Henry and Kristl spied out Fort Apache, The Bronx(1981)

“I liked this movie!.” Kristl said while she leaned back into the couch as the credits rolled. She laid her black combat boots on the raised woodwork that Henry recently had made in front of the screen to enhance the mood of them being in a regular movie theater.It was part of Henry’s ongoing project to turn their garage-turned-cinema into a movie theater for real. That is why the walls had people like Katherine Hepburn, James Coburn and  Humphrey Bogart staring into the room from old movie posters that adorned the walls. Kristl had remarked something about being subjected to the scrutiny of dead people.
Behind them were lines of those folding movie chairs, which were non functional, as that had made them cheap, but still gave the feel that at any one time the room could be filled with a throng of people carrying big bags of popcorn and soda pops.

 “It was an engaging movie. I mean I sort of could connect with Paul Newman. And it gave me a feeling that what you saw was real. Not embellished or made to look heroic or just distorted for the sake of getting a message across.”

 “Hmm.”  Henry said.

 “Are you going to say…. that you did not like it?” Kristl said.

 “I feel pretty depressed.” Henry said.

 “Well, it seems to have been a depressing place. The south Bronx.”

 “There isn’t  really anything heroic. Not even the main lead is. I mean.. where does this all go? I feel a bit like when we watched The Road. Utter bleakness.Grey on grey.. and nothing is going to get better.”

 “Well, there is this human story of Paul Newman. Who as a veteran cop, still remains a cop, even after all what happened.”

 “Yeah.. but it felt like: you are no good for anything else, so what else are you going to do but be what you already are: a loser cop stuck in a dead end job, with an attitude and mostly shady colleagues for friends. And most of them are no good,  being racist, scumbags, lazy shifts and so on. At some point that new commissioner remarks how many of them are not doing their jobs. It is a dead end place. It is where the dirt is gathering because it can’t slide any deeper.”

 “The new commissioner. That was Ed Asner. I think that it was around that time he played Lou Grant. It was nice to see him act.”

 “Never heard of him.”

 “It was before your time.”

 “It definitely was. That's a movie from 1981.”

 “I was a teen then.”

 “No less. And did you already have those white spikes for hair?”

 “Not exact, they were blue or pink at the time.”

 “Geesh. You did not change much overtime.. except for getting older...” Henry wisely avoided in saying: more portly..

 “Actually I did. I got older and I changed back to what I was.”

 “I see.  A trip to nostalgia.”

 “Perhaps.”

 “Most of what you see in the movie I did see before. I think they call that a cliche. The good cop - bad cop thing. The new commissioner that wants to clean up the precinct. The bad cops killing people. The cocky bad guy.” 

 “Perhaps that is true, but maybe it is because much of those ideas became cliche in hindsight?”

 “Maybe..”

  “It does seems to  focus on the cops..if there are any other people those are either criminals or dope-heads. When you say that the police station is called Fort Apache because it is like a fort in the wilderness that protects the ‘good’ citizen, it would be nice if you got an idea of who they are protecting..”

 “I think I would rather see an action movie in which the good guys win and the bad guys lose.” Henry said, “Much more uplifting.”

 “But in a way it is uplifting. I mean the end is that the bad cop is arrested. The good cop stays on. There is even a sort of understanding between the commissioner and the main guy. And finally his colleague says he will stick with the good cop when he ‘rats’ on the bad cop.”

 “Hm.. I still feel depressed. I feel like I am in a sinking ship and the only thing I can do is to bail out the water with a paper cup. You could say: cool.., a paper cup is better than nothing, but I think it is not much better. It does not make you feel very happy.”

 “Is that the purpose of a movie? Make you feel happy?”

 “You don’t mean to say it should make you feel unhappy?!”

 “uhm.. I mean it can be meant to make you think or give you insight into the life of someone else. A glimpse of their life.”

 “A dim glimpse.”

 Kristl nodded.

 “I go for a beer.” Henry said.



