News

Also new is that the column on the right shows the most recent comments and the last guest book entry, which will make sure no comment goes unnoticed (even on old items), and will hopefully motivate my visitors to post something.

From now on I'm using my 'real' nickname Godsmurf. The reason I used Krommenaas for my personal site before was that 'Godsmurf' was a bit too famous in the gaming world, but those days are long gone now so everything is smurfy again.

Well, look around and let me know what you think! Best viewed with Firefox, of course.

A selection of the things I want to do:

• Learn Ruby on Rails, a development platform for web sites. I've spent a few weeks on this already.
• Remake this web site in Ruby on Rails for exercise. I'm busy with that now and you'll see the result in a few weeks.
• Rewrite my book on the Antwerp dialect and finally publish it.
• Rework my Flemish grammar study into a web site.
• Create a web site with Belgian "eSports" (competitive gaming) news.
• Create a web site about international eSports history.
• Clean up my appartment and finally finish unpacking my stuff (I moved here 7 months ago...)
• Collect all the information about my family tree, enter it in a database and make something presentable of it.
• Make a journey. I now have the opportunity to make another big one, but tbh my traveling fever is not so high anymore, so I'll probably keep it simple and relaxing this time.
• Work on my novel.
• Practice the piano.
• Finish my India travel report.
• Create software that I could sell. I have a specific idea that would work, but I'd have to devote all my time to it.
• Refresh my Java knowledge and learn J2EE

I'd need about 5 years of vacation just to do all of the above :) If I feel I'm using my time well, I may wait until after the summer to go job hunting.

This is the theory: the 9/11 attacks were not the work of islamic terrorists, they were the work of the US government. The WTC towers didn't collapse because of the planes, they were carefully detonated with explosive devices that were planted all throughout them. The Pentagon wasn't hit by a big plane at all but by a cruise missile. The 4th plane didn't crash at the official crash site at all, that was entirely fake. The mobile phone calls from people on the planes were fake as well.

Wild stuff huh? Well, anyone can make things like this up. What makes this a great conspiracy theory is that it's not just based on the imagination of a few creative paranoids, but is being propagated by a whole network of people who have done some pretty serious and detailed research that does raise a lot of serious questions. For example they argue that the temperature of burning kerosine is far below the melting point of the steel used in the construction of the WTC, and demonstrate that some specific engine parts shown in the mainstream media's debris pictures could not have come from a passenger plane.

All this is explained in great detail in the documentary, which is really well put together. It has a lot of great 9/11 footage that I hadn't seen before (and I was glued to news channels for weeks after 9/11) and an excellent sound track to boot. It mostly sticks to detailing research that does pull the official version of the events of 9/11 in doubt. Many of the issues raised are at least strong enough to make me curious to find out more and to hear counter evidence, and some of them are outright convincing.

The strongest bit in my opinion is that about the Pentagon. The material and research presented here does make it hard to believe that the Pentagon was actually hit by a Boeing 757. Of course, I need to hear a well-researched refute of this theory before I can judge what to believe. But if only this one part of the theory would be correct, then that would already indicate a mind-boggling cover-up by the US authorities.

To be clear, I disbelieve any grand conspiracy theory because I am convinced it is entirely impossible to succesfully implement and then cover up an outrageous plan if it actively involves hundreds of people - which such a conspiracy by the US government certainly would have. Humans are too volatile for any large group of people to be so dedicated and disciplined, without exception, that something so outrageous could be pulled off and then kept secret. Only small conspiracies can ever succeed; there is not a single example in history of a grand conspiracy that had any measure of success for any amount of time.

I do however consider it entirely plausible that the US government would cover up aspects of the 9/11 catastrophy, perhaps to hide major political or military blunders for which it is responsible. What if the US army was succesfully inflitrated for example? What if the terrorists did not just manage to hijack passenger planes but also an armed military plane? Those are things I can see being covered up, and if there are indications that suggest this may have happened, I want to know all about them. This documentary presented many such indications, some stronger than others.

I hope that the people doing this research and propagating this conspiracy theory manage to break into the mainstream, so their questions must be answered and their arguments countered. I do worry though about the Arab media picking up this theory. Many in the Arab world still believe 9/11 was the work of Israel and that all Jews who worked in the WTC were warned in advance and stayed away from work that day, because Arab media spread that grotesquely absurd story. This theory could take hold just as easily, and further remove the muslim world from facing up to its inner rot.

