I don't remember why, but I bought a bag of orange lentils the other day.  When I brought them home Marleen said, "We already have a bag of orange lentils."  Boy, did I feel dumb.  Yesterday I decided that I was going to do something about our lentil surplus.  Despite the fact that we have four or five cookbooks, I went online to find a recipe.  I discovered a few intriguing possibilities, including soups, lentil pie, and lentil veggie burgers.  I decided to try my hand at lentil veggie burgers, and I must admit that I chose the wrong recipe.  Now I have one and a half bags of orange lentils, and one really big bowl full of lentil veggie burger mix that is rather pasty, and not very exciting to eat.  It was not supposed to be this way.  My lentil veggie burgers were supposed to be delicious.  I must find a way to make them more exciting.  I refuse to throw this horrible mush away. There are children starving in Africa.

I'll keep you posted,
Jim

i have recently (re)discovered that the simple act of taking your motorcycle out can elevate your mood for the rest of the day.  i haven't been riding lately for a few reasons.  1) i don't have anywhere to go.  2) i don't have gas money 3) i don't want to get stranded.
yesterday, i took ole brownie out for the first time in quite awhile, and it was awesome.  unfortunately, i stuck to the city limits of ro-town, but it was still good.  riding in rotterdam is fine, but you have to stop CONSTANTLY.  there are traffic lights and draw bridges and other things that force you to stop EVERYWHERE.  if you could ride continuously for more than 20 feet, you would consider yourself lucky.  seriously though, i'm only exaggerating a little.

best,
jim

this past weekend i went to the noorderlicht photo festival in groningen.  i went there not only because i am a photography enthusiast, but also because one of my images is in a show there.  in general it was a good experience, but i felt kind of weird being there.  first of all, the noorderlicht gallery was generous enough to offer us a hotel room so we could stay overnight.  this was surprising to me since i am such a small part of the show, but i gladly accepted.  when we got to groningen, we checked in, and then went about looking for photo festival people and activities.  that proved to be sort of difficult.  we went to the galleries where things were happening, but i never encountered anyone who was in charge, and i felt like i was in a ghost world watching things happen in the living world around me.  the main exhibit hall was a church, and it was densely populated with fancy photo people with festival badges and the large groups of photo buddies they were hanging around with.  marleen and i were just kind of walking around trying to look at pictures.  we decided to skip out on the festival dinner and get dinner by ourselves because it would have been too awkward to try to ease into the cool kid photo clubhouse.
i'm glad we did that.
after dinner and a lengthy walk around groningen we went back the hotel for a sound sleep.  in the morning there was a package with a festival badge and all kinds of useful festival information at my door.  i really wish i had gotten this package when i checked in.  i think it would have made things a lot easier for me, and i would not have felt so much like an alien.  so…  day two was a little better.  i had my badge, i saw lots of pictures, i got a free catalogue of the show, and felt a little better about everything in the world.  then i went home.

best,
jim

Baby Tooth, originally uploaded by jimturbert.

this is a picture of the baby tooth that i recently i mentioned had come loose in my head. there was not an adult tooth to replace it, so the baby tooth never fell out. i know it looks nasty, but keep in mind that a baby tooth is not designed to last until its host is 33 years old. this one tried very hard to do that, and dentists helped it to last as long as it could. now, i have 27 teeth instead of 28, and a big gap where my upper left 2nd pre-molar should be. fortunately, this gap isn't overly noticeable, but i'd still like to get an implant at some point. for now i'm going to see how it goes without the tooth. chewing can be strange without a tooth there, but it doesn't hurt, and it hasn't prevented me from eating anything yet. i'll keep you posted.

best,
jim

I would like to take this moment to mourn the loss of my in ear headphones. Today I put them in my ears only to discover that the left channel no longer works. I mourn because they were expensive, but mostly because now I find myself using the Apple headphones that came with the iPhone. The Apple headphones are far inferior to my dearly departed Shure in-ears (I don't remember the model name), and  are tinny in comparison. It almost hurt to listen at first. I have a pair of nice big muffy Sony headphones with a long ass curly cord.  They sound great, but they aren't very good for running with.   I'd have to tuck a meter of cord into my pants, and constantly hold the damn things so they would bounce off my head.  Of course, I'd also have to ring the sweat out of the ear muffs after each run as well.  I'm going to have to suck it up until I can afford another pair of quality in-ear sound isolating headphones.  That makes me sad.
For those of you who are happy with your iPhone/iPod headphones, DO NOT BUY A BETTER PAIR or you will be sad when they break.  Ignorance is bliss.

