I´ve been watching my Twitter account and my Facebook updates with a suspicious eye lately. First Yasmine, a lovely Belgian singer died. Though all my sympathy goes to her relatives and friends, the internet frenzy that followed was crazy and horrifying. Not only were all the sinister details of her suicide smeared all over the net, hundreds of people started to comment on the why, the how, and the-who-should-be-blamed. Nobody considered apparently the grief and horror her loved ones must experience while reading…  Sympathy pages popped up like mushrooms on a dying tree in a rainforest, generating more sympathy and generosity than most of the charitable causes on the web…

And the day after, the self proclaimed King of Pop died… The social media craziness following the first announcement was mind boggling: Twitter reporting well over 30 percent of all conversation dedicated to Michael Jackson, and having to shut down some of its functionality to keep from fail-whaling. Facebook updates showed signs of mass hysteria as a gazillion people expressed whatever they felt like sharing in their status lines. I dotted down updates like “disaster”, “horror”, a “black day”, “my world ends” (!)… I need to go back to the web just post 9/11 to see so much emotion expressed. It largely beat the social online concern right after the tsunami…

Michael beat the charts big time, not only are his songs propelled right back at the top of the iTunes charts, but his death generated more compassion than the passing away of thousands of dying kids in dark Africa.

I´m not sure I like that… maybe we should recalibrate our priorities…

There: I survived a month without blogging.  So It´s doable. Proud of me?

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever. This is not her story. But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman. Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.”

Happy Towel Day!

I´ve been watching them for some months now. A magnificent pair of brave little blackbirds, twittering around in my garden. Deftly picking @ little beetles, worms, grains and other food. We´ve been leaving small bits and pieces out for them during the cold winter, up to a point where they do not even fly away anymore when we get outside. We´re tolerated in a way the more royal cats can tolerate as well

And now they are building a nest in our hedge. I think they meant to keep it a secret… so we pretend not to know what they are up to. J Can´t wait to meet the little blackbirds…

There will be a lot of Twittering in the garden soon, of all kinds…

It was predictable. With more people on social media channels like Twitter or Facebook than I´d care to feed, sooner or later those networks had to be tapped in to. After the spread of silly adds, desperate people trying to boost traffic to a usually ridiculously bad website, or smartasses phishing around for logins and passwords, crowdsourcing seems to be the next big thing.

The principle is geniously simple: you ask those in your network to help you out with advice, or by answering a specific question. Tap into the collective intelligence of your hang-arounds and you by-pass expensive third party vendors, and Rolex-ed market analyzing consultants. People who are well connected can easily datamine a couple of hundreds, even thousands followers or Facebook friends. Cheap, easy, fast. Then, it´s just a question of a bit of common sense and some good analyzing software to turn this data into charts, insights, trend previews and shiny statistics.

People as Marian Salzman, Martha Stewart, Don Tapscott and many others have found clever ways of using Twitter as a spider web for collecting data. And that is a good thing.

I do have some future looking concerns though. People are genuinely so happy to help out in these online communities that they answer to calls for help and info often. Too often. Over the last week I´ve been asked my opinion on healthcare, millennials, blogging, the situation in Israel, baby food, tracking software for photographing stellar constellations and the ideal coach for the Belgian national soccer team. On 4 of these items I do have insufficient knowledge, insight, or authority to add anything useful to the conversation. Still I was asked, and I did answer.

I´ve seen outcome of crowdsourcing - based analyses that was dead wrong, because the question was shot at a wrong but very enthusiast audience.  You catch my drift: to gather great insights on most topics, laser profiling your focus group is very important. Crowdsourcing is testing the water with your toe. For indepth analyzing, the ability to narrowcast down to selected audiences will differentiate data butchers from data surgeons…

As I was fueling up my classic MGTF this weekend, a fellow car enthusiast came to admire the old two-seater. He eyed my trusted Breitling watch and asked “wow, you´re still wearing that?”.  Honestly, for a split second I thought that my favorite watch was out of fashion… but no. In his eyes it was too “expensive” to be seen with in these dark economic times. “I leave my Rolex in the safe for the moment. Omega is more ´bon ton´ now…”

I was flabbergasted. But a little research showed me quickly that it is indeed a new trend. It is good to be OK. It is bad to show so. Fellows at the car club keep their cabriolets inside.  They are fueled up, fully insured, but apparently it is not ok to be seen in it. A local service club voluntary ¨downgraded¨ their two-weekly meetings to a restaurant without a Michelin star. They drink the same expensive wine, smoke the same parallel imported Cuban cigars, but feel better parking their wives car @ a lower cost venue.