The Swiss organisation has nominated 21 monuments for the 7 spots:

• Acropolis, Athens, Greece
• Alhambra, Granada, Spain
• Angkor, Cambodia
• Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico
• Christ Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Colosseum, Rome, Italy
• Easter Island Statues, Chile
• Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
• Great Wall, China
• Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
• Kyomizu Temple, Kyoto, Japan
• Kremlin, Moscow, Russia
• Machu Picchu, Peru
• Neuschwanstein Castle, Füssen, Germany
• Petra, Jordan
• Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
• Statue of Liberty, New York, USA
• Stonehenge, Amesbury, United Kingdom
• Sydney Opera House, Australia
• Taj Mahal, Agra, India
• Timbuktu, Mali

This selection was obviously politically and commercially inspired: each big/powerful country has one candidate even when it has nothing that's quite up to par (like Germany and Japan), each continent has at least one (even Australia), and of each country the most iconic monument was chosen. Still, that makes for a very balanced and interesting selection of what the world has to offer, so well done I say. The poll to determine the seven new wonders will be little more than a chauvinistic contest between the big countries, so it's this larger list that matters imo. I've visited 9 of these 21 nominees (Acropolis, Chichen Itza, Colosseum, Eiffel Tower, Hagia Sophia, Kremlin, Petra, Pyramids, Taj Mahal), how about you?

My personal Seven Wonders of the World would be:

1. Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
2. Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
3. Taj Mahal, Agra, India
4. Temple of Karnak, Luxor, Egypt
5. Acropolis, Athens, Greece
6. Burj Al Arab, Dubai
7. Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
   

The single criterion for me is how awestruck I was (or think I would be) when seeing these monuments - we're talking about wonders here after all - and that is determined by their age, their size, their beauty and the technical achievement they were for their time.

Nothing beats the Pyramids when it comes to inducing awe - if you can grasp just how ancient and big they are. The Hagia Sophia is the most beautiful building I've seen - on the inside - and its dome was an amazing engineering feat for its time. The Taj makes the top 3 on its sheer beauty alone - it is the most beautiful and perfect monument I've seen. The Temple of Karnak is almost as ancient and impressive as the Pyramids. The Acropolis breathes the greatness of ancient Greek culture. The Burj Al Arab is the most poetic skyscraper there is, and at 310m among the taller ones as well. The Eiffel Tower is a fantastic structure and was the first building to be higher than the Greater Pyramid - immediately doubling its height. I also wanted to squeeze the Statue of Liberty in, but I'd have to see it before I could remove any of these 7.

Petra is the most beautiful place I've ever seen, but that's mostly for its natural canyons, so I don't know why it was even nominated for this list - its monuments aren't thát special. Machu Picchu seems to be a similar case (but I haven't been there).

I love making lists btw, in case that wasn't obvious yet :)

I like conspiracy theories, and you can make great fiction by assuming they are true, as the X-files proved.

What bothers me about this book is firstly that it's not great fiction, it's pulp. The action is smeared out with easily digestable but cheesy details (I don't care how the hair of the heroine smells) and most of the suspense is created artificially by withholding information. For example, we're told early on that the heroine once saw something terrible, and over the next 200 pages we get bits and pieces of information about where and when she saw it and how much it shook her before we are finally told what the heck it was. In the first half of the book every chapter also ends with a lame cliffhanger like "and then he saw something amazing" after which the next chapter switches to another character. It's all very much like a dumb soap opera.

What is far worse than the awful style and structure though is that Dan Brown presents many aspects of the conspiracy theory as actual history that just doesn't happen to be common knowledge. The main character is an academic who regularly says things like "historians agree that" or "it is now commonly accepted among historians that" followed by some wild extrapolation of fabricated facts and speculations. Because of the amazing popularity of this book and the general naivity of people, millions must now believe that a lot of this crap is true. No wonder the Vatican is so pissed haha.

I'd give Dan Brown credit for coming up with this elaborate theory, but he just took it all from the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail written by three very imaginative 'historians' who understandably sued Brown for plagiarism. I've browsed through their book; it consists entirely of "it is possible that" followed by bits of speculation that are then assumed to be true and used as bases for further speculation.

For example, they say "it is possible that" Maria Magdalena was a descendant of the first Jewish king, Saul, because she was said to belong to the tribe of Benjamin from which Saul had come as well - that is the only basis for this speculation. Jesus on the other hand is considered to be a descendant of David just because the New Testament says so; never mind that everyone claiming to be the Messiah had to pretend being an heir of David because that's how the Old Testament prophecied it; and never mind that Mark and Luke fabricated two entirely different genealogies to demonstrate how Jesus descended from David.

By combining this wild speculation about Mary with this obvious fabrication about Jesus, their children now suddenly unite the lines of the two great Jewish kings and make Jesus and his family a major threat to all men of power in 1st century Israel, which is why Jesus was crucified and Mary had to flee. In the real world however, Jesus was such a completely unknown nobody that in the many surviving historical records (Jewish and Roman) of his time, he only gets one (1) brief mention. That Mary Magdalena came to France, of all places, is assumed because a French monk wrote so in the 7th century.

These are just the first two links of the long chain of assumptions that make up this ludicrous conspiracy theory. The funniest thing though is that the authors think that once the cat is let out of the bag, the people of Europe will welcome the current descendant of Jesus as a kind of priest-king to replace our democratic governments. This expectation speaks volumes about their grip on reality.