Sincerely,
Jim

hi.  i've been away for awhile, but i'm back now.  i was recently thinking about tone deafness and how how horrible it is.  i can't imagine what it must be like for people to lack the ability to discern the difference between different tones.  i became aware of tone deafness when i was quite young.  i had not started school yet, so i'm guessing that i was around 4 or 5* years old.  i was at the house of one of my parents' friends, and i was talking about the theme from superman and the theme from star wars.  i hadn't seen star wars, but i was familiar with the theme, and i was a huge fan of superman and the superman them.  one of the children of my parents' friends was insisting that the themes from superman and star wars were the same.  i had no idea why someone would think such a thing.  they both have clearly different melodies and themes.  it is true they are similar in that they were composed by the same man, and they are both bombastic and brassy, but they are not the same.  i didn't realize that it was called tone deafness, but i definitely realized that the child i was talking to was at the very least misguided.

best,
jim

*imdb.com says that superman was release in december of 1978.  i was was born in december 1975, so that puts me at around 4 years old at the time of this story.  

I still have a baby tooth.  Due to some genetic malfunction there was not an adult tooth to replace it, and its small baby-toothness has remained in my mouth far longer than it was supposed to.  Finally, the time has come for this baby tooth to fall out.  I was eating muesli the other day, and the baby tooth loosened after I bit down on a nut.  Now the tooth is loose, and I can't leave it alone.  When I was a kid with loose teeth it was the same. I would wiggle the damn things around even though it hurt because it was an enjoyable hurt.  I think that this tooth will find its way out of my mouth within the month, and I do not know if I will miss it.  We've been through a lot together.
I'll let you know how it goes.

Best,
Jim

I know I wrote that the tide was turning the other day, but that is not how I feel now.  I am a bit depressed about my apparent lack of desirability in the eyes of the Dutch people.  If they only knew the power...
I am unhappy and sad.
(sigh)
On a positive note, I made a fine batch of chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips yesterday.  They are both tasty and nice to look at.  On another positive note, Marleen had her contract renewed at work.
Yay.  Everything is awesome.

Yours,
Meneer Turbert

DUTCH LOVE!

Maybe the tide is turning.  I recently discovered that an image of mine was selected to be in the Noorderlicht International Photo Festival!!!  I'm pretty happy about that, especially considering the amount of rejection that I have received from Dutch people lately.  
I'm going to update my resume right now.  After that I may buy a lottery ticket.

Sincerely,
Jim Turbert  

FIELD DAY!!!!!!!!!!
The athletic fields down the street from my house are swarming with children and adult supervisors I can only assume are their teachers. I'm glad to see that field day is an international celebration.
Since my last post, I have re-uploaded many (if not all) of the pictures that I accidentally deleted off of flickr.  I urge you to not use iPhoto's built in upload plugin.  Currently, the free plugin that I used to use doesn't work with the most recent version of iPhoto, but it works well with the older versions if you haven't updated.  It's called FFXporter, and it is awesome. Since it doesn't work on my iPhoto, I've been using a more full featured and effective pay plugin called FlickrExport. I fully endorse both products, but in the end you can't argue with free.
So yeah, I re-upped my pictures, but I haven't updated the links on old blog posts. I'll get to that eventually. I bet you didn't even notice they were gone.
Blah, Blah, Blah.
I still have no job. I get no Dutch love. I may have to go to MacDonald's. Seriously though, I will not be going to MacDonald's. I didn't work there when I was a youngster, and I have no desire to work there now. I'm sure it's a fine place to work, but if I must work in a grease hole, I'm not going to wear a silly uniform. One must draw the line somewhere. I was an extra in a movie last week. That's almost like a job, but it doesn't pay very well, and it only lasts 5 or 6 hours. It was fun, though, and I'd do it again. Unfortunately, most extra jobs are in Amsterdam. As a Rotterdammer, it costs €14 for a day return ticket to Amsterdam, and if you get paid less than a fistful of dollars it is not worth the trip. I did it because I needed to go to Hamsterdam anyway. I met some cool people, and I saw some sweet gear. Like I said before, I'd do it again. With any luck, I won't have to. I should be getting an avalanche of acceptance notices from all the places I applied to so far. Then I will have my pick of the riches that Holland has to offer. I could use some riches.

