Or not. At least not that last part, for it’s hard to get very enthusiastic about a country which a while ago broke the world record for operating without a proper, approved government after its last elections (which happened at the beginning of June, 2010). Instead we have newspaper editorials marking the day like the one impishly offered by Liesbeth van Impe in the Nieuwsblad, entitled Fear and Cynicism. And as the latest in a long line of formateurs (politicians appointed by the king to cobble together a workable governing coalition), a bow-tie-wearing dude called Elio di Rupo, finds himself having to deal with squabbling political parties and scheduled negotiation-meetings that fail to convene, the prospect continues to hang over the country that a split-up might be the only solution left.

Hmm . . . a National Day for a nation on the verge of separating roughly down the middle. Don’t know about you, but that reminds me of 150 years ago and July 4, 1861, when all of the states that were to make up the Confederacy had seceded, and blue and grey armies were headed towards each other on respective sides of the new internal border. Especially since that day was described recently in an excellent New York Times piece, one in its “Disunion” series marking that 150th anniversary.

OK, there are no Flemish and Walloon armies mobilized and headed for each other, and it’s a sure thing there never will be – for one thing, the rest of the EU would never allow it. And while the very real cultural differences separating the two sides here are accentuated by different languages in a way that was never the case between the American North and South, the crucial difference between the two situations is that, in Belgium, it’s not the case that one side senses an existential threat to one of its main economic asset-classes (i.e. Southern slavery – not that the North was truly aiming to enforce abolition; it’s a complicated question, but most historians agree – see the NYT piece as well – that it was Union, not the destruction of slavery, that motivated the North to mobilize against the seceding South).

Indeed, it’s actually the differences between these two situations that are the most enlightening, and there may well be another crucial one here. Check out the Nieuwsblad title again: Fear and Cynicism. Then read that NYT piece on July 4, 1861; whatever there was in North and South public opinion way back then, there was precious little fear and absolutely no cynicism. The South wondered whether it really should celebrate the Fourth, as it mobilized to protect what it saw was its legitimate choice to declare independence and go its separate way; the North, on the other hand, celebrated the Fourth with steely determination to remind itself why it shortly had to take up the grim task that awaited it of bringing the Southern states back to heel.

The Flemish-Walloon dispute that threatens to rend Belgium in two is very different. It is safer from the prospect of bloodshed, as mentioned; but then it is also cheaper, more petty, more ignoble. It doesn’t really have to do with property, or certainly with questions of freedom, but it does have to do with money, with base accusations of one side sponging off the other and with the resentments coming the other way those give rise to. And it’s about long-held grudges, about memories of past slights, about revenge against a French-speaking Establishment that dominated business and government for most of the state’s 181-year existence (until recently), and which sent a largely Dutch-speaking rank-and-file to die in the trenches during the First World War for a nation they had little enthusiasm for even then.

So that now, Ms. Van Impe writes:

The equilibrium in this land seems lost for quite a while now. For the fourth time in five years we celebrate the National Holiday without an approved government. After more than 400 days of negotiations the chance of any improvement is distant.The land is in just a dreary state as the wavering summer. Cloudy, with chance of rain and local thundershowers.

Then again, to continue her weather simile, the Belgians will surely take that “wavering summer” (kwakkelende zomer) any day over the ferocious heat now rampant over former Civil War battlefields in the United States. Likewise, perhaps even a miasma of small-mindedness is preferable to outright internecine warfare. Just ask anyone from the former Yugoslavia.

                          

1. Be attractive: Of course! Handsome men supposedly earn 9% more on average, hot women 4%.
   
2. Have an above-average IQ: I guess they start with the obvious ones. Naturally, a disclaimer is added here – from some econ prof, Jay Zagorsky – that “not all geniuses end up rich.”

3. Be popular in school: Really popular people earn on average 10% more.
4. Be tall: Damn, men earn 4% to 10% more for every centimeter they are above “the average,” women 5% to 8%. But what can you do about this if you are disadvantaged? Wear high heels?
   