I overheard a conversation between two well doing fashionistas. One was selling off her Louis Vuitton  handbag from last season before swiping her credit card on the new one. Not because she cannot afford keeping both, but because “she does not want people to think she is not affected by the global crisis”.

So meet the New Faux Poor: doing well, financially extremely sound, but not willing to be seen spending. Because that is not politically correct.

The old grumpy me in me staggers. Trying to think down at that level gives me a burning headache. You´ll have to forgive me, but I´ll drive my cars as long as I can afford fuel, I´ll be waving my Breitling for ages to come. It´s a damned fine watch and I like it. The day I cannot pay the rent, I´ll sell it.

Be Real Rich. Real Normal. Or be Real Poor. Don´t fake either….

I must admit that when I first looked at Twitter three years ago, I could not see the point, at all… Why would one need an online SMS system? Blogging on this site (and some others J) helped me warm slowly to the concept of microblogging, and I dipped back into Twitter.

I use it mainly to keep track of new ideas and online expertise and share thoughts. It is also a great search tool that complements the battery of RSS feeds, e-letters, and netvibes monitors that fuel my curiosity.

As usual, the biggest challenge is finding out who and what to follow. Everybody seems to Tweet these days. And that is where my old grumpy self gets annoyed. There is a blatant lack of respect and etiquette in Twitter land, and it will kill a perfect good tool if people do not get hold of themselves quickly.

Far from telling other people how they should behave, I prefer to share some rules that will get you out of my personal Twitter land… quickly.

I am interested in your thoughts. Occasionally retweeting is fine, but if that is all you  do, I might as well follow the people you retweet constantly. I will. Same with all the great articles, movies and sites you spot. It is fine, and from time to time I will click on one of your tiny-url´s and see what it is about. If you have lots of them, get a blog: I promise I will visit it. Oh, and DO have the decency of telling me in three words what the link is about? I am not psychic, so “this is great: http://tinyurl.com/dcabd3 “ does not tell me a thing and annoys me… profoundly.

And direct message (DM) does exist on Twitter. Use it. Please. I follow a US PR agency that goes “@Boss: will be there in three minutes. @Employee: hurry, client is already waiting. @Boss: oops does he look mad?” and that all day, all night.  If it is useful, funny, remotely entertaining: by all means, share it with the world and me. If it is meant for one person only, get the DM function. Just having your private conversations in the open, and forcing me to witness, is too arrogant for words.

Most of us are adults. Use real words. If you have more than one word starting with “tw” in your Tweet (like in “Tweople, if you have a Twuestion just Twask and Twadd my friend”) I will delete you into oblivion.

And I do have a genuine interest in you, and your life. But if you feel the urge to update your Twitter 43 times in 90 minutes I can as well move in with you. I have no desire to know what even my very special ones are doing by the minute, and that should tell you enough J.

For the rest I am fine, thank you very much. Follow me on http://twitter.com/dannydevriendt

On Saturday 28th March about a gazillion people around the globe switched their lights off for an hour, with a happy smile on their face. After that they went sleeping contently, having the mediatized impression that they helped save the world. Clean conscience.

“Switch off your lights for 60 minutes… and stop global warming,” says the WWF advert. What a Brilliant Idea! How have all these scientists not thought of this before?

Now, let me get this straight: I am all for Worldpeace, Saving the Whales, Preserving the Planet. But let´s get real. Cheap demagogy like Al Gore’s movie or the Earth Hour initiative will not change the problematic in any way. They are meant to ´educate´ people, and to mobilize them. I guess that is fine.