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082402/

Art by Second Life: kayly iali

It is not my intention to write about anyone who displays their art in Second Life. Not that such would be a good thing, but given the amount of art that is created(and use the word art  for covering a wide range of artistry) such would be a full time task. It would be fun to be able to do that and get paid for it, but at the moment I do not receive any monetary incentive  for what I write and who knows.. there might be reasons for it.
Anyway let's get back to what I do like the write about.. Which is simply driven by selfish interests. I have a interest in combining pictures with text to give voice to my stories so anything that sort of helps me with that interests me more. Although.. there sometimes things that are just beautiful.
Now it happens to be that I was looking at some art(istry)  displayed at a gallery and one set of art captured my eye, which is that of  Kayly Iali (A second life name).  She makes her art and displays it in  Second Life, using SL as a way to promote her art.
I took the audacity to copy her profile description:
I am a RL artist and exhibit in SL galleries. I work in oils, watercolor and pastels...using calligraphic strokes to bring about imagery[]
If you are interested in any of my rl paintings, please feel free to IM me. Or check out my website at marleneleeart.com. I'm also on facebook. Thanks.

To be honest I probably would not have shown her art because I am more aimed at showing art that has a kind of story in it, but I liked her studios that her art was displayed in. I know a very arbitrary reason to base your decisions upon. Probably you would say.. you need to show art that is great to be promoted, but is that not a personal taste? And if something is personal, would not any personal reason be enough?
In fact.. you should yourself see if you like her art. More can be found here: marleneleeart.com.

 I think that if you want to go and have a look.. then it would be her portraits that you should at least have a look at. Somehow captures human faces is quite a skill..

Second Life & OS Grid: Lord it over the prims.

All hail to the torus

Well,

That title requires some explanation. Especially for people who are not familiar with Second Life or the OS Grid. Second Life is, as you might have heard, a virtual world. OS Grid is another one. Both OS Grid and Second Life are based on outwardly similar technology. There are more virtual worlds that are based on this same technology. Here you can find more info about it http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page. (A note aside: do not try to find these worlds with the catchphrase virtual worlds.. you will get lost in the woods as you stumble over all kinds of game sites, sex places and what not. While I do not want to say anything for or against these, it is more fitting to refer to the worlds that are similar: the key word that let’s you enter the proper multiverse seems to be: open sim).
One aspect of this sameness is that primary objects can be manipulated in a similar fashion. In fact you can copy over the settings of one world to the other. A primary object, if you have not heard of it, is a basic object that comes in a basic shape that can be altered so to make it look different. Basic shapes are for instance: the cube, the sphere and the torus. The latter which is the subject of this post(or actually.. should that not be.. the object?).
Now all this technobabble aside this post is actually just to show that you can create fun things with the basic shapes available in virtual worlds. You do not need to be a highly skilled person to do that. You just make an object appear, add a touch of fantasy and start changing them parameters. Like, that prim is not going to bite you.
(A side note: i sometimes wonder if it is not much easier to lord it over them prims instead of trying to dominate other people.. which is something some people seem to like to do. Your control of them is total. Prims don’t have a mind of their own and you can do to them things you would want to have done to yourself and get away with it!)
Now I wanted to show some exampled of how the torus can be altered to create interesting new forms that can be used to create great new effects.

Oh, show it already!

The vehicle in this picture I made for a Burn 2 two event some years ago. It is almost completely made using torii. The vehicle was called Poetry in motion and that is what it did. It read out loud random poems and showed the text overhead as text on a picture. Oh and yes.. the one who actually built it was Taubie.. who you see on the picture above. She is  my other main avatar. Actually emotionally she would be THE main avatar.

Now some days ago I was finding some new shape to use and I found a nice one, which I so like that I showed it to Veleda Lorakeet. It is nice to be like a little kid sometimes. She like the shape to, copied it and gave it her won twist. And then she told Laughie who in turn changed it into something else.

Now this is the fun thing about inspiration.

Let me show

Shape I made using two tori, cut in half and one turned 180 degrees.

I use it as a display case.

Veleda Lorakeets changes

Result 1: layered tori in dept changed each one changed by Veleda with glow added to some.

Result 2: two tori changed by Veleda and some shine added.

Version made by Laughie

This is a version made by Laughie. Using the same shape but in full and three prims added to make a face. I thought it looked like a bear or dog, Laughie tought it looked more like a pig. It would make a nice sign or marker. Or a wall painting like this:

Tori butterflies.

What I liked about this is that people inspire and get inspired. It might not be superior art.. but it is fun and perhaps might lead to more.

Cheers!

Two Nekos do Urupe 8: Brussels

Chocolate and Lace

Sooooooo we are probably reaching the end of this Nekos do Urupe series as I ran out of European Cities to depict. There are some places that have the name of a city, but do not on any way represent the city or parts of it. However.. we might show them to, just because some people love their city even though it does not look like that city.

