I'll play all the panel games and watch all the quiz shows

[austin_dern]

At breakfast on Friday we had a visitor: a local cat wandered in and hopped up on the table to get at what of the soft-boiled eggs it could, and then, to what over anything else it could. The cat wasn't much for being told it'd had enough, or that we didn't want it eating the cheese right off our plates, although I did try to accommodate it by putting my (mostly finished) softboiled egg on the ground where it could eat in peace. One of the waiters came over and took it away, although the cat found its way back and we figured that was about time to get to our separate tasks.

For bunny_hugger that was another day at the conference, being a professional philosopher. For me that was another day back in Utrecht; I figured to see the Railway Museum. First, though, I took the bus to the central bus/train station so I could buy a chip card and pay bus fares that were much more reasonable. I took the bus to what sure looked like just a block or two from the museum, but as I kept walking in what seemed to be the right direction I kept getting farther from anything, and as best I could tell completely off the map, so, I found another bus --- any other bus --- and rode it back to the central station, then back out again, this time stopping sooner, where I could find the roads on my hotel map and where I recognized some of the settings from Wednesday. (I also tried to get on the second of three doors, where people seemed to get on, at the bus station, but was yelled at by the driver, so I got off and got back on the front door.)

Along the way I passed a carnival being set up, including a little wild mouse roller coaster, and knew how sad it was that bunny_hugger was working instead. The fairground-style attractions included backdrops painted in the classic ``Public Domain Versions Of Disney Cartoons'' airbrush style, including some statues of Kind of Balloo, Sort Of Rafiki, and Resembles Timon surrounding the statue of Burgemeester Reiger, 1891 - 1908.

The Utrecht Railway Museum has as its motto ``You Will Believe'', suggesting a lack of faith amongst the children of the Netherlands in the existence of railroads that I'd think looking at track would pretty soon disprove. It's in the former railway station, one of those palace-type buildings popular around the turn of the century, and boy it's great. Right off the main hall is a pile of antique-style luggage, piled up as it might have been in a car, and ... wait, there's tiny dioramas on the inside. With ... signal-splitter glass used to project movies. Like one of ... a demoness crawling out of a steam pipe, going up to a Stephenson Rocket-type engine, lighting her tail on it, and then trying to set fire to the workshop, only to be foiled when a cloud comes out of the engine's steam vents, and ... there's a child on it, and it rains, putting out the fires and driving the demoness off and ... I'm pretty sure I didn't dream this. Really. Maybe this is what the kids of the Netherlands don't believe.

The museum proper has a number of rail cars, some of them as much as a century old, and some of them retired cars for the royal family. From these I learned the Dutch Royal Family had the same furnishing tastes as my grandmom, but, everybody did back then.

One of the halls was dedicated to the Orient Express, and as I entered there was a group being taught by a woman dressed in Vaguely Edwardian Upperclass Ladies' dress. She was speaking purely in Dutch, but I was able to follow more or less. She was explaining how travel around Europe circa 1900 would go, if you were an upperclass vaguely Edwardian lady, and she did bits about calling for a porter --- who, since there was none, didn't appear --- and sulking (in English) about how you can't get good help these days. As she went on, and I could tell she was describing taking the train and the boat to England and then the train again to England she called on kids on the audience to fill out various little roles, including holding her bag.

She got to talking about Buckingham Palace and the guards outside, best I could tell, and then she pointed at me.

Again I should note, I hadn't done more than understood the general tone of all this, apart from a few key words like ``Buckingham Palace'' or the gist that she was talking about what you might see around there. I hadn't said anything, so she had no particular reason to think I wasn't understanding Dutch. What was I being expected to do?

I guessed she wanted someone to pretend to be a Beefeater, so, I went up as directed, took the umbrella she offered, and stood straight as I could with the umbrella held as parade rifle. She got a kid to come up and, based on what words I did get and her pantomime, explained that it was impossible to get a Beefeater to crack up so he should try. He made a couple faces and I stood still for them, and on the third (or so) try smiled. The kids clapped and the guide (playfully) scolded me, and I affected an exaggerated frowny face and slunk back to the audience. Thus ended my career as an improv comic in a foreign language, with, I think, a technical victory.

Then the guide took us to the next room, a stage decorated with Vaguely Egyptian motifs and they put on a show of ... I really couldn't tell you. I have no idea what was going on, or why, just that it was was apparently puppets at the end of a railway trip out in the eastern Mediterranean.

Among the non-interactive, non-performing exhibits were the usual sorts of train memorabilia, some of it actual hardware, some of it more ephemeral stuff like board games based on the history of locomotives. One intriguing bit was flyers and programs and all from an exhibit celebrating 100 years of railroads in the Netherlands, held, the 8th of September through the 1st October 1939. It feels to me, someone who knew how it turned out, that would be an event overwhelmed with gloom and portents of disaster, but, then, who in the Netherlands in September 1939 would have particular reason to expect the coming years to be particularly bad for them?