5. Get married, and stay that way: Married couples allegedly see their net worth rise by 16% for every year of matrimony.
   
6. Drink up!: This one might be a bit counter-intuitive. But if you drink, that means you socialize and thereby build up that all-important “social capital,” i.e. your business network. But all in moderation, of course . . .
   
7. Be thin: Employers prefer to pay those with “ideal dimensions.” Every Body Mass Index point you carry above average lowers your net worth by 8%.
   
8. Be blonde: Here the affect is apparently more indirect: the men whom blonde women marry earn 6% more than average.
   
9. Don’t smoke: Good advice in any context, but non-smokers supposedly have on average 50% more money in the bank than smokers – and yes, the effect here is direct, it’s because cigarettes are so expensive.
   
10. Buy property young: That way you show that you’re confident you’re going somewhere in life, and that prophecy then self-fulfills.

If we were ready just yesterday to accept advice on browser quality from a French newspaper, surely we’ll be interested in this path to riches as laid out from Belgium – because Belgium is so well-known for all its billionaires! (Actually, it’s true that the country does have a number of rather wealthy people, but they tend to live in the extreme northeast – they like to be on the Dutch border because they are tax-exiles from the Netherlands!)

*Official SEO-enabled blogpost headline! To go along with the official blog-tabloid-style entry! Is it all worthy of being #1001? We post – you decide!

                          

An otherwise-unnamed human rights organization based in Guinea estimates that about 160 people were killed at the stadium and more than 1,200 wounded, and other nasty things occurred as well, particularly against women, that I will forbear from detailing here. The government, on the other hand, maintains that only 57 people died, most of them trampled in the stampeding crowd. From President Camara: “It was the opposition politicians who led other people’s children to their deaths, while their own children sat comfortably elsewhere.” Anything untoward that might have happened, he declared, was due to “uncontrollable elements in the army,” which he can’t be expected to take responsibility for. You’ll be glad to know, though, that his government does intend to financially compensate the victims’ families.

                          

Bear in mind, though: The armed can come into those places, but they aren’t allowed to drink any alcohol themselves. And they can’t come in at all if the owner happens to think it might not be such a good idea and posts a “No Firearms” sign at the door: around 1,300 of the roughly 6,000 establishments eligible to welcome a bit of packed heat have thought the better of it and “requested such a sign,” although they also are allowed just to print one out for themselves.

(For example, bar owner Brad Henrich unwittingly helps us learn an interesting Flemish expression when in the article he characterizes the very idea of mixing weapons with alcohol as welhaast bezopen: roughly “just about plastered/smashed,” i.e. crazy with drink.)

Naturally, the National Rifle Association needs to be consulted here for its view of the issue, and spokesman J.P. Nelson helpfully points out that this is nothing new, that similar laws are in effect in 40 other states. He then adds:

Funny things happen in cafés. People want to have a weapon on them, and if the café-owner has no problem with that, then there should be no problem. If someone drinks and gets in a shootout and kills someone, then he naturally must be prosecuted by the law.

Indeed, some other establishment-owners positively welcome the new law as enabling a “deterrent” (afschrikmiddel). It’s precisely those places posting “No Firearms” that criminals will go after, claims restaurant-owner Marc Peagler: “[They] know that no one is there who can stop them.”

                          

Van Vlimmeren does stay aware of other dog-oriented sites which might pose a bit of competition. There’s dogster.com, for example (“for the love of dog”), which he dismisses as “not very user-friendly.” It’s also true that dogster.com is not really structured to be a social-networking site, although it does have private accounts, discussion fora, and groups. It also has a companion site called, of course, catster.com, with much the same pluses and minuses. One has to assume that Van Vlimmeren is well aware of the obvious main limitation of his own honden.be: he’s going to find it hard to make it appeal to anyone with no capability in Dutch!

UPDATE: I should have known that Facebook itself would be on the case. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Dogbook!