Anyway, the Da Vinci Code does have a lot of interesting information about the places and artifacts that feature in the story, so being offensive to the Vatican isn't its only quality. I suspect that the upcoming movie will be a lot better than the book though (it has a superb cast in any case), so if you haven't read it yet I recommend you wait for that.

Everything is written in a witty style typical of Vidal, which especially shines in the narrator's condescending comments on the Greeks and especially the Athinians. His Persian perspective is of-course diametrically opposed to how we are taught about ancient Greek civilisation, which makes it very interesting. My favourite passage is when Spitama describes Xerxes' attack on Athens and says "his army moved south along the coast and killed a Spartan king and all his men along the way". This refers to the battle of Thermopylae, for the ancient Greeks one of the most heroic episodes in their history, so it's funny how the Persian brushes over it.

Besides learning a lot about this period in history, the main thing I take away from this book is Vidal's view on the typology and chronology of religions. He argues that in all these regions tribal invaders from the north (the Greeks in Europe, the Persians in Mesopotamia, the Aryans in India) replaced the original otherworldly religions with their own polytheistic worship of a pantheon of gods, but that the old religions gradually came on top again in new forms - Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism in Persia, and later of course christianity. An interesting theory as it goes against the general perception that religion had a linear evolution from animism to polytheism to monotheism.

Anyway, this is recommended reading. I love Vidal's style - English at its best - and I'm definitely going to read his best-know work "Julian", which is set in the 4th century AD and deals with the early history of christianity.

On the last day we took the 6h train from Amritsar back to Delhi and went straight to the airport where we arrived at midnight; our flight was at 3:30am. It was there and then that Danny discovered he had lost his passport, and the airport staff made it clear there was no way he could leave the country without it. Getting new papers would take at least a week of running around ministries and embassies. Needless to say, this was a bad moment in our trip. But Danny called the hotel in Amritsar and it turned out they had found the passport there, so that made the situation considerably less bad: he could go get his passport and take a flight three days later. I left Danny with the Lonely Planet guide and my bank card, and started checking in.

I'd felt bad that day and while spending hours queueing I got feverish and sick; I threw up somewhere between the security and customs lines. I spent half the night on the plane's toilet making funny noises. So after the Nepalese bacteria of the last day of our trek I now got a special goodbye from Indian bacteria as well. The Nepalese bacteria were worse. Anyway after a seemingly endless journey my parents picked me up at Brussels airport, took good care of me and called a doctor, and by Sunday evening the medicines had made me a lot better. I'm still on sick leave now but tomorrow I go back to work.

On to happier tidings: I managed to get all my 2100 pictures home safely and can now begin the task of filtering them out and making a selection, something I enjoy almost as much as traveling itself. Check back here for a picture report over the next few weeks!

• Last Saturday we took a nightbus from Kathmandu to India. Since we took an unusual route to get to Bodghaya, we ended up in Bihar, the poorest and most criminal region in India. The border town Raxaul is the most miserable place I've ever been. Unfortunately, it was election day in Bihar and to prevent violence, all vehicles were banned while the army controlled the streets. So we were stuck there all day. We made up for that by taking another night bus out of there.
  
  This day we were accompanied by a 16 year old Nepalese boy who had run away from home without any money or luggage because his parents were mad with him and wanted to go meet a famous Guru in the south of India. I helped him along to Raxaul so he could say he made it across the border, then spent the afternoon persuading him to go back, with success. A special adventure that.
  
  
• Monday we visited Bodghaya, the place where the Buddha was enlightened 2500 years ago and now the holiest city of Buddhism. Not much to see there.
  
  
• Tuesday we visited Varanasi, the holiest city of Hinduism. The most interesting thing there were the people bathing in the Ganghes. There was a big Hindu festival that day so we thought we were lucky, but except that there were a lot of lights and a lot of people nothing much seemed to happen on the festival. We were actually standing on the main square by the Ganghes between thousands of Indians during the time of the celebrations, and nothing happened, though people applauded periodically for no apparent reason. Very weird.
  
  
• Wednesday we visited Khajuraho, which has big 1000 year old temples covered in little statues, many of which are very sensual and some even pornographic. Beautiful monuments.
  
  
• Thursday we visited Orchha, a village on the site of an old capital where we could roam around the ruins of huge temples and palaces freely. That was great.
  
  
• Yesterday we visited Sanchhi, which has a Buddhist monument with nice statues 2000 years old.
  
  
• Today we visited Gwalior, which has the biggest fortress I've ever seen. There were other great things as well, like big rock carvings, and it was the highlight of the week so far.
  
  
• In between all this we've done lots and lots of traveling, mainly waiting for trains and sitting on trains.
  
  
• Tomorrow morning we're visiting the Taj Mahal!

Of course I have many great pictures of all these places, look forward to sorting them out and putting them online.

Not sure if I'll be updating again, in any case we're coming home in a week!