(Krisp says there is a place called Dublin that we went to but did not quite cover so we might go and look that place up).

Anyway, lets have  a look at Brussels that has been declared to be the unofficial capital of Urupe because it is the formal seat of the European Union. I must say we have a rather vague feel about Brussels. So what we did is find what we could find on youtube. And we ran into this guy.. Rick Steves. We took the liberty to offer a few  links to some his movies(see beluw).

We liked this one cause she looks cool, even though we did not have a clue what she was saying cause she speaks French and we do not understand French. But you know, it is a great way to learn some, cause that is the language they speak in Brussels. You see, Brussels is the capital of Belgium too and Belgium has a French speaking population, called Walloons and a Dutch speaking population, called Flemish. And there is even a small group that speak German. Brussels is on the border between the two parts, but most of it's citizens speak French.

We recall once visiting Brussels and ordering some chocolate with a Leonidas store because chocolate is a thing that Belgium is famous for. And Leonidas is a famous Belgian chocolate store. So we were Dutch and did not speak a word of French, but we indicated what we wanted with pointing and that has helped in many countries of which we did not speak the language. But the Walloons and Flemish do not like each other very much, so speaking Dutch - which is similar to Flemish - no doubt acts on them Walloons like a red cloth does on an enraged bull.. So they pretended no to understand us. But well, my dad, who was there, just shrugged his shoulders and said in Dutch, "well then we buy something in the other store." And he put his wallet back in his pocket. And for some reason they understood that and got us the things we wanted.. See...money talks!

At the top of this post you see us, to the left was a store that sold chocolate and to the right is another product that seems to connected to Belgium or Brussels, which is lace.  So Krisp is trying to make some and I am trying to get eat something.

Next to lace and chocolate Mussels seems to be a dish that is associated with Brussels, which is interesting as Mussels come from the sea and Brussels is smack-bang in the middle of Belgium, nowhere near the sea.

Atomium

This is the Atomium, built for the  Expo'58 and, I am reading this from the wiki, represents the iron atom very large. It seems that it has not been used much in movies and such, which might be cause by the fact that someone has claimed intellectual property rights on it  till 2075 and any depictions of it, although not for private individuals depicting it for private non commercial reasons(which would cause a revolution, we think.). One wonders how the world would be like, when everyone was copyrighting their house, their car, their whatever. Oh, how about my cows? Or my windmill? A barren world will unfold. The upshot is no doubt that nobody wants to show it. Hence you get to see the Eiffel-tower,Trafalgar square and what not.. but not the Atomium.

Royal Greenhouses of Laeken

Last picture^^ is a picture of a the  inside of the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken. It was not a big representation of the real thing, but with the proper light it actually looks a bit magic. The real life Greenhouses can only be visited during April and May. The Second Life version is never closed.

Rick Steves

Book Review: Night Watch

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I have stopped reading Night Watch around page two hundred and will return the books to the library. The writing started to annoy me so much that it was no use continuing.

Background
Night watch is not a surprising read. I say that because some people seem to say that the idea is novel. The world painted in this book is similar to Vampire the Masquerade and even more to it's successor, the World of Darkness. Both of these world settings and their spin of books pre-date this book by half a decade.
The idea is that woven in with the 'normal world' there is a hidden world of non normal humans or supernatural beings that form a community consisting of diverse forces that sometimes oppose but sometimes help each other. In this world there are the forces of light and the forces of dark..but we already are introduced very early in the book to the idea that there might be independent and rogue forces. The established forces might oppose each other, but for the sake of 'balance' they have come to some kind of truce and agree to make sure that us normal beings are not aware of them: them being the usual staple of vampires, demons, witches, shapechangers and wizards.. nothing that I have not seen or read about before.
So the background and settings are not unusual and what transpires is hardly novel.

The main character
I have a problem with the detached writing. After fifty pages into the book I hardly knew anything about the main character, Anton, besides some superficial details. The writer feeds us a few background details and we are continuously told that he is more like this or that, but it is not shown. Anton's personality is so flat that when first part of the book was finished I did not care one way or another for him. Indeed I cared more for the other beings like, Olga, his companion, the boy Jegor, the vampire and the woman who was inflicted with a dark dangerous spell.
They seemed to have more personality and depth than Anton.

