I'm waiting for the tram to work this morning, and there's a poster for a movie at the stop. It's called "Volle Maan", a teen/20-something flick. The dripping-wet, "gothic wierdo" chick on the poster has caught my eye. I guess I'm still a product of my roots.

At the bottom of this poster are the usual warnings about age restrictions and content, but in graphic form. The one for "sexual situations" made me laugh out loud: two sets of cartoonish footprints in classic "missionary" position. That is multilingual marketing, my friends.

I've been in the Netherlands for a week now, which is plenty of time to settle into life here. I've started my Dutch language classes ("Ik begrijp het niet!"), learned several new tram lines, and found the shoarma place next to my house.

3.50 euro for turkish shoarma, piled with high-quality Dutch lamb, sliced razor thin and tender, crispy on the edges. Jeff, eat your heart out. :)

My diet consists largely of daily-fresh Dutch breads, falafel, lamb, and all sorts of traditional sandwiches from cozy shops along the Keizersgracht. I can't say I miss American food, but I rarely ate it in San Francisco. I'm just a xenophile, all the way.

It's cold here. Bone-chilling, 10-degrees-C, farther-north-than-Canada cold. It's not even snowing yet. It's October, and the Dutch are laughing at me for wearing gloves. Wait until I break out the cute little fuzzy raver hat. At least it's warm.

Some long dormant German instincts are kicking in. My inner-mammal seems to think it's time to stock up for the winter. I'm hungry constantly, despite a relatively regular diet. I always had trouble over the winter holidays in California, but that was nothing compared to this. Perhaps I'm going to hibernate soon.

The stroopwafels call to me, the bastards.

I seem to be a harbinger of death for European royalty. On my last visit, the Queen Mum, the mother of Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain, died. Not a week into this visit, Prins Claus, the prince consort of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, died. He passed Sunday evening after a protracted fight with cancer and Parkinson's disease.

Prins Claus was a German diplomat and former NAZI solder, a source of some protest when their engagement was announced in 1965. But he won over the hearts of the Dutch people, mastering the language and providing three male heirs to the Dutch throne (the first in a century). He was a remarkably popular speaker and well-known for his humility.

I'm not one to follow the exploits of the aristocracy, but the Dutch royalty fascinate me. They play a real role in the government, approving the ministers appointed by parliament and playing a major role in foreign diplomacy. Unlike most European royalty, they have actual power but are known for approchability. Until Pim Fortuyn's assassination last year, it was common to approach them in public. I saw a film clip of a woman jumping on the back of Prins Claus' bicycle as he rode in a parade a few years ago. There were no bodyguards, and everyone was smiling.

Try that in the States, and you'll have a collapsed lung and a prison sentence for your trouble.

Incidently, thank you to those of you that read this by email (instead of at www.tolaris.com). You're all guinea pigs for my new "It's not really spam!" emailer tool. It's a simple little perl script that sends one copy of my message to each entry in a list. This should get it past your spam filters, since you're no longer on a BCC: or a list of 70 recipients. I'll be combining this with the blog software I'm installing at tolaris.com, so I can distribute the message once instead of hand-coding HTML for the site and pasting in my mailer. As always, email me if you don't want to receive my sordid little tales.