                          

Anyway, the commission will be headed by Chile’s ambassador to the UN, Heraldo Muñoz, assisted by former Indonesian public prosecutor Marzuki Darusman and the former Irish policeman Peter Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald actually has some experience in this sort of thing, as he was heavily involved in the UN’s investigation into the February 2005 bombing-assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Strangely, though, back then Fitzgerald and his UN staff were on the scene in Lebanon to begin their inquiries only eleven days after the crime was committed, and he issued his report the following month. I wonder what his private thoughts must be about the considerable delay involved here.

There’s another, more subtle problem present as well. Presumably, as was certainly the case in Lebanon, an important reason for this UN measure is the generally-accepted skepticism that the Pakistani authorities themselves could ever conduct a thorough and impartial investigation. The “whodunit?” here is simply too politicized; if you ask the government in power at the time (headed by former general Pervez Musharraf), you get the answer that the Pakistani Taliban were the culprits, but the current government (headed by President Asif Ali Zardari, Bhutto’s widower) instead points the finger at Musharraf. Yet the Nieuwsblad article notes that commission-member Darusman has already indicated that it will rely on the current Pakistani government to bring forward suspects.

In all, then, this whole UN effort looks like a farce – one-and-a-half years is surely long enough for any murder-trail to go stone-cold. But the article also reminds us that, for whatever reason, the Pakistani authorities at the time made sure to hamper any proper collection of evidence, no matter how prompt, by thoroughly hosing down the site of the assassination just as soon as the bodies and the wreckage of the vehicle in which Ms. Bhutto had been riding could be removed.

                          

Well, you should know by now that you can count on EuroSavant for that sort of thing every so often. The latest bit is from Japan, as reported by Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad within – surprisingly! – the “.biz” business section of its website: Bra stimulates women to seek a man.

Yes, it seems the Land of the Rising Sun has somewhat of a demographic problem, in that its women are increasingly disinclined to marry, preferring to devote themselves to their careers. Now the lingerie company Triumph International has come to the rescue, with its new “Husband Hunting Bra” (available on the Japanese market only, for reasons which will soon become obvious). It’s a bra, all right, but the star attraction here is the digital clock built in on an extension underneath the garment’s supporting sections. There are two set of numbers there that count down; I assume that they represent months and days, for the idea here is that the bra’s owner sets herself a deadline for catching a man, programs it into the digital clock, sets it going, and so has a constant prod to action there on her chest. How to stop the clock? I’m glad you asked: above that clock-section, in the sweet spot between the cups, there’s a slot just big enough to accommodate the insertion of one engagement ring. Upon such an insertion, the clock mechanism stops.

Those Japanese do sometimes inspire the darndest things, don’t they? Oh, and Triumph has even taken care to discourage any sort of pre-marital hanky-panky, in that below the clock part you have printed in big Japanese characters a message which according to the Niewsblad article reads “In search of a husband.” Imagine taking a girl home, getting to third base with her – and recall that the Japanese are very into baseball – and encountering that! Maybe at this point you’re suspecting that I made all of this up, but be my guest and click through to the article: even if you know no Dutch, you’ll find there, appropriately enough, a set of two illustrations showing what I mean, as displayed by a rather cute young Japanese model.

                          

Nieuwpoort is a seaside-resort town in Belgium, maybe ten miles away from the French border, across which lies also on the coast the slightly-more-famous Dunkerque (Dunkirk). We just enjoyed an unseasonably-warm Easter weekend in this corner of Europe, and on Sunday Gert Vanluchene, Didier Balencourt, and Pieter Jonckers (all out of Brussels) were taking advantage of the weather to grab their scuba-gear, head for the seaside, and indulge in their hobby of going diving in search of interesting sea-wrecks off of this very historical coastline. As things turned out, they didn’t have much luck when it came to finding something interesting underwater. It was only afterwards, as they were all relaxing under the springtime sun in their rubber-boat “drinking a pint,” that they hit a sort of jackpot. As Vanluchene recounts for the article:

Suddenly there appeared above our heads swarms of sea-gulls and we saw to the left and right of our boat silver flashes. Immediately afterwards two porpoises shot out of the water. That was the beginning of a spectacular exhibition. Evidently we had arrived right in the middle of lunch for some tens of dolphins. There were two-meter-long specimens, but also little ones. For definitely an hour they showed us their stuff all around our boat.

