Murakami’s Norwegian Wood reread

On the plane back from Prague, I finished reading Norwegian Wood—re-reading, actually. I don’t often re-read books, but Murakami is a favorite of mine.

Watanabe is in love with Naoko. She is the girlfriend of their mutual friend, who died at a very young age. Naoko can not cope with life and commits suicide in the end, while Watanabe is torn between emotions he is not able to identify or is not even conscious of. The girl who falls in love with him must tell him he is in love with her. An old friend tells him he has to choose for himself. While perfectly capable of analyzing other people’s situations, he is unable to analyze his own issues. Let alone that he is able to come up with a choice for his own problems he is not even aware of.

Photo movies

I (re)started making picture movies from my photo projects. I publish them on my YouTube channel. It’s a kind of slide show, but I’m trying to make a bit more of it and augment pictures with some video I made during the photo shoots.

I started this before with low success but now decided to take this more systematically. Nobody seems to exhibit his photography products like this, at least not so systematically. The first new set I created during the Scotland trip. Created a separate playlist for this trip.

This weekend, I created a video using pictures I took during a business trip to New York City and upstate New York.

And I have a large backlog of similar trips. Having fun with this.

Subscribe to the channel if you like it with this button here.

Exploring Ethical Search Engines Beyond Google

There is no good reason why you should still rely on Google search for your search engine. Read this excellent article on Google’s practices, and Big Tech chills run down your spine. There are ample good alternative search engines these days that do have integrity:

DuckDuckGo

Ecosia

Bing (though also Big Tech and historically suspect)

Brave

StartPage

And there are more.

Lately, I’ve been using Ecosia and DuckDuckGo side by side. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything about Google.

Vacation Photos; and the fun of always taking pictures

Toeristen fotograferen

Kronkeling has the most fun blog about photography.

Kronkeling has a hard time photographing on vacation. I don’t share this struggle. I always takes pictures. Sometimes it’s for the image, the beautiful picture, sometimes for the subject, so just the snapshot. I decide the goals afterward, but then I am different from Kronkeling.

Tips for your holiday pictures from Kronkeling are here.

Sometimes, there are miniseries, like when our car broke down, and we had to wait until a mechanic came to help us. I photographed all the trash in the parking lot.

Or, during vacations, photographing tourists.

Or hotel rooms.

Hotelkamer
Hotelkamer
Hotelkamer
Hotelkamer
Hotelkamer

Or art on the wall.

Or numbers.

47
104

Nina Katchadourian is a super creative source of inspiration.

The convenience of a vegetarian diet

Haloumi burger
Haloumi burger

More than a year ago, I became a vegetarian. In fact, I am a pescatarian; I do eat fish, although I try to limit that, too.

Sometimes, it’s hard to eat vegetarian. When visiting people who are not prepared for it, for example, and also at home, when the rest of the family does want to eat meat. (And I’m not the evangelical type; they have to decide for themselves.)

But it also has advantages. In a restaurant, a vegetarian diet pleasantly limits the choices to no more than a handful of options. Easy, no choice, stress.

Sometimes the choice is limited to a bare pasta, but then you’re in the wrong restaurant anyway.