On the other hand, I am convinced that the strongly implied message of virtuous and holy self-denial by switching of lights for an hour is absolute the wrong one. I save more CO2 (equivalent)  emissions by  having invested in replacing my light bulbs timely, and driving a German car with more filters in it than an average Manhattan skyscraper, than by turning lights off for Earth Hour. On the contrary, electricity nets all over the globe will have dumped a precious hour of unused current into the ground, and will have had to put auxiliary (polluting) units on to struggle with the biggest power-demand peak in human history when all those bonobo´s switched on their precious lights again…

I am against light pollution. I love watching the stars. I am for reducing lights on highways permanently, and against this nasty habit of lighting up church towers with Eiffel tower ambitions all year long.  I asked my city council three years ago to extinguish the power-eating bastard light poles next to my house that kill half of my star field, and only give clarity to the sheep in my back garden. Non is possibile… Can´t be done. But the same city did switch off the lights in the city hall for an hour. And feels good about it.

O well…..

Maybe it is because I do not get out much:  all of the sudden visionaries, paid prophets, trend watchers and a gazillion would-bees are proclaiming on the web that blogging is dead. It´s over, done with. Amen. As Wired writer Paul Boutin puts it elegantly: “Don’t start. And if you’ve already got one, pull the plug” and “Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004” , all in capital letters of course. Because that is a statement you have to Shout To The World.

Well, excuse me. Blogging is not dead. It is far from. The number of people starting their own web-log still vastly tops the ones dropping out silently. And I am a bit sick and tired to hear that Twitter and Facebook are the tomorrow’s successors to yesterday’s blogs. That is like claiming that the electric Lotus Tessa is the successor of the Hummer H1. They both have wheels. They do not play in the same field. They´d better not J.

Boutin´s basically bases his claim on the fact that there are too many other blogs (hardly a proof point of it being dead and over with), that writing more than Twitters 140 characters is too much work, that professionals start blogging, and that the notorious Jason Calacanis has stopped his praised blog.

Well, if Calacanis thinks that 140 bits are enough to spread his message, that´s fine. I can live with that. Luckily there are thousands of people over there that do take their  time to develop their thoughts in a more readable form. Let´s be honest, SMS turbo speak did NOT kill books, micro blogging like Twitter will not push back blogging to the dark ages.

Same with Facebook. Why would it kill the blogosphere? I´ve around 500 people on Facebook, a couple of hundreds are following me on Twitter. That hardly puts my more than 150.000 monthly blog-page views in perspective not?

I tend to agree that the web2.0 ecosystem expands. We had sites and mail, we added blogs and instant messenger. Fine. Now we´re building a new layer with Facebook and Twitter, we spice it up with YouTube and Flickr. Our online house becomes more complex.  More channels to express, share, connect.

Instead of replacing and burying blogs, a plethora of other social media will add to the reach of the Web2.0 user who is able to think a bit strategic. Blogging, in my humble but very wise opinion is still the thriving motor of a big chunk of the social web. Try to convince me otherwise in 140 characters. J

I know. I’ve said this before. But I’m sure of it. There is more stuff in my inbox than amoebae in a comfortably decaying puddle of ice-cream. Just looking @ my mailbox gives me slight nausea. More email than anyone can possibly deal with, and that on a quiet day. The fact that all those digitally encoded and encrypted pieces of art arrive on my BlackBerry does not really make a difference. There they are, mails… most of them pure information (fine, I’ll file it), questions that mattered yesterday (ok, so?), spam or silly jokes. About all of them marked with red exclamation marks. If I need to read them all, I cannot work anymore. At all. Heck, life as I’m used to know it stops. So I ban most of this email mountain temporarily out of my life, keeping secured timeslots in my agenda to sift through them. Early morning. Noon. Mid afternoon. Just before diner.

Last week, a train trip to London allowed me to file, respond to or trash 992 mails. No kidding. And earlier this week I had to sms a client on his mobile phone to have a look @ my mail, on his BlackBerry. He had over 300 mails in back-log. So much for e-mail as an effective way of communicating.

Email, is the new snail mail. It has become about as efficient as a quick communication tool as sending a letter in Christmas-card period. Actually if you chose your stamp wisely, you might get noticed way earlier using snail-mail. Or send a pigeon…

Back to fast sms to interact with mobile people. SMS for the fast track, email for stuff that can wait. I believed Twitter messages might be good. But Twitter world is getting so crowded that it’s getting difficult to see the trees through the forest. So your best option: IM. Instant Messenger, complete with camera-feed and audio for fast, cheap and instantaneous reaction when it matters. Works on PC, laptop, smartphone, Berry, and –I heard- even on iPhone…

Most of my communication with clients and teams runs over IM these days. It saves me time. It is as close to inter-acting as it gets, it’s useful when phone calls or life meetings are a stretch. It’s refreshing, real time, ad hoc communication.

