Funny things about Brussel

I was in Brussel yesterday and I had found out some funny things about Brussel.

First of all people who live in Brussel must be either a) filatelists or b) musicians. I have never in my life seen so many shops with stamps and shops for filatelists and I have never seen so many music shops with guitars, drums etc.

Second thought is about really strong Muslim community. I was living in a quarter (near city center) and the whole Stalingrad street was filled with barbershops, groceries, restaurant and other shops and only Muslims were in there. I liked the way how they make business. They have just simple room with a desk, chairs and PC and that is the shop - for example the travel agency. Almost nothing on the walls, no decorations.

The third thing which surprised me was how they deal with the garbage in Brussel. They do not have any dustbins. They just put their garbage into plastic bag and throw it on the streeet. So when it was 22.00 the streets were overwhelmed by garbage bags. The problem is that I had many plastic garbage and I was looking for the plastic garbage bin and found none, so I traveled back into my country with this plastic waste and threw it into the yellow dustbin (for plastics).

The end. Maybe I will write something down something else about Brussel in the near future.

Skateboarding is deader than dead

I remember the times when I was a young kid and I was skateboarding. We had normal clothes, shoes lended from our parents (I had adidas shoes from 70s - nowadays they are selling again the same model with little difference) and being cool did not meant to have special trousers worth 250 euros, but doing great tricks on the board...

And why I am writing crap about it? Because today I read press release by one of the Czech banks, which will emit credit cards for "young" people and there will be motives of snowboarding and skateboarding, because "it is, what teenagers desire". FUCK! Skateboarding became a platform for marketers and PR managers, where they will serve their products to the younglings.

If I were a parent now and my kid would tell me that he wants to do skateboarding... I will really consider it, because I guess that the kid would like more or less only the cool clothes and shoes and the skateboarding itself would not interest him. Like he will probably only wear the board in his hand and tried to look cool. We had a wonderful czech word for it. It was "pozér". I had seen such a boy two weeks earlier. He had all the cool stuff on himself and his mother looked like she will die of hunger next week and she was wearing really crappy clothes, which only poor people wear. I really wondered how she could afford to buy to his sun all this cool stuff. I guess that he would not be able to do shove-it-flip even if he wet his pants first. What a lame jackass.

Sherlock Holmes and science

I am aware of the scientific methods called induction and deduction. But only after reading book "How to make sociological knowledge" I started to think about those two methods in connection with Sherlock Holmes.

Since my childhood (when I read all books by Arthur C. Doyle) I always talked about Sherlock Holmes as of one of the best DETECTIVEs or masters of DEDUCTION. But in fact, as Milan Disman correctly mentioned in his book, Sherlock Holmes was master of INDUCTION.

Funny. :o)

Today I met president

And I do not mean the crappy clown Klaus who is talking nonsense at the UN congress about global warming... I mean the one and only president our republic had ever since its beginning.

Yeah. Today I met Václav Havel. I was on my way to school when suddenly car stopped on the street and the door opened and Václav Havel popped out. I was looking at him and then we made an eye contact and I smiled at him and that was everything.

To be honest I had an encounter with the recent president Václav Klaus, too, a while ago. It was at some classical music concert. We were just sitting at the stairs with my girlfriend when gorilla-type-of-guy came in front of me and told me "Can you move along?" And I asked him why, that he can not fit in the stairs or what? (15 people beside one another can fit on those large historical stairs from the end of 19th century) and he told me nothing and still stood against me. Then I stood up from the ground and looked behin him and I saw the "first lady of republic" and afterwards (about 10 metres behind her) was coming president Klaus surrounded by bunch of gorilla-type-of-guys. So this was my another presidential encounter.

To be honest I liked much better an encounter with Václav Havel. First of all he really has my respect and the situation was not that unpleasant. =)