Sincerely,
Jim

do you use iphoto? do you use flickr? i do, and i just got a little screwed by iphoto's upload to flickr function. i inadvertently erased a ton of my images off of flickr because i was displeased with the way iphoto handled uploading. apple's upload to flickr feature is a slow and painful process by which you drop photos in an RSS linked album in iphoto. then your image automatically goes to flickr. in theory it sounds great, but actually it fucking sucks. it takes a looong ass time just to upload one or two images. i decided that i didn't want to use this method anymore, and i deleted the RSS album from iphoto. now a shit ton of my pictures are gone, and a bunch of photo links (to this blog and others) are now broken. i am very disappointed.

sincerely,
jim

I am looking at xpatjobs.com right now, and I find it sad that the job I am most qualified for is a house cleaning job. Technically, I have no experience in the house cleaning business, but I'm going to assume that a degree and a lifetime of cleaning shit is qualification enough. If I could speak Dutch fluently I could get a sweet job, like "Senior Erection & Installation Manager." Then I could manage and install erections all day long!!!
I seriously saw that posted on monster.nl. Shit is funny.

Sincerely,
Jim

I need a job. It's true. As much as I enjoy not working, I enjoy buying things more. I also enjoy going out to eat a lot, and it is tough to do that if you have no money. So please send me your money, or give me a lucrative and satisfying job that will not make me want to claw my eyes out.
OK
I can't believe it is June. Time goes very quickly these days. Is that because I am old now, or has time somehow sped up? Seriously, I would like to know. Speaking of being old, Marleen ceases to be young next weekend. Now I can officially call her, "My Old Lady." You should send her a congratulatory e-mail for successfully completing her twenties. Her birthday is Saturday the 13th.
Today we went for a bike ride to a "special" grocery store to buy "special" muesli that you can't buy in the normal grocery store. Doesn't that sound like something old people do? Since the store is so far away, we bought 8 packages of the stuff. I think we're set for awhile. Maybe until we die.
Speaking of dying, I saw Terminator last night. It was far better than I expected. There are some nice surprises in the movie, but there are also some incredibly cheesy moments. For the most part the action is exciting, but the new movie can't compete with the suspenseful and scary chase chase scenes in the original Terminator movie. Also, I liked the old school analog effects in the original Terminator better. Especially when Arnold's skin is coming off his face in the old one. It looked way more real than when the skin starts coming off the face of the organic robots in the new movie. It's worth seeing on the big screen if you are a Terminator fan and it is around 600x better than the last Terminator sequel.
Before Terminator started, I saw the trailer for the John Dillinger movie with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. It is directed by Michael Mann, and the trailer kind of got me fired up. It looks awesome, and I will be seeing it as soon as it graces the screen in my neighborhood.
We should talk more. Send me an e-mail. I swear, I'll write you back.

Love,
Jim

I just saw Lightning Bolt in a place the size of a high school bathroom. It was loud and totally sick. Brian Chippendale warned a guy in the front to put ear plugs in or he would be "decimated." A fellow who calls himself Mudboy opened up. He was interesting. I think he may take acid. Also, he might play dungeons and dragons a lot. If he does play dungeons and dragons, I think his character is a druid with a synthesizer and theatrical lighting. His performance was so freaking weird. He blends pleasant sounding synthesized tones with what appear to be nature recordings, and then he starts chanting, and yelling about "the pig" and throwing babies in a hole. It's totally worth checking him out live just for the "what the fuck?" factor.

Mudboy!, originally uploaded by jimturbert.

best,
jim

Marleen and I are going to ride to Delft today. I am wearing shorts.
It's warm.
I will post more deep thoughts later.

Best,
Jim

Look Kids! Big Ben! Parliament!, originally uploaded by jimturbert.

Look Kids! Big Ben! Parliament!
Have you ever seen European Vacation? I have. I have also been in London for the past few days.

Love and kisses,
Jim

i'm going to london tomorrow night. if you have any suggestions for things to do there, let me know. i would really appreciate it.

best wishes,

jim

Today I learned that the plural of apparatus is apparatuses, not
apparati. I feel so stupid.

