Writings by Hans de Zwart
In early 2020, I joined a sailing boat as a crew member and crossed the Southern Atlantic from Capetown in South Africa via Namibia and St. Helena to Salvador in Brazil. My captain was sailing around the world as part of the World ARC. My trip was wonderful (ping me if you want to read my diary of the trip).
Many people have asked me how to find a boat to join. Here are some tips:
Continue reading “How to become crew on a sailing crossing”Believing that for any situation, there is a perfectly apt quote from the film The Big Lebowski, I created www.thebiglebow.ski, a search engine for quotes from the movie with stills to match. Donations for keeping it running are welcome!
I’ve tracked how much each quote has been shared over the years. So here is a list of the 40 quotes shared the most. I’ve been having fun imagining the situations in which these quotes have been shared. Some of them are classics that I expected to be there, but there are some surprises, too. You can click on any of the pictured quotes to open them in the search engine for further copying, sharing, or downloading. Enjoy!
Continue reading “The Big Lebowski Quote Top 40”
I bought a record player (so that I could listen to the ultimate Dutch hip-hop album, Eigen Wereld by Opgezwolle). I’ve quickly grown fond of the small ritual I’ll have to continuously perform while listening to my records. The player is fully manual, so I must get up when a side has finished playing and take the needle off the record. I’ll use my brush to keep things clean at the beginning and end of every play.
The side of a 12-inch LP is usually around 20-25 minutes long. I quickly realised this comes close to the ideal timing for a Pomodoro run (25 minutes). So, this is my new way of timing Pomodoro’s: starting an LP, working in full concentration while it plays, and then getting up, picking a new album, doing the small ritual, and continuing the work. Very mind- and joyful. Recommended!
The image “Audio Technica Record Player” by nan palmero is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, one athlete pulled a move that, so far as we know, no one else had ever done in all of human history.
This piece of podcasting is an object lesson in how to make audio that engages. This is how you tell a story.
The episode has everything: the bizarre marketing stunts of the coach of a black ice skater, the nearly inevitable paranoia of a black person when it comes to racism, the sound of ice skating, the difference between esthetics and (heroic) athleticism. All topped off by someone taking a stand.
Do yourself a favour and listen to it.
Source: On the Edge – Radiolab
I don’t think there has been a news story in the last few weeks that has made me more irate than this one.
Malik Jalal describes four drone strike attacks trying to kill him (and the collateral damage of those attacks).
I need to understand this better and will read these Drone papers very soon.
I soon began to park any vehicle far from my destination, to avoid making it a target. My friends began to decline my invitations, afraid that dinner might be interrupted by a missile.
I took to the habit of sleeping under the trees, well above my home, to avoid acting as a magnet of death for my whole family. But one night my youngest son, Hilal (then aged six), followed me out to the mountainside. He said that he, too, feared the droning engines at night. I tried to comfort him. I said that drones wouldn’t target children, but Hilal refused to believe me. He said that missiles had often killed children. It was then that I knew that I could not let them go on living like this.
Source: I’m on the Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones | Voices | The Independent
