More photos are here.

Hayden loved everything about Mini-Europe - the Hayden-sized buildings, the things to climb, the buttons to push and the national anthems. Best of all, though must have been the earthquakes Hayden could cause by pushing a button at Mount Vesuvius:

The bluebells are in flower, so we went out to Hallerbos forest to see them. Bluebells grow best in ancient forests, where a dense summer canopy and thick leaf-litter prevents most other plants from surviving in the undergrowth. Hallerbos is one of the few surviving fragments of the primordial European forest, part of the mighty Silva Carbonaria that once making up the frontier of the Roman Empire, and even though most of the largest trees where felled during WWI, the mature forest is still one of the best places to see bluebells in flower.

More photos are here.

I hope you are thinking "what nonsense"; I expect you followed it up with "but who does it hurt?". The problem is that believing in any pseudoscientific nonsense is a faith-based enterprise, removing evidence and reason from the decision-making process. If someone sells "lost golf ball dowsers" and sells them to the gullible at $20 each, it doesn't do much direct harm. But when society embraces this garbage it can do a lot of harm indeed.

Moving on to James McCormick, he bought up large shipments of the $20 "lost golf ball dowsers", replaced the stickers and then sold them to the Iraqi government at $40,000 each as explosive detectors. The claims were so over the top (it is powered by the user's static electricity, it can detect explosives from the air or even 1km underground, you can reprogram it by putting it in a jar with any other substance to absorb the vapours), that it is obvious to any rational person that the thing was a shame. McCormick even said in an interview that "the theory behind dowsing and the theory behind how we actually detect explosives is very similar". 

Unfortunately, we aren't all rational people, and anyone who believes in dowsing for water is hardly in a position to rationally reject the concept of dowsing for explosives. The Iraqi government was so taken with these devices that they replaced physical inspections with dowsing - and people died as a consequence. When confronted with the scam the Iraqi General Directorate for Combating Explosives replied: "Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is detecting bombs". And that is exactly the problem. It does matter whether it is magic or science, because science works but magic/dowsing/crystals/prayer/etc do not. Before you laugh too hard at Iraq, more than 20 different countries have bought into this scam, including Belgian police using them for detecting drugs.

James McCormick deserves jail. The greater point, however, is that a society which embraces "harmless" faith-based rubbish is more susceptible to harmful faith-based rubbish. Belief in crystal healing doesn't hurt directly, but it can lead to use of alternative medicines that can kill. Praying to get better from a cold leads to praying to get better from HIV - and hence less diligent use of actual HIV meds. Believing in a God looking out for you makes you more susceptible to lottery scams and the like. And the worst, of course, is when the gullible fools taken in are in positions of power, so we all feel the consequences of their faith-based decision making.

And yet. The same old gang of reactionaries have came out to voice their hatred: the Catholic church, Muslim groups, evangelical Christians and right-wing conservatives. What makes someone so virulent that they will spend so much energy in order to ensure that other people don't gain equal rights? The massive anti-gay protests have even turned violent, and hate-crimes have been committed against LGBTQ people. Not hard to predict considering the violent language spouted by the leaders (Frigide Barjot: "Hollande wants blood, and he will get it"; Hervé Mariton: "This is an incitement to civil war"). Nasty regressive thugs, nothing more. 

Fortunately, the tide has turned against these regressives. It is only April, and this is already the best year in history for marriage equality - three more countries have approved same-sex marriage (Uruguay, New Zealand and France, plus four more Brazilian states) and another 100+ million people have been granted to right to have their love recognised by the state, regardless of sex or sexuality. The Christian and Muslim Churches are showing once again that preventing equality is far more important to them than any other topic, and political parties like the UMP will be tarred for decades by their embrace of open homophobia in an era where attitudes towards sexuality are inexorably turning progressive.

Canterbury canals

The gate to Canterbury cathedral

Why not try the best sandwich in Sandwich, as judged by the Earl of Sandwich?

The white cliffs of Dover

Egg hunting in Whitstable

So it is interesting that this free-marketeer is going to the United Nations to sue his own supporters. Ron Paul supporters have been running www.RonPaul.com to support Ron Paul's election. Now Paul wants direct control over the website, and like good freemarketeers his supporters want him to pay for it ($250K). Yes, like good libertarians, they are willing to damage their own long-term interests in order to make a quick buck, an entirely self-consistent (albeit, flawed) ideology. Ron Paul, by contrast, having campaigned against government oversight in general and the UN in particular, is hypocritical in appealing to regulatory bodies for a forced takeover of a private enterprise. Oh, he has a valid point in the website being associated with his name, but I guess government regulation is only okay when it helps him?

Meanwhile, in Antwerp, the mayor has decided that civil servants are not allowed to dress in a manner that identified them as openly gay. The example used was a rainbow shirt, but the concept was explained such that a civil servant cannot dress in a way that "makes clear that he or she adheres to this obedience". By all means, Mr Mayor, please give us the official homosexual dress code so that styles that are too obviously gay can be banned. Also, to achieve your desired neutrality, please ban all dress styles that are too openly heterosexual. 

To me, the greater act of vandalism was performed by the architect in designing a big ugly brick wall in an urban landscape and by the city planner who approved this monstrosity of a building. Every time I walk past I think that we should commission a mural on the wall, so while this isn't what I would have chosen I'm happy to see a bit more character than ugly brick.

The other thing that this building makes me consider is who should really own the rights to our urban landscape? Living inside our ugly building we have views over a park and a beautiful castle, yet our neighbours are dominanted by our eyesore. We would all like to live in a beautiful city, but there is little incentive to make our own building a feature as we only see those of our neighbours.