ASYLUM

* Real-time Video Recall

This is something I'd love to see developed: Some kind of specialised, political Google Video for use at TV stations. Remember when GV started out, and instead of being "like youtube, but less popular", it was where Google uploaded news reports matched to the subtitles (closed-captions) so that you could search by what was said?

It's one of the things that The Daily Show does so well — catching politician's lies by pulling out footage of them condemning something or denying having ever said or done a thing, and then pulling out footage of them saying or doing that exact thing.

Unfortunately, while TDS pwns the "student-age cable couch-potato" demographic, it doesn't get so much play elsewhere, and it's also never in time to refute the politician directly. This is not TDS' fault, it's an inevitable consequence of 1) having to track down the clips, and 2) showing late in the evening on cable.

Imagine if all that video was on speed-dial.

Imagine if, while the politician was still denying something, the contradicting evidence just popped right up and started playing.

Yeah. Imagine that.

* Amsterdam

Man. I blink and months pass. That, and having real difficulty finding time and motivation to post.

Anything to mention? Well, I took a trip to Amsterdam, in February. I started writing it up the day after I got back, and now it's May. Hm.

Amsterdam was interesting, but I don't think we picked the right time of year to visit; it was cold, and overcast, which meant I didn't get much photography done.

We stayed at the Lloyd Hotel and Cultural Embassy, in the Rietlandpark area. This is a really odd hotel, in a good way. At least, if you're like Scary and I. I suspect someone looking for a more traditional hotel experience might have been a bit put off.

The Lloyd Hotel is in a former borstal, which was taken over by Nazis during World War 2, lay empty for a long time, and eventually got renovated by design freaks. The basement is a museum of its history; the corridors still have a creepy institutional vibe going on, but half the building's been opened out into a combination of canteen, library and exhibition space, and the hotel rooms are each uniquely and strangely styled with a mishmash of concept/designer furniture and fittings, some of which we later saw in exhibits at design shops we checked out during our stay. If you see a photo of a weird chair posted on BoingBoing, chances are you'll find it there. Double points if it's made from recycled materials.

So, our room's main oddity was the bathroom, which rather than being a room, was a kind of dog-legged series of three orange "pods" that made what would've been a plain rectangular room into a sort of U-shaped 70s-era spacecraft, something by Chris Foss or Ron Cobb perhaps.

Reitlandpark is apparently somewhat like Amsterdam's equivalent of the London Docklands, a formerly marine/industrial area redeveloped into an upmarket residential one. But whereas the Docklands feels corporate and soulless on the whole, Reitlandpark feels a bit more homely, and the bars we went to for dinner was very warm and friendly. On the way out there from Centraal, you also pass the Muziekgebouw, an award-winning building reached via a bridge that looks kinda like a spinal column. It's that sort of place. The tram stop has giant tables. No, I mean, giant. I'll post them to Flickr at some point.

Daily hilights...

Friday: Arriving at the hotel was stressful/awkward because my bank's delicate orchid of a security system freaked out because I was overseas, and decided not to validate anything. Weirdly, cash withdrawls worked just fine at the bank across the road. If I was designing a financial security system, I'd be stricter with anonymous cash withdrawls than precisely-pinpointable transactions.

Anyway, once that was sorted out and some relaxing done, we sought out food in Reitlandpark. Cafe Zuid was where we ended up. The food was proteintastic and, for all its exotic meats (I had some kind of wild game hotpot. Mountain goat. Hare. Boar. Venison. Kangaroo. Yes, kangaroo. All in one dish) it wasn't particularly tasty. But the staff were lovely and helpful, the decor was retro and appealing, and we liked it. The sort of place with big, slow-moving ceiling fans all visibly driven by thick belts connected to the one motor. I think more of a place to hang out drinking coffee and either chatting or reading a book.

Saturday: After heading back into Centraal by tram (narrow, bendy, very sharp acceleration. You really need to sit, or hold on tight. But they're regular, fast, and absurdly cheap compared to London) we wandered semi-aimlessly, heading towards the Kattenkabinet. A tiny and bizarre cat museum featuring Musical Maneki Neko Bagatelle and my shoelaces being attacked (endearingly, rather than viciously, I should clarify) by one of the real live cats in residence.

We found the Englisher Tourist Zone. Bleh. I forget the real name. Leidsestraat maybe. But it's a street filled with lame multinational shops, and it intersects another street filled with lame english-tourist-bait food places. More on this later.

Nearby, we found a "Bean & Bagel", a chain of Starbucks-esque (except nice) cafes, what at home I'd call a coffee shop — but in Amsterdam, that means something else. They do a great BLT bagel though, if you're in the market for one. We came back here.

More wandering. Found the Tuschinski cinema, which is art-deco-tastic. Took pictures. Eventually found our way back to the hotel, after getting sidetracked, and wandering past what Scary insists on referring to as The Last Windmill In Amsterdam. She has no proof of this, you understand; but it did seem kinda lonely.