Seriously,
Jim

do you ever get the feeling that people are repeating other conversations that they had previously when they are talking to you? you know, like when a friend is telling you about a movie or a piece of art, and it doesn't sound like something that they would ever say? when their spiel sounds as if they had read it somewhere and liked it so much that they decided to make it their own? i get that sometimes, and i think it is weird.

sincerely,

jim

people always talk about how safe it is to ride a bike in the netherlands, and that no one needs to wear a helmet here because of the prominence of bike paths. well, i was about this close (pinches fingers together to indicate a small amount of space) to getting taken out by a cyclist who was not paying attention a few moments ago. i was passing him on the left, and he inexplicably shifted over to the left side of the bike path forcing me to ride up onto the curb and evasively maneuver around garbage bins and other such sidewalk stuff. i expect such behavior from small children, not from grown (dutch) men in business attire. these people grow up in a biking culture, and they should know better. i wasn't riding slowly, so the maneuvering was quite stressful. i pulled it off, and the man was very apologetic, but i didn't want to talk to him. i was all amped up, and i think i would have hit him if i tried to discuss what had just happened. i rode off briskly, gradually regaining my composure. if there had been a person on the sidewalk or a row of parked bikes my bike and i would have been fucked. if there were a person, he would have been fucked too.
i thought you would like to know about this.

best,
jim

Jim Turbert at the Hudson Museum, originally uploaded by jimturbert.

Jim Turbert at the Hudson Museum, originally uploaded by jimturbert.

Jim Turbert at the Hudson Museum, originally uploaded by jimturbert.

i walked by the Hudson Museum earlier today so i could see the show that no one has mentioned my participation in. i will not be including pictures of any of the other work since i was left off of their lists.
fuckem.

love,
jim

although i haven't been able to find my name on it anywhere on-line, i am in a show at the hudson museum in rotterdam right now. you should go check this mini-show/mini-exhibition space out if you are in the greater rotterdam area. otherwise, you will have to believe me that i am in the show. here is an (incomplete) informational link >>> http://narb.me/expo/group-exhibited/in/hudson-museum
i get no dutch love.
also, i have nothing interesting to say.

jim

hi. i'm in new york. i had a lovely day walking around and socializing, and now it is time to say good night.

good night.

more later,
jim

i was in a store called kwantum yesterday. marleen and i were looking at a carpet. while we were in the store a song with the lyrics "i want to make love - in this club" came on the the sound system. first i laughed. i thought it was funny that the music in the home goods store was talking about making love in the club. then i wondered if in the club was referring to something other than my assumption that it meant in a dance club. maybe young r&b dudes refer to their bedrooms or the kitchen as the club these days. then i wondered, "who the hell is this, and why does he have a career?" i wanted to know who the "artist" was and who was listening to him. i whipped out my handy iphone computing device, and i googled "make love in this club" and it turns out that shit tons of people listen to him. the song is by usher (featuring little jeezy), and while i am not intimately familiar with their work i can tell you that i have heard enough. i seem to recall seeing usher on a daytime talk show when i was in high school making him roughly my age, maybe a little younger, and i have come to the conclusion that he sucks meaningfully and deeply. i got a little angry that he gets to make gobs of money singing ridiculous tacky songs with a sidekick named jeezy. i know i sound like the crotchety old man saying "damn kids and their crazy music!!!" it's not like that. i don't think the music is crazy at all. i truly believe that the music he puts out is of low quality. the music is overproduced to mask the fact that its quality is so low, and for some reason the demographic that he is selling to is too uninformed to listen to something better. i find it difficult to imagine that in this age of the ubiquitous internet that anyone in his target demographic is uninformed, but that can be the only explanation for this crazy train of pain i will call the rise of the house of usher. it is truly mystifying to me.
as we were leaving the store i was bitching about usher's crappiness to marleen, and she pointed out that ushers is attractive and that he's a really good dancer. that is more than i can say for almost all of his female counterparts in the world of music directed at the top 40 youth of america. most of them can't sing, dance or make a sandwich, but they look good in underwear. at least he can dance as well as being a fine specimen of man.

that is all for now,
jim

p.s. usher, i may be mistaken, but i believe that if you are doing it in a club it is not called making love. it's fucking.