A more interactive exhibit, one with provided audio recordings, started with a walk through a coal mine of the kind which inspired the earliest rail roads, then opened into an ``English village'' of the kind George Stephenson worked in, and then opened to a reconstruction of the first railroad platform in the Netherlands. The audio program's guide was the (English) man who was the Netherlands' first railroad engineer. The guide was keyed to location, so I spent some time wandering around and figuring out where I had to be to trigger the different parts of the spiel.

This and some more wandering around downtown would be plenty for the afternoon, particularly given the museums closing about the same time. I did stop at an ice cream shop and attempt to try out the ``Smurf'' flavored ice cream (it was kind of berry-ish), although I made a shambles out of attempting to order the middle size as the clerk kept asking how many bollen I wanted. She seemed very resistant to the idea I'd get two scoops of the same flavor, so, I got something else --- I think an apple cider flavor --- for the second scoop.

That evening bunny_hugger and I wouldn't be searching the streets of Utrecht for dinner: the conference was having a grand dinner, for which we had tickets, and which we were dressing up for. This was held at the academy hall, as the original reception had been, and we followed a long series of corridors and stairs into a strikingly compact, cozy little dining hall lined with portraits of stern-looking men in academic regalia. We got seated at a table with several English women, and one Chinese guy who struggled throughout to join in the conversation, made more difficult by one of the English women getting a little tipsy, augmenting her outgoing side. There's really no outgoing like tipsy English outgoing.

I should say we were a bit lucky to get our table at all, since we got up to the room without turning in our tickets, which we learned we were supposed to trade for coasters which encoded whether we were having the vegan or the plain old vegetarian dinners (the difference, best we could tell, was about getting some cheese). So we had to find our way back downstairs and disregard the instructions they gave us for going back upstairs because the ticket-takers and coaster-givers were trying to lead us, we think, to a different dining hall. We have no idea how the speeches were handled across multiple rooms.

Still, thanks largely to the outgoing English women we had a lively, interesting table. Unfortunately, it was lively and interesting because they focused on bunny_hugger for attention. My lovely bride is a Kant scholar, and one of the plenary speakers talked about Kantian views of animal ethics. And the tipsy outgoing English women, coming from the biology departments, were quite interested in hearing from her about things like why we need to study old ethicists when we've got centuries more knowledge than they ever did. I thought bunny_hugger defended her profession, and her particular interest well, and the tipsy outgoing English women ultimately agreed, declaring that she had won the evening's conversation and that they felt much more enlightened on this entire area than they had imagined being.

I did chat some, explaining my own research interests and how they've got nothing to do with animals, and how I was there as this was part of our honeymoon. (I should say, mentioning this is your honeymoon is a great way to produce awwws and congratulations from everyone in every context, including from customs officials.) The rest of the table thought this great, and pointed out how I should do some kind of mathematical simulation of animal interactions with humans. I admit I've wondered about some such questions that might be amenable to the kinds of modelling I'm capable of doing, but my main research is in planetary atmospheres; that's a far cry from ``what are decent ways to treat animals''.

I should mention at one point a fellow in kilt playing bagpipes came through the room. I can explain this only as general exuberance. The main talk after dinner talked about the history of the university and pointed out the portraits of the room we were in. The room apparently is used for all doctoral candidates' defenses, each taking 45 minutes. The portraits on the walls were of various important professors through the school's history, although the (provost? dean?) noted that the portraits were taken down in the face of World War II and when the time came to put them back they weren't sure who was supposed to go where. Oops. Also, there had been eight empty blanks, but on considering the all-male lineup, the university decided to have portraits of several of their noteworthy female professors painted; I assume they're labelled correctly. The speaker pointed out the rather small door through which the doctoral committee enters and exits for defenses is just under one of the women's portraits, so, they have to bow to the lady while doing their job. (I wondered how the selection of portrait locations was made; the four remaining blank spots aren't symmetrically arranged or organized in any pattern I spotted, but then I worry about such things.)

Following all this was a concluding talk by ... well, I don't know the name of the person, but someone respected in the field. His talk kind of roamed over various animal-connected subjects, including a number of pictures of animals doing cute things or funny things. bunny_hugger compared it to the slide show given by your gently nutty uncle, the one that rambles all over and includes jokes that you chuckle at because that's the appropriate behavior when your gently nutty uncle is giving his slide show presentation. I hadn't placed its tone nearly so precisely, but bunny_hugger figured out just the nature of all the events and many of the people we'd seen.