The evening saw a trip to the Sex Museum. This was... not what I was expecting. For some reason, I was expecting something more... mature, I guess. Something actually informative about changing attitudes over the ages or in different places, provocative artistic works, cultural impact, blah blah blah... something more Kinsey. Instead it was basically filled with cheap, kinda tawdry, mid-twen-cen english-seaside-town-style smut. Animatronic flashers! Oh, and pretty damn tame, in case you were wondering. And, finally, outright factually inaccurate.

After that, we sought out something more edifying: Indonesian food. In this, we were not disappointed. Very rich, though, couldn't finish it. But so tasty!

Sunday: There's a small cantina just next to the Lloyd Hotel that served us some great egg, cheese and bacon fritters. Most successful breakfast of the trip, I think. After that, we trammed it again and checked out the Rijksmuseum. Lots of Rembrandt, obviously (Van Gogh has his own museum next door). A lot of other good artwork too, but the artifacts didn't do much for me: mostly in the 'monstrous carbuncle' category, sort of 16th-century bling. Giant dolls-houses made of tortoise-shell, and cribs encrusted with jewels. Mmf. It was after this that we ended up back at Bean & Bagel. Banana and cinnamon, mmm.

Dinner was a doomed affair. We tried to go for seafood in a guidebook-recommended place, but the prices on the menu were about double what the book led us to expect so we looked elsewhere, and failed. Lots of places were closed surprisingly early — I guess we're used to a more 24-hour lifestyle — and after lots and lots of hungry walking, we ended up back at the tourist trap, and ate the worst meal of the trip.

We should've been warned by the Michael Jackson playing on the stereo, but we were too hungry to notice at first. The drinks should've been our second warning — the coffee was obviously instant, and the 'cocktail' Scary ordered resembled an alcopop. Having sat down and rested a bit, we noticed those, and if we'd had a backup plan we'd have left right then, but still... you live and learn.

Monday: A mediocre food start, we had pancakes in town, but they were very greasy and the place seemed again to be quite tourist-oriented. A specific kind of tourist, I should point out, who might perhaps wear a soccer shirt or rugby jersey. I think you'd get a better Dutch pancake experience at the My Old Dutch Pancake House in Holborn.

We checked out the Waterlooplein market, which was a lot like being in Camden, with a touch of Greenwich thrown in. Also bitterly cold. We did check out some groovy design stores, though. Frozen Fountain, and Droog. Google, or perhaps BoingBoing archives, or Adaptive Reuse blog, will show you the sort of thing, I suspect. A couple of tiny galleries, too. Somewhere on Runstraat we escaped from a high-pressure street-washing machine thingy into a small cafe where we had espresso cake and big mugs of hot drink.

Dinner was early, having learned our lesson: a place called, I kid you not, Kanis in Meiland. This was great: Another good find local to Reitlandpark, the food was just what I'd been looking for, the drink was excellent, the staff helpful and very friendly. Seared tuna steak with soy sauce, wasabi, rice — starter was seafood broth, ostensibly for Scary, but it was Looking At Her, so we swapped — so she had rib-eye steak and a mixture of tasty home-baked breads with dipping sauces/spreads. Also, music feat. Bowie. There was also a brief Bohemian Rhapsody, to which the bull-dyke playing pool with her sugar-mommy sang along beautifully. This Place Is Recommended.

Tuesday: Breakfast at the hotel, servicable. And then home. All fairly uneventful, really. Except my spectacles case apparently confused the hell out of airport security. Go figure. Being Dutch, they just ran it through a couple of times until the were satisfied, and that was it, really — no Alerts or Secret Lists or Men in Dark Glasses required.

And I think that mostly sums up our trip.

Miscellaneous observations that didn't fit in anywhere else:

• Lots of houseboats. Much wider canals = much larger, more practical houseboats.

• They seem to like Air in the Netherlands. I heard Air tracks a lot.

• Everyone knows about the Red Light District, but it was kinda weird passing scantily-clad women in windows elsewhere, on otherwise staid, "respectable" streets, just a few doors down from the offices of well-known multinationals.

• There's some really odd stuff to see in passing. Greenspaces with plastic tree-stumps dotted across them. A naval museum in a building like a giant ark.

• Amsterdam's economy seems to support a lot of really "niche" shops. If you want to visit a shop selling only small fluffy animals, or one that sells dinner plates and alchemical bottles, you can do that.

• Outside of Touristtrappenstraat, everyone seems really polite and helpful.

• Even more so as you get further out (eg Rietlandpark)

• Navigation is confusing if you're used to grids, as Amsterdam's radial. Polar coordinate fun! In addition, stuff like road junctions are pretty complex with lots of different lanes (cars, bikes, trams) and it's not always obvious which direction you need to be checking to make sure you're not going to be mown down.

• On the other hand, it's pretty obvious where trams go an inside, many of them have quite a nifty part-digital map thing which shows the next 3 or 4 stops' names as they approach.

• However, trams have confusing quantities of differently colour-coded buttons. One of them, presumably, is the stop-request button.