These are Dutch comedians/musicians Mike Boddé (in black) and Thomas van Luyn. I caught the final fifteen minutes of their theatre show “Ajuinen en Look” on tv last Saturday. This amazing piece of piano art is the very last bit of that show. Enjoy!

My computer is running two models and while I wait for the results to roll out, I’ll grant myself a moment to write about the weekend.

On Saturday, my host, Steve, took me to the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, about two hours from Granville. Along for the ride was Steve’s son Matt, who knows an astonishing amount about military aircraft for someone who just turned five.

The museum hosts about 400 vehicles, ranging from the earliest World War I open-cockpit propeller planes through modern-day stealth fighters. The collection includes several aircraft that played a key role in history, such as the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki to end World War II. There are also a number of prototypes, including several X-planes.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress “Bockscar” that ended World War II by dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The Consolidated B-24D Liberator “Strawberry Bitch”. An American heavy bomber, the B-24 was produced in greater numbers than any other type of aircraft used in World War II.

Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk at the United States Air Force Museum. This American fighter was used extensively in World War II, by the Americans and their allies alike.

Lockheed F-117A Nighthawk at the United States Air Force Museum. This American ground attack aircraft from the end of the Cold War was the first plane initially designed around stealth technology.

Steve and his wife invited me to a concert by Scott Ainslie in Granville that night. Ainslie is a blues and folk musician, a musical historian and a great story-teller. I’ll admit that blues and folk are not high on my list of favourite musical genres, but that didn’t keep me from enjoying the concert. In fact, it wasn’t just a concert, and that’s what made it so much fun. Ainslie told as much stories as he played songs, and he spoke with a passion that made it impossible not to appreciate his tales.

I spent Sunday evening watching part of the first NFL semi-final and the entire second semi-final. Yes, that’s American football: a sport I never understood and never saw more than a few minutes of. (It’s easy to go without American football in the Netherlands, because there are only a handful of clubs and it’s hardly ever shown on tv.) It turns out that the rules are quite simple and once I knew what they were doing, I actually enjoyed watching the games.

The NFL regular season runs from September to early January, followed by a series of play-off games and the big finale, better known as the Superbowl. The Sunday games were effectively the semi-finals, and the winners will play in the Superbowl on February 3rd, the second-to-last night of my visit to the US.

A great fuss was created by the media over the cold weather in which the second semi-final was played. At -1 °F (-18 °C), it was the third coldest game ever in NFL history. However, the only people that were affected by the low temperatures were the FOX Sports reporters. Many of the players only had short sleeves and some didn’t even have gloves. Except for a few instances of cramps, they were doing just fine. The spectators were doing fine, too. I mean, do these women look like it was actually that cold?

Did you know that Brian May, guitarist of Queen, used to be, in a way, a colleague of mine? Or rather, that he still is one?

May was working on a PhD in astronomy at the Imperial College London in the 1970s, but quit when Queen rose to fame. He was studying zodiacal light, the faint glow that is visible above the horizon under favourable circumstances after twilight or before dawn. It is produced by sunlight reflecting off dust particles within the solar system. (May can undoubtedly tell you much more about it than I can.) As part of his thesis work, May performed observations on Tenerife, resulting in his co-authoring two scientific papers (one, two). Even more interesting, the first of these two was published in the very prestigious Nature journal.

As of last year, May is once again working on his thesis, hoping to finally earn his astronomy doctorate after a thirty-year break. It’d be cool if he succeeds!

Talk about coincidence… Just today I started playing The Secret of Monkey Island (the first game in the absolutely wonderful Monkey Island series) again. Right now I was listening to some music from my hard disk, and guess what tune came up? “Monkey Island Theme”! I didn’t even know I had that song. Or maybe I really didn’t, and the evil pirate LeChuck put it there.