It frees up time that I now can spend meeting people. Meeting people. IRL In real Life. Can you imagine?

I know. You want some . For ages I have been pestering the people around me with the visions and projections of Raymond Kurzweil (1948). Kurzweil is a successful inventor and futurist. He has been pioneering in optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech and speech recognition technology. He is the author of the upper right corner of my library and fascinated me with his daring projections on artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, and the technological singularity.

Basically, he claims that computers are slowly migrating into intelligent devices, capable of heuristic data treatment and parallel processing. In other words, create a nice neural computer, set it up nicely and it will learn. By itself. It will become “intelligent”. Transhumanism and some hybrid thinking (you, with some extra computing power and techno-gadgets imbedded, like a pacific version of Robocop J) made up for great reading, and freaked the heck out of my trusted friends who thought I finally lost it.

But see: revenge is mine! In a newspaper (The Financial Times) Kurzweil is prominently projected on the first page. Nasa and Google are throwing their weight behind a new University in Silicon Valley that will be headed by Ray Kurzweil and will teach people how to think about machines that will be able to improve themselves, and will help us find solutions for problems as energy, climate change, malaria…. And snow.

In two weeks time, I’ll be @ the MobileWorld Congress in Barcelona. Hope there will be less snow, more sun, and exciting stuff to comment on!

Somewhere along our evolution path, something went terribly wrong. I’m sure you know what I mean… I am talking about “the others”. Those people who still have to look for their ticket when they try to check in. The ones with the oversized bags. Without the required visa. No, they cannot remember the name of their hotel. Yes they forgot to fill in their landing card. The Hawaian-shirted, sunburned passenger.

They scare the heck out of me. They have these nice cabin luggage that fits easily the complete wardrobe of a midsized African village, and they squeeze it elegantly, and with a vengeance above my suit jacket. In the next hour, that luggage will be opened about a dozen times, to accommodate his K-way, to get out his Sudoku book, etc…

Next thing is that the other will ask me to take his picture. Framing him, and his travelling tribe. And then, he will be recording the take off with a turbo sized high-def camera (note the Sony labels are still attached, noblesse oblige) while muttering half-loud (for the off-camera track, you understand) everything that he sees.

After that, the stewardess will ask him to move to his assigned seat, which is going to be next to me. Obviously, he will try to sit on my lap to get there, and will whack my Bloody Mary over my computer.

After that he will tell me his life. All of it. From childhood over the second divorce, up to the happy kids. And the other one loves garlic. And he will use my 50% of the armrest. And he will go to the restroom plenty, Hey, it’s for free. And he will share if it’s a number 1 or a number two. And he will explain me all the funny bits of the movie he is watching while I try to work.

And he sweats. God, do other ones sweat. And their deodorants are packed, and shipped on their way to Timbuktu. A week ago.

And mind you: @ landing the other ones will clap, applaud, and whistle. As if putting down a 747 is a circus act. And right after the landing other ones will leap over your lap and cram the gangway with their souvenirs, luggage and kids. And they still think they get out faster by pushing hard.

Other ones should walk… or bike.

Well, I am a Space boy. Since I could walk I’ve been looking up to the stars, and dreaming about my very private spaceship. I ended up as a strategic communications consultant…

Most (social) media attention these days were focused on America’s new president, and I think that stuff on that has been said and written plenty. So what about some lines about the inauguration of President Barack Obama? 

Google homed in the brand new GeoEye-1 bird, the satellite that will supply Google Earth with even higher-resolution imagery of our little blue planet to take some bleeding edge, high-resolution pictures of the inauguration. Taken at around 550 of altitude, at a staggering speed of roughly 25.000 kilometers per hour it shows everything in perspective . When new technology meets a new president….

Some people have way too much time. Some mad scientists actually calculated that today, of all days, is the most depressing day of the year. Right. *deep sigh* thought I just share with you Marvin, the depressed robot, to cheer you up…

Well, the battle for the American presidency has certainly caught a lot of attention. And the expectations around the president elect, Barack Obama, are extremely high. With an inauguration the day after Martin Luther King day, some newspapers even talk about “new world”, “new era”, or even more poetic ”the end of the world as we used to know it”.  But let’s give the new president of the United States of America some time to show the world what he is really like…J.

