Today is once again Belgian National Day! A day off work! Military parades in Brussels! General joy and jubilation!

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. (more…)

Here it is, 10 tips for hitting it big, passed along by the Belgian (Flemish) paper Het Nieuwsblad from a piece apparently originating from the Belgian job-listing site (bilingual) Jobat.

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!

Serendipity is once again at work here on this site, meaning that you get yet another piece from Belgium’s Het Nieuwsblad. It was the title that caught my eye this time: President of Guinea accuses opposition of bloodbath. That would be the incident from last Monday when soldiers from the presidential guard opened fire on people at the national stadium in the country’s capital, Conakry, who were demonstrating against President Moussa “Dadis” Camara’s intention to take part in the upcoming presidential election. Camara became president in the first place by simply seizing power from his base in the army last December after the previous dictator, Lansana Conté, had died.

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.

In a masterpiece of reporting-by-understatement (by a journalist who, unfortunately, is credited only as “loa”), the Flemish paper Het Nieuwsblad reported yesterday on that new law in Arizona, USA that you might have heard about that allows citizens to take their loaded firearms into café’s and restaurants where alcohol is served.

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.”

“Snoutbook”? “My Dish”? Exporting the social networking paradigm to the canine world was probably only just a matter of time, and you can still legitimately debate how such a service might best be named, but there is already a notable site of that kind in existence, and it is called honden.be (“honden” being Dutch for “dogs”). The Belgian daily Het Nieuwsblad has an article up now on-line in its “Lifestyle” section about the new project of one Jan van Vlimmeren, a Fleming, to set up that site to bring social networking functionalities like the “Wall” (to relieve oneself on?) and “pokes” (here “sniffs”?) to man’s best friends, as represented by their owners. Specifically, on honden.be you can already set up your dog’s profile, join groups, post a doggie-diary, and even hook up with Google Maps to locate the nearest veterinarian and canine hair-salon (although I suspect that that latter functionality does not extend beyond Belgium). Features that are soon to come include a new category of profiles for dog-breeders as well as checklists to compare your own dog’s personality with the character-traits that his/her particular breed suggests that he/she should have. What’s more, according to the Nieuwsblad article 220 dogs have already been signed up to the site!

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!

Het Nieuwsblad, out of Flanders, has this piece on-line now about how the United Nations has finally gotten around last week to setting up its long-promised investigative commission to look into the assassination of the Pakistani politician and international figure Benazir Bhutto. You might remember that that actually occurred at the very end of 2007 – so one-and-a-half years ago!

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.

Did I go to sleep and miss a couple of months? Is it already “silly season” – those depths of summer when real news is so scarce that radio time, newspaper pages, and weblog entries must be filled instead with the trivial and inane (if hopefully amusing)?

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.

Today, news from Koen Lauwereyns of the Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad: there are dolphins in the North Sea! His lede: “Sunken treasure-hunters get a free performance off the coast from Nieuwpoort.”

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.

Did you know that Barack Obama’s first visit to Europe as US President actually begins tonight? I didn’t know that, but that’s only one of the interesting facts you can pick up (if you read Dutch) from Frank Poosen’s preview of the president’s visit published today in the Flemish newspaper Het Nieuwsblad (The Obamas tear through Europe).

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. (more…)

Alas, it had to happen. You know how it goes, when an attractive American woman suddenly comes into prominence . . .

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).

Hey, at Guantanamo Bay they’ve been able to get useful information out of the detainees! So reports the Belgian Dutch-language newspaper Het Nieuwsblad: “GUANTANAMO BAY – Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have elicited useful information from detainees. Not by mistreating them, but simply by asking questions. So says former interrogator Paul Rester.”

The rest of the brief article has mostly to do with various other pronouncements from Rester. The very next paragraph is great: Rester complains that his profession has gained a bad reputation due to all the reports about the CIA mistreating detainees in various secret prisons. “His work is little appreciated by the public and that sticks in Rester’s craw.” (more…)

Remember that “genocide law” in Belgium (formally known in English as the “law of universal competence,” and which EuroSavant first commented upon a few weeks ago here)? The one that allows anyone, from anywhere, to take to court in Belgium anyone, from anywhere, whom they wish to accuse of committing violations of human rights and/or of the laws of war? It has by no means gone away; indeed, lately Belgian-American tensions have risen to new highs. (more…)