The writing
The writing is actually a big stumbling block. The writer skips one way and another. He goes from one scene to the next, from one setting to the other and so on. He also like to use the favorite bad trick of not telling the reader about something and then suddenly pull out the rabbit: bet you did not know that one.
His skipping and hopping about makes the story unfocused and rushed while at the same time nothing seems to really happen. We drive a lot to and fro, but the story does not really develop during this driving. The writing is on par. He introduces one character after the other, briefly describes them and skips to the next.

Inconsistent story telling
The writer introduces ideas but does not follow through or explain. For instance at one point someone drives the main character to a scene in his private car.. acting like a kind of taxi. Anton remarks that the guy is rich and even offers Anton a job as a system administrator when he finds out he is a programmer(??), but there is no explanation why someone like that would drive around through the night working on the side as a cabdriver.
So much is unexplained. For instance where does Anton get his money from? And how does he stay awake since he has a additional job as 'watchman' next to his other job?

Cliffhangers
There are however some positive developments. One is that we see Anton develop. We get to know more about his companion Olga, a woman forced into the body of an owl. We discover the duality of light and dark. We see how Jegor reacts when he sees how both sides are using him. And the vampire that is almost killed survives..So she might come back and exact revenge(I hope she does.)
So I am giving it a try and see what the next chapter will show and report back. Otherwise I lend another book.

Update

No explanations
I stopped somewhere in part two. The beginning of part two is ominous bad : his name was maxim. And then we get several lines explaining that the name was not unusual but not usual either. Not that this piece of information is relevant to the plot.
This illustrates how unbalanced the writing is. At some moments we get long drawn out lines and next the writer rushes over things without at least given an idea of how something essential works. For one: at some point the hero of the story is sitting in a restaurant with someone else and he spots a dark magic user. How does he know? Does he know the magic user? Can he sense dark magic and discern if from good magic? Which is strange as before it is said somewhere that darkness and light seem more to be motives and methods than basically different in essence. But no explanation or even a hint at how this all works.
Another example is when he investigates the past of some of his colleagues he finds out that his direct superior was around at the time when the treaty between dark and light was made hundreds of years ago. He then goes to say that it was strange that his superior was of such a low rank considering anyone else who was there (and still alive) was now a high ranking watchman. How does he know that? Do you know if all the high ranking managers of a big company have something in common like being at a place at the same time in a distant past? Did his investigation into the alibi of a low ranking watchman give him access to the information about high ranking ones? But if so, why did he only get that information and not about his lower placed superior? For he says he knew about all the high ranking members but not about his superior. I could invent some reason he knows, but the writer does not bother to explain.
On the other the writer has a hard time to differ between himself and his ‘hero’. His hero knows things he can not know unless explained and when it is essential to the plot it requires explaining.

Obsessions
Another annoying thing is that the writer is obsessed with young women, alcohol and ranking. Almost all the women in the story are 'young women'. The vampire, Olga, Swetlana, the two useless (narrator's words, not mine) women who act as programmers(???). There is one exception: a woman called Polina who is described as looking older..which might as well mean that she looks to be in her late twenties or early thirties, but the writer does not explain. He in fact does not even tell us what ‘younger women’ means. It might well be they are all in their late teens or in their late twenties or maybe even in their late thirties..It all depends on what viewpoint you take. But again nothing gets explained.
Alcohol is very present.If not thinking about or drinking it, they are talking about it and if not talking about it they are using it as a weapon against vampires. Yup.. alcohol has replaced holy water in this russian novel. How ironic.
And then ranking.. Oh my god.. everyone is ranked.. his superior is a low ranking director, there are high ranking people above him and strata of lower ranking beneath him, Anton is of this rank, his fellows of that rank, and those people over there are of that rank. And poor Anton thinks he will never get beyond rank four(on what scale) but he happens to have done rank two magic as a rank three magic user (or is he rank one) which seems to be pretty impressive but I am lost. The whole world is layered in ranks of which the writer.. eh lead is specifically aware of. We have no clue how he knows all that. Has he some kind of book? Do they have, like in roleplay games, have levels that hover over their heads like a tag? Oh hey, that is a level 21 sorcerer and that is a Level 8 priest. He is so focused on ranking that his ego gets a real boost that when his superior tells him that he had done something that was believed to be beyond his power.
But nothing was so painful to read when told about the useless(the lead’s words..not mine) two young women programmers who desperately wanted to be part of the watch but had no power or skill at all.
I foamed at the mouth. My experience is that if people have a drive you can have them do something useful and if you confess someone who has a drive to be useless.. you should look in a mirror.

