Two more photos from Den Haag:

I was in The Hague this past Thursday for a scholarship awards ceremony. I shuddered when I first read the program and realized that we were scheduled to do paintings together as as "get to know each other" activity. But shame on me, it really was a lot of fun! We were asked to paint a canvas with our ideas we had about the Netherlands. Below you can see the process from start to finish. I am responsible for the extremely tall man standing "around" a bicycle that someone else painted. There were interesting speaches too, particularly that from the Gemeentemuseum curator who talked about Dutch art in the 19th century and its relation with international exchanges and influences. One interesting point: from his perspective, the French occupation at the start of the 19th century was in many ways a good thing, at least for Dutch art and artists.

Further below, pictures of other Tinbergen Institute students receiving their diploma from the chair of the selection committee, Dutch Nobel Prize winning physicist Gerard 't Hooft. His work that got him the prize, according to the Nobel website: "elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions". Not bad, not bad.

Anna is back in Copenhagen now, but she was here for a visit for Easter. Here she demonstrates how to get to the tasty green leaves on this tree, which actually are alright to eat.

A few weeks back, I took a bike trip with my friend and colleague Andrei Dubovik. It was a beautiful day and, armed with a map, we biked about 13 kilometres north-west of Amsterdam. Our destination: some kind of lake/nature area. Unfortunately I can't be much more specific than that, but we had a good time.

"I met the author Dick Francis at the Kentucky Derby years ago. I knew he had been a champion rider in steeplechases. I said he was a bigger man than I had expected. He replied that it took a big man to "hold a horse together" in a steeplechase. This image of his remained in the forefront of my memory so long, I think, because life itself can seem a lot like that: a matter of holding one's self-respect together, instead of a horse, as one's self-respect is expected to hurdle fences and hedges and water.

My dear thirteen-year old daughter Lily, having become a pretty adolescent, appears to me, as do most American adolescents, to be holding her self-respect together the best she can in a really scary steeplechase.

I said to the new graduates at Butler University, not much older than Lily, that they were being called Generation X, two clicks from the end, but that they were as much Generation A as Adam and Even had been. What malarkey!

Esprit de l'escalier! Better late than never! Only at this very moment in 1996 as I am about to write the next sentence, have I realized how meaningless the image of a Garden of Eden must have been to my young audience, since the world was so densely populated with other secretly frightened people, and so overplanted and rigged with both natural and manmade booby traps.

The next sentence: I should have told them they were like Dick Francis when Dick Francis was young, and astride an animal full of pride and panic, in the starting gate for a steeplechase."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Timequake" (1997)