Personally I’m interested in his Blackberry. Like the Belgian ex-prime minister Yves Letherme, Barack Obama is keen on being connected to information. Information that comes in a digital form through his Blackberry.  Tons of articles are now speculating whether Obama can keep his beloved Blackberry or not. And apparently he cannot. Something to do with the safety of the US and the free world, and the fact that presidential correspondence needs to be kept like, forever.

Now, duh. Mail can be encrypted, safely exchanged, password protected. Electronic files can be stored, searched, retrieved.  Most captains of industry are on mobile mail every day (and most of the night) through their Blackberry’s, HTC’s and iPhones. As far as I can tell, this has not resulted in corporations going up in flames, or smaller nations going on the fist because of an intercepted “secret” email.

Let’s be a bit careful with forwarding  the launching codes for the A-bombs, and continue to send highly military secret stuff around with good-old double-muscled and lip-sealed spies. But for the rest, let the new inhabitant of the White House please stay comfortably in a web 2.0 connected world! Heck, I hope the man’s on Twitter.

Bizarre how fast stuff moves. Two decades ago, you were a name, an address and a phone number.  That was all that was needed to connect to you. It was all you had. Basically, it was all you were. A snail mail address, a pigeon hole box, and a phone number.

These days, we’re identified by way more access points. We move faster, carrying our digital identity with us. Wherever we go. Our music. Our pictures. Our networks. Our access codes. All condensed in small black battery operated devices.

Intelligent phones or blackberries hold the key to a scary big part of our lives, and have factual become our portal, our Stargate to the worlds out there: clients, family, loved ones…  Some of us even have digital Avatars literally re-presenting ourselves in a virtual world.

Are you keeping track of your Digital ID?  Email addresses? LinkedIn? Plaxo? MSN? Sametime? 2nd Life?  GoogleID? Gmail? Facebook? Twitter? Etc… How many versions of you are out there?  Do you already need one of those fancy pieces of software to keep track of all your logins/ID’s/password? Or have you given up entirely –as I do-, trusting on the biometric scanner of your devices to be able to connect you to all those digital highways? How much time does keeping track of all that cost you a day? Or do you need smart software mashing and merging lots of these digital presences?

Clock your digital day. Google yourself and watch the creepy resume of your web life over recent years…  trust me, I tried it J.

Millions of people all around the globe dived happily into the web, blending in with countless social networks, publishing their personal blogs, sharing their private videos and pictures, and creating huge webs of countless social contacts. Web 2.0: the web is us, you know…

Few people did it smartly, realizing that personal information, personal data, and private lives are precious and deserve high protection. Few people were careful on what to share with whom, what to publish and where, and how to deal with incoming digital requests.

Others are slowly waking up in a digital nightmare, wondering where it all went wrong.

My prognosis for 2009 is that it is going to be a year of “un-publish”, “un-list”, and “un-friend”. A year where people will try to scale down the enthusiast openness with which they hurried themselves and their families into Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and the like.

Because, yes, there is a difference between a “digital” friend, and the normal notion of “friend”. Because Facebook labels contacts as “friends” does not necessary mean that it is wise to share life, data and all pictures blindly with the hundreds of people in the “friends”-list.  Would you share your half naked pictures with all the people in your phones dial list? With all the people on the mailing list of your company? So why are they open and unprotected on your Facebook again?

And the millions of very revealing pictures on Flickr? Tanned girlfriends on sunny  beaches, drunken in-laws, sweaty Karaoke sessions…. all to share with colleagues and business contacts as well?   And though I love cute babies, finding unprotected pictures of the helpless thingies draped on their innocent sheepskins on MySpace accounts and other picture sites makes me extremely uneasy. Do people not realize that everyone might be watching?

Tread with care. The web is a social place. It is not a protected area where you only meet friends. Chose carefully what to share. Protect your intimate life, your dignity, your reputation, and your loved ones.