Characters(again)
The biggest problem is that after two hundred pages he never seems to bother us with anything that might make a person into a person. We still know next to nothing about Anton. He must have a social life, he can not live in a void. What about his parents? What about any other family, friends, colleagues, people he knows from school. His neighbors? What about his favorite soccer club(if any?)
Still there is no explanation about how he combines his daytime job with his watch time exploits. It does not have to be rubbed in, but at some point a brief mentioning of him having a lack of sleep might give an idea. But the writer does not bother with that.
And then it gets worse. At some point it becomes clear he is obsessed with a girl he hardly knows and never seems to get to know better. This girl is Olga, the woman from the first part of the book who was punished to live in the body of an owl and could redeem herself by helping Anton. In part two she has redeemed herself partly, we are told(but how she did that we are not told. Or was she redeemed as part of what happened in part one? But she hardly did anything but tagging along with Anton?), so she is now human and not an owl and yet again we get no more information, where something more might at least gives us an idea of the person she is (She is the potential love interest!)
And then Anton’s obsession becomes repulsive. Illustrative is this part: he has to stand close to Olga as part of a magic spell and he goes something like: it is strange to be close to a woman who has felt the touch of another man. Uh.. what? (Ironic: they swap bodies, not that Anton spots the irony: how strange it must feel to be in the body of a woman that has been touched by another man!)
The whole time we see Anton painting Olga in a sexual context. We never seem him joke or have a nice conversation. He never sees her as another person. We see him ponder what has been going on when Olga and his boss retreat into a room with two glasses and a flask of wine. Well, she was probably getting touched by him. Oh my god.. this centuries old woman is not a virgin! Cut down some trees, make a bridge and get over it. He is obsessed with her having sex but we never see a moment that might at least explain that there is some kind of affection developing between them.. you know that moment when you and your love laugh at the same thing and you recognize you both do?
Now you might say: this is great storytelling.. and in other cases it might be if Anton was meant to be a distorted personality but I suspect that this is meant as part of a love story that will slowly unfold. It is meant to be romantic not pathetic.

Unbalanced writing(again)
Now all of that would probably be tolerable. I have been entertained by bad stories before(Ready Player One springs to mind) but the pacing is still off balance. Long parts of Anton going from a to b, while nothing in particular happens and we get monologues on various subjects, then very brief moments of sudden action that usually result in some kind of anti-climax. The lack of exposition where it is needed and too much of it where it is irrelevant.
For instance: Anton is an analyst, so we are told, but it is never described. Instead we are told that he analyses something and then are given a conclusion. Hop scotch. There is no in between process and I suspect the writer has no knowledge of the subject or the whole thing does not really interest him. Why then make Anton an analyst?
Anton is also a small time administrator. We are told how he installs software he does not care about on people's desktops. Specialist administrators and programmers do not install software on end user desktops for the simple reason that they are too expensive to do such work. It sometimes happens that a well paid administrator programmer cares for something very much and thus does work he or she is not supposed to do. But we are told he does not care for it, so he does not belong to that category. Or perhaps Anton works for a organization that has highly trained and capable staff doing simple jobs they do not care about? We do not get an explanation.. again.

The final scene
The final nail to the coffin was the restaurant scene. So Anton is now in the body of Olga and accompanied by Swetlana, who has to be with him so he has an alibi at all times. This because they think the dark ones want to frame Anton for the string of strange murders. So in this restaurant is dark magic user(he is mentioned above). This magic user then goes off to the toilet gets killed and Anton is just in time to be alone with the corpus delicti and without Swetlana to give him an alibi. How utterly convenient. Not only so because in a previous instance we are told that the Others are very rare. Very few people become Others. So what a coincidence that the murderer, Anton and the victim are on the same spot but without Swetlana and without Anton bumping into the murderer? While I grant any writer the right not to explain a thing, i think that at least they ought to make a story plausible. But given the track record of the writer there will be no doubt in my mind that this will not be explained.

Summary
Night Watch is probably meant to appeal to a certain audience that wants to cast themselves in the boots of the main lead Anton. Hence there is a lack of personality and background. The less we know him, the more we can be like him.
The story lacks plausibility. Things happen because they have to and the writer does not seem to care much for rhyme or reason and thus, if need be, a deus et-machina is used to resolve the issue.
I grant that the background interests me and there are ideas in this story that might have been interesting but without any developed personalities and a well developed story I am left to wonder what the appeal of this book is. For me it has non.