hello. i am still here.
i've been busy keeping it real. later today i'm going to get some spark plugs and pick up some film from het beeldgebouw. i may also go to the store to buy some cereal. i've been eating albert hein fruit and flakes lately. fruit and flakes is a copy of kellogg's fruit 'n fibre. after that i'll take some pictures.
i will be going to an art exhibition opening this evening. it is a painting exhibition of a pair of dutchlings who are known as villeroy and boch. they are acquaintances of mine whom i enjoy talking to whenever i see them. if you are in or near rotterdam, you should totally check out their show >>> http://www.cbk.rotterdam.nl/tentrotterdam/mooij-nl.htm

i will post more in the near future.

best wishes,
jim

p.s. if you live in my neighborhood, and you leave your cat outside all the time, please let him in occasionally. he keeps marleen awake when she should be sleeping, and he wants to hang out with you. also, you should want to hang out with him. he doesn't like being on the terrrace. seriously.

Registered
Originally uploaded by jimturbert

This is a picture of my recently registered in the Netherlands motorcycle. It is a 1978 Triumph Bonneville, and it is beautiful. I find it difficult to refer to the bike as mine. Often I call it "the Triumph" or I find some other way of deferring my possession of the bike, but it is actually mine. The former (and original) owner of this bike was my uncle, whom I called Buddy. Others may have known him as Tom. He passed away just over a year ago, and he would have been 61 on February 19. I always coveted this motorcycle even though I didn't know how to ride it. First of all, it was brown, and I haven't seen too many brown motorcycles. Also, i thought the paint job was really nice. I used to wonder why he chose to ride his other motorcycle more often despite putting so much time and effort into keeping this one. Now that the bike is mine, I fully understand. I got stranded on the side of the road the other day. I had to push the damned thing 10 miles through the Dutch countryside, and it started raining on me. I'm not giving up. I am committed to making this bike an everyday rider. I am just a few small steps away from total reliability which is something that this bike has not experienced since (i'm guessing) the early eighties. I've put in a bunch of money, and I made some sound modifications. Summer is going to be glorious.
I'll keep you posted.

Best,
Jim

>>>> SPOILER ALERT!!! <<<< 

If you haven't seen Back to the Future, do not read this post.

The other day I was thinking about the first time I saw "Back to the Future" (around 900 years ago). If you recall, the climax of the movie takes place in the parking lot at the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance. Biff is molesting Leah Thompson in the back of his car, and George MacFly steps up, and changes the course of his family's history.  Around the same time in the movie, Biff's henchmen, or cronies, or whatever they are are chasing Michael J. Fox.  They catch MJ, and they lock him in the trunk of Marvin Berry's (cousin of Chuck) car.  Marvin was the leader of the band that was playing the dance, and they happened to be taking a break behind the school while all of this was going on.  I don't remember the dialog exactly, but upon seeing Biff's cronies messing with his car, Marvin (Marvin and the band happen to be black guys) calls one of the white cronies "peckerwood."  I believe that peckerwood is a fantastic insult.  In fact, I want to start calling people peckerwood regardless of what color they are, and regardless of whether they deserve it or not just because it makes me so happy to say it. Getting back on track,  after being called peckerwood, the cronies feel threatened, and one of them says, "We don't want to mess with no reefer addicts."  I didn't understand what he was saying the first couple times I saw the movie, mostly because I didn't know what reefer meant. I thought he said "referratic."  I guess referratic would be a cross between refer and erratic, so the definition would be "an unpredictable reference to something???"  All fictional words aside, that line confused me until I learned that reefer was one of many names for marijuana.  Then I thought, "Ohhhhhh...  The Band guys were smoking weed."  It all came together, and the movie got funnier.  I love that movie.

Yours truly 

Jim Turbert

Because I know that you are interested in even the smallest details of my life, i thought I'd share my most recent purchase with you.  

CYCLON! is a degreaser used for cleaning up the greasy bits on your bike or anything else that gets greasy.  In the US, I used to buy citrus degreaser.  This is pretty much the same thing.  It cleans just as well as the stuff I'm accustomed to, but it doesn't smell like oranges.  The superior label is what does it for me.  If CYCLON! smelled like oranges, I don't know if I could handle it.  I think it would blow my mind, and I'd just sit in a corner rocking back and forth repeating nonsensical phrases to anyone who would listen.    

Okay, I admit that it's not that exciting.

Have a good day.

Your pal,

Jim Turbert