Once it is online, it is in the open. Pretty much for ever.  On the web “un-something“ is a myth…

Bizarre thing, this web 2.0. Even hiding on a lonely hilltop in Nolleval, France -thoughtfully comtemplating a froze lake- does not prevent one from updating friends all over the planet with a simple microblog site as Twitter. Just curious what leading trend watchers as Marian Salzman and co make of this new phenomenon? It is addictive, fur sure…

(als woorden bereiken wat ze bereiken moeten, zijn geen woorden meer nodig…)

Being a voracious reader, having a big brick of a book over the holidays was a good start.  And eat this, Harry Potter fans, Susannah Clarke’s novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell got me hooked for three days in a row. It deals with magic, dreamy written in a massive 19th-century -like tome. Clarke’s novel reads like Proust on mushrooms, and is an anachronistic oddity that switches off the real life out there for all seven hundred and eighty-two pages of Victorian writing. 

This book is not for the faint of hearted. Jonathan Strange, the magician mentioned in the title, does not even make an appearance until page two hundred and eight.

It took me the better half of two nights, three steaming baths and a great bottle of Bordeaux to finish it off. It’s a great book, I’ll put it between Ulysses of James Joyce an God created the Integers of Hawkin: to re-read when I am retired J.

A marvelous 2009. It is a New Year, 365 days of blank canvas for you to fill in. Make it into a nice tableau. May your most crazy wishes come true, may you encounter fun, friendship, starry nights, real coffee, pleasant moments, dreamy music, warm fires, plenty of luck, blue oceans, true love and crazy quarks… have a fab one!

For our Christmas action, we decided to collect funds for UFB, the United Fund for Belgium that yearly helps a prime selection of 100 Belgian charities. We opted to auction off the best we have in house: us J. So here is your chance, if you want to spend some time with me, at a time of your convenience I offer the following package:

Summary: Communication has evolved. More direct. Web-based. Global. Lightning fast. How do you deal with the new media? Where/when do you blog? Are you LinkedIn? Facebook-ed? How’s your digital profile? Will you survive working with millennials? To help you keep the pedal to the metal and lay rubber on the road, I’m auctioning off a two-hour adrenaline session. With a Lotus Elise R. No ABS. No airbags. No power steering. Just you, me, and the road. And yes, you can drive J.

We’ll wind down over dinner in the Ostend Queen restaurant -watching sunset- for an in-depth chat on how you can add web tactics to your communication mix. Or anything else you want to chat about. Just one small thing: one of us has to drive back….

To place your bid, click:

http://www.porternovelli.be/auction/index.php?page=forsale&id=36

Saw a nice photograph in the National Portrait Gallery that deeply moved me: Kate by the Lake  by Spencer Murphy.  Thirty year old Murphy pictured a dark haired woman standing at the Lac de Saint-Cassien in Southern France. Black and White. No nonsense. Breathtakingly simple. Razor-sharp. The artist states he tried to illustrate the tension between man and nature, and the mythic mists around romance.  The picture sent my thoughts away to the shores of Avalon. Just thought I should share this with you. It made me smile.

I simply hate public transport. It’s personal. It’s deep. It hurts. Ok, I admit, I’m a petrol head and I would rather drive somewhere than trust myself to the whims of some unknown employee from a grey and mystical ministry of transport. If I can, I’ll take the wheel. Thank you very much.

There are of course exceptions. Though I am fully mentally prepared to go through the pains of getting a pilot license, being ridiculously heavy colorblind prevents me from it. And my accountant claims I cannot afford an airplane yet. So I give my money to airliners that threat me like cattle, give me bad service, Lilliputian overcooked food and make me miss my connections.

A bad knee prevents me to cross the North Sea swimming, and even if I could, last time I checked my cherished electronic gadgetry did not like moisture very much. So I have to train. Well, trust me. Trains hate me. They do not run on time. They never go where I want to be. Their staff speaks a multitude of languages, none of which I master. And very simple requests like “can I sit down together with my wife” or “could I get another Coke” is met with an ice-cold “none is possible”.   I know. I’m nagging. But I paid 525 Euro Business Premier hoping to get some service. Which I did not.

Ever tried the London metro travelling with suitcases? These endless corridors? Automatic ticket control machines that smash your luggage? These steep stairs that force you to backbreaking escalades? All that for 5 euro for three stops?

Excuse me, but Jeremy Clarkson is right. I cannot be bothered. Where are my keys?