View all my reviews

C'est une.... eh.

Welcome to the short version of my wordpress post.
And be happy because it is shorter and therefore more to the point.
Remember Magritte?
He made the above picture and it was referred to as: the treachery of pictures.
What seems to have been his aim is to point out that the picture of a pipe is not a pipe. It does not have the real life properties of a real life pipe.
At some point he describes something along these lines: see this pipe.. you can not stuff it, light it and smoke it..
But the question is this: he did.. he just described something that was not real.. he stuffed, lit and smoked a pipe.
In fact we do that a lot of times these days. I bet you might go and see a movie.. a movie like the nobbit: the desolation of smaug. You see a hobbit, you see elves and you see dwarves.. all make believe in one way.. Yet anything you can imagine you can have them do...

But that is not the point of my post. It is just a bit of irony.
My post was more about this,

My attempt is to show you something without showing it. Like the pipe is a picture.. but it is a common idea. Something we accept when we are confonted by a pipe.. a real one of one that is only a picture.

But even more... the one picture leads to the next.. and without the image.. i can have you see the pipe even when it is not there.

It that what intrigues me. Here is the flow chart.

In a very drilled down version I could show you this and you will still see a think of a pipe.

Is not that fascinating?.. no?.. oh well.

http://meritcoba.com/2013/11/28/ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe-or-what-is-not-there-or-is-in-hindsight/

Two Nekos do Urupe: Amsterdam

Hi,

Welcome to my two nekos do Urupe: Amsterdam.
I have a blog on wordpress but I am getting a bit annoyed with it because I can not display wide shots unless I pay another 75 dollars. Yes! I say another 75 for I already paid like 90 dollars for a premium account, but this did not include a theme that allows for wide shots. +
Blogger however does, without extra money.
I will therefore add blogger to show my wide shots.. Over time I hope to add more of my post I made on Wordpress.

Now Amsterdam.. that is that city I was born.. and we(= my avatars) went into SL when we found it existed. And exist it does.. I mean not in a small way, but actually there is a rather big place in Second Life that looks in a certain way as Real Life Amsterdam does. Although without the myriads of tourists plodding around and without, for some reason, the bars and the coffee shops pandering soft drugs. Yeah.. that is Amsterdam for you, yet it is not. There are coffee-shops there but it is not like every inhabitant is intoxicated.
I recall my friends and me had this moment in which we smoked pot and stuff like that. It started one day with someone bringing us a cake made with grass and a year or so later it stopped. Just like that.
Smoking lingered long after that. I mean one of those friends, he smoked until his late thirties, until one of his lungs collapsed and his doctor said: if keep this going...
If you were to say that one drugs lead to another.. it would be hard to proof. For nobody of the eight people involved ever touched any kind of drugs after that one year. It was this wild moment and it was over a year later. In fact.. studying at the university and doing soft drugs is not a good mix. I suspect most of us were to serious for that.

Now the picture above shows the dam. That would be the central square of Amsterdam in a way. I guess most inhabitants my beg to differ. I mean the Leidseplein is more of  a center for people who want to go out and have a drink. And the museumplein would be more of a culture place. And yet the munt, not really a square, would be more of a place to watch a movies. The dam however holds the most dominating landmarks that illustrate the dutch mindset: a church, a big shopping mall, monument for world war II, a palace which isn't actually a palace but rather a symbolic palace and also the gathering place for the ruling elite untill it became a democracy. And not far off: the stock exchange. For the three pillars of the dutch are: commerce, religion and a vague authority.

This is a picture that more or less show the damrak that is a broad street running from the central station(way  to the rear of the picture) towards the dam.(behind us in the picture). The building with the flag on it (the dutch flag: red-white-blue) is the former stock exchange. I am not sure what it is for used for now. You can have coffee in front of it as it has a kind of bar. It also seems to have some kind of stock exchange function, but what it is I do not know.
In the front of the picture are the typical trams.. the one you see is somewhat old, as nowadays they have a yellow basic look and somewhat more modern.

Ok I am sorry but I like the versions of the above place. Those show the typical dutch canals, called grachten. I think it's a nice example of how a gracht might look like in Amsterdam. However the grachten seldom ended in a way like this in the way you see here. Usually they either continue on into another gracht. A building that is located at the end of a gracht I have seldom seen.

Ok... not the greatest shot to end.. but still.. I captures Amsterdam. Perhaps the street  is to wide.:P