Afterwards we walked back to the hotel --- it was hard not thinking of it as home, in fact --- while going past many of the interesting shops we'd noticed, like the small eatery with an Addams Family pinball game inside, or the coffee-and-ice-cream shop that didn't offer coffee these months which we'd noticed just that Tuesday, or toy stores with a lot of Smurf merchandise, or trying to figure out what Shakespeare play it was named Veel Gedoe Om Niks which got advertised with a complicated flyer showing an underdressed woman, Dumbo, Gemini capsule plans, space shuttle plans, and a host of other pop culture or modern technology things. We were having enough trouble thinking of any multi-word title of Shakespeare's that could possibly fit. (Later we realized it had to be Much Ado About Nothing, teaching me what I know about Dutch for ``much'', ``ado'', ``about'', and ``nothing''.)

We'd be leaving our first overseas home in the morning.

Trivia: At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics at least 640 female athletes were subjected to gender tests. None were disqualified. Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.

Currently Reading: Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Jeffrey Kluger.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

The speaker was ethologist Mark Bekoff.

I might be wrong but I think the two English women you're talking about were behavioral psychologists, one of them the dissertation chair of the other.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's it. I couldn't think just what field they were in. The non-advisor was the one who got me explaining my research topic, which I haven't actually done for any new people in a while. I felt rusty.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I thought it was the woman immediately to your right, who was (I think) from some Spanish institution, that you were explaining your research to? She was much quieter than the two psychologists.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, oh, yes, you have it right. I was talking to the woman from a Spanish institution (although I believe she was from ... was it Romania? herself).

[xolo.livejournal.com]

One intriguing bit was flyers and programs and all from an exhibit celebrating 100 years of railroads in the Netherlands, held, the 8th of September through the 1st October 1939. It feels to me, someone who knew how it turned out, that would be an event overwhelmed with gloom and portents of disaster, but, then, who in the Netherlands in September 1939 would have particular reason to expect the coming years to be particularly bad for them?

I've long gotten the feeling from mass media of the time that for some years prior people had understood perfectly well in a general way the magnitude of the impending disaster, but that like us, they had to go on with their daily lives. Auden wrote a poem about that unhappy September in New York, where (one presumes) there was even more reason to hope that the war would stay far away:

[...]
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
[...]

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I admit among my fascinations is the popular culture during World War II. A couple of books I've read have gone into that, and I've picked up other interesting tidbits (eg, a Gallup poll in early 1940 which revealed that ``World War II'' was the only popular name anyone in the United States had; there were attempts to give it a different name, none of which even feigned catching on), but do look to learn more.

I do know that the war's declaration was greeted more with this strange resignation than enthusiasm or fear, particularly compared to the outbreaks of World War I, at least according to secondary and tertiary sources interested in making that comparison.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Every impression I have of the late 1930s is that it was a strange, haunted time, and it was obvious to everyone what was about to happen, even if they didn't know the full details. The Kate Smith version of 'God Bless America', that starts out with 'While storm clouds gather..." is from 1938, you know.

Also, I've been reading up on Dutch automats. FEBO, the ubiquitous chain, was founded in 1941 while the country was under Nazi occupation. Reading between the lines, I'm beginning to wonder if part of the chain's initial success was that since the food was ready and waiting, instead of being prepared to order, German soldiers could eat there safely without worrying about being poisoned, etc.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The impression everyone gets of the late 30s is that it was haunted by the idea that The War Was About To Come, and goodness knows there's plenty of pieces that show how The Imminent War was on people's minds.

The thing is, I don't know how much of that is a retrospective fallacy: there's always people quite sure, and often quite vocal, about the imminent war (or other disaster), and nearly all of them don't pan out, mercifully. I do know about the British ``Mass Observation'' reports that tried to survey what average people thought about the time --- they get quoted a lot in trying to establish British spirit during 1940 --- but probably should someday actually attempt looking up what they say about earlier times. There doesn't seem to be something quite like that for the United States, although if I knew the right journals there's probably a decent number of people who've made careers arguing the spirit of the times then.

You may be right about FEBO gaining rapid success because it could be trusted as a source for quick food away from camps. But the press during the war everywhere was for food that's cheap and fast, never mind necessarily safe. I wonder how White Castle grew during the War (which may be impossible to say, given the confounding factors of meat, building material, and manpower shortages restraining growth).

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Thus ended my career as an improv comic in a foreign language, with, I think, a technical victory.

Nicely done!

..darnit, my eyes skipped ahead to the Shakespeare title reveal before I could puzzle it out, and I've got enough German to where I probably could have keyed off 'Very something something Negative-word". Though what Space Shuttle plans would have to do with it I've no idea. That'd make me think The Tempest, because you could stage that in space.

Sounds like a very fun time, all this. :)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Ah, sorry. If it were easy to rot13 stuff in Livejournal I should have done that, but it's too awkward to. (The word length might have given it away anyway.)

It's obviously some sort of modern-setting nonsense, but how it gets into Mish-Mash 20th Century Americana stuff I don't know.