That passage is very heartening to read, but ultimately is of course but an anecdote. For the bigger picture about dolphins in such cold waters we could use some sort of scientific authority, and Lauwereyns duly segues to Wim Wauters of the Sea Life Center in Blankenberge, BE (for what it’s worth, a for-profit aquarium), who lets him know that dolphins are hardly unknown in the North Sea, it’s just that pollution over the last decades had tended to drive them away. That they are now back in greater numbers – along with seals too, by the way – is a hopeful endorsement of state efforts to clean up the North Sea, as well as adjustments fishing-boats have been required by law to make to avoid getting them caught up in their nets.

                          

Yes, the US first couple (and the rest of their 500-person entourage) fly into London’s Stansted airport (misspelled in the article) sometime tonight, to be then helicoptered promptly to their hotel in London proper. Poosen adds that up to six helicopters will be taking off from Stansted at roughly the same time, each heading to London by a slightly-different route – it’s a helicopter shell-game designed to befuddle any terrorist stationed just outside the airport with an anti-aircraft missile, you see.

Oh, and the “Beast” is already there to serve them. Sorry, this is not some giant, hulking Secret Service agent, maybe sporting steel teeth, but rather the President’s custom-designed Cadillac: seven meters long, armored, built to withstand rocket and chemical attack. It could come in handy – let’s not hope too handy – because by all accounts London is going to be an unadulterated circus on Thursday, trying to run that super-important G20 summit in the middle of a city full of protestors.

The final tidbit Poosen offers up that you may not have the chance to learn about elsewhere concerns the dinner at Nr. 10 Downing Street scheduled this evening for the Obamas, presided over by none other than the Naked Chef himself, Jamie Oliver. Don’t worry, Oliver has agreed to wear clothes this time in honor of the dignity of the occasion – if he is there at all! You see, his wife is about to give birth to their third child, and he has made clear that even the Obamas aren’t enough to keep him from being present for that. But there’s a problem: Oliver isn’t going to be allowed to have any mobile telephone at hand while he’s at Nr. 10 Downing Street – security, you know – so he’s been trying to figure out some other way to get word, if it comes, that he’s needed at the hospital. I guess either Gordon Brown or his residential staff will just have to take the call from a landline.

From the G20 summit, the Obamas’ trip continues on to Strasbourg on Friday (plus a brief excursion across the Rhine to Germany), Prague on Sunday (but sorry, Poosen is wrong here: the president is in Prague on Saturday and Sunday), and then off to Turkey to fulfill Obama’s promise of making an early visit to a Muslim country.

                          

Yes, that’s right: Hugh Hefner wants Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin to pose for Playboy. Somewhat bizarrely, this tidbit of news comes up in two Flemish newspapers: in the leading newspaper-of-record De Standaard and in Het Nieuwsblad – as well as in OK! magazine, the American celebrity-rag to which Hefner originally contributed his comments. These include (translated back from the Dutch) “I can’t describe it exactly, but a beautiful woman with glasses simply has something special.” The Flemish publications dutifully mention to their readers that Palin finished second in the 1984 Miss Alaska competition, but I think most of us already knew that, having been reminded most forcefully by the recent surfacing on YouTube of Palin’s swimsuit-competition promenade during that event.

Note: The text about this in both Flemish newspapers turns out to be identical. However, it might be intriguing to note that De Standaard puts it in its Beroemd en Bizar section (“Famous and Bizarre”), while Het Nieuwsblad files it under “Glam & Gossip” (in English).