There are places in the world where no one comes. Ever.

I'm not thinking of remote areas of Antarctica or unclimbed summits in the Cordilleras de los Andes. Nor do I believe there are bits of jungle in deep, dark Ruanda that will never be seen by human eyes.

No, I'm thinking of the armpits of the world.

Most everyone passes them almost daily, those desolate wedges of land, nestled in the Y of a forking freeway or railroad. I suspect that the majority of passers-by doesn't spare them a look or thought. But to me these remotes, generally unused, almost unreachable wedges carry a deep, melancholy romanticism.

There is a confused tangle of freeway and railroad junctions just south of Amsterdam. That logistical labyrinth sports some of the most beautiful armpits. One of them is used by the City for storing dozens of huge empty wooden cable reels. They've even gone to the trouble of erecting a fence, as if anyone would ever want to come there, and if they did, be interested in a pathetic collection of sun-bleached, warped reels.

Another armpit has only a field of yellow dying grass. Every so often, a sad old horse, reminiscent of Eeyore, grazes there listlessly.

But most armpits are barren and empty; sad, unattractive places where no sensible person wants to come. Too noisy and polluted for picknicks; too remote for vandalism; too small for storage or development. As if the armpits themselves recognize their anatomical metaphor, the grass there is often longer and kinkier there than anywhere else.

But for some reason, these sad places of the world exert a wholly romantic pull on me. I think I'll take a tour next year of the world's armpits.

I'll have to remember to pack my ladyshave.

Came home today to five consecutive moments of utter joy and excitement.

Moment of joy and excitement #1:
There was an envelope in my mailbox from Leading Edge Magazine, and that could, and did, mean only one thing: my contributor copy was here, containing my short story Diamond Sharks. And indeed, when I opened the envelope, the beautiful sea-blue cover appeared of issue 55.

Mojae #2:
Turning to the table of contents, I found that Diamond Sharks was the second story in the issue, and they'd come up with a lovely little one-sentence blurb for it.

Mojae #3:
Turning immediately to the story itself (of course), I discovered not one, not two, not three, but four gorgeous and perfect illustrations depicting key scenes in the story. Illustrator Michael Madder did an incredible job of capturing the atmosphere and essence of Oceana, the planet where the story takes place.

Mojae #4:
Staring at the illustrations, I realized I'd seen his style before, recently. Very recently. And closing the magazine, I discovered the best of the illustrations: a full-color picture of my main character, after his transformation, swimming the deep waters of Oceana with a wistful look on his face. (This also explained why the cover had this beautiful sea-blue color, obviously.)

Mojae #5:
And it took me an embarassingly long time to realize that this picture on the front of the magazine could easier be described as 'the cover illustration', which in turn meant that Diamond Sharks is the cover story!

A moment of private cheer and happiness (and, admittedly a bit of gloating).

Not only is my wife bright, blonde, and beautiful, as of tonight she is also a certified masseuse. She passed her final exam earlier this evening. I'm almost as happy as she is herself. And proud, very proud.

Back to our champagne now...

All foreign shows on Dutch TV are subtitled instead of dubbed (unlike in France or Germany, where, for instance, 'the actress who always does the voice of Courteney Cox' is a celebrity in her own right). Often, subtitlers get it wrong. Sometimes, they get it wrong in a funny way. Whenever I catch them at it, I'll try to remember to post here.

Yesterday morning, on one of his many cooking shows, Jamie Oliver was traipsing through a field to pick some nettles for his quiche. Squatting near a cluster of the yummy but stingy plants, he announced:

Now I'll just go ahead and pick it like a pansy...

And the subtitler, in a leap of creative interpretation, wrote:

Now I'll pick it very carefully...

Let's not forget that writing things continue to happen. For instance, my fellow Codexian Cat Rambo, in her incarnation as editor of Fantasy Magazine, has (very nicely) rejected "What happened while Don was watching the game".

This was close but not quite right for us. Send something else?

The answer, obviously, is Yes. Now all I need to do is write a new fantasy story...

One of the joys of working as a trainer at Capgemini Academy is the frequency with which I'm expected to be on the receiving end of their courses. Just tonight I completed their 'Vision and Didactic skills' course, one of their requirements for Certified Trainer status and a rich source of theoretical knowledge (Behaviorism, Kolb, Leary) and practical applications ready-made for use in my own courses. I've been a trainer (on and off) for 13 years now, but this is the first time I've felt like I have the beginning of a firm grounding in didactic theory.

One of the lessons learned at the course, though, came from an unexpected source.

In one of the activities in the course, each of the participants was asked to give a brief presentation on a subject of one's choosing. Since we were expected to be creative and take risks, I decided to try an improv theatre game with my group. This game simply consists of having the group tell a story. The catch is that the story must be told one word at a time. So with my group of five, by the time the first participant gets to say a second word, four other words have come in between and the story has flown off on a tangent. It's a game of responding without rational thought, of letting go of one's preconceptions, and other worthwhile things, but it's also jolly good fun, as the English would say.

Interviewed in this week's VARA TV Guide, renowned negotiator Alistair Crooke illustrates the principle of give and take in negotiations by quoting a remark a Hamas leader made to him:

The Americans demand that we cease all violent action, turn in our weapons, and recognize the State of Israel, before they will enter into negotiations with us. I ask you: if we meet all these demands, what will be left to negotiate about?

Not to endorse either Hamas or Crooke's efforts at diplomacy, but the man does have a point...

Discovered last week: my name is on Wikipedia! How cool is that, in a nerdy, egotistical kind of way?

(Also a very odd way to discover I was runner-up for a horror award in 2004...)

On its way to Leiden Lammenschans station, the slow train to Alphen passes a crossing. It's a fairly unappealing place, where the ugly housing developments of northern Leiden crowd up to an uninspired business district and an empty lot. At first, therefore, it was hard to explain the rush of satisfaction I felt when I passed the crossing that morning.

Only when I remembered a work night a few weeks back was I able to explain that rush. It had been a day of hard work to meet a project deadline. At about 8pm, deadline met and our work completed, my colleague and I had looked at each other and wordlessly agreed that it was time for a fancy dinner at our boss's expense. The Internet gave us the location of an Indonesian place in downtown Leiden, and we drove there in his convertible for what turned out to be an excellent rice table.

Over this railroad crossing.

And of course, this wasn't the only time a completely anonymous railroad crossing, street, square, or intersection had suddenly acquired an emotional charge as a result of an event in my personal life. It's happened to me countless times: after visiting a new friend in a neighborhood previously unfamiliar to me, that particular neighborhood acquires a strong but somehow unspecific positive charge. There is a table at Winkel Café that will always be special to me because I met Her there for the first time. But this effect is not limited to positive events. A bridge in eastern Amsterdam was the venue for an apocalyptic fight with my ex. And the A9 on ramp at Krommenie was witness to the totalling of my first car.

And so I envision a map of the world where proportions are not determined by the reality of sattelite images and surveyors, but by my own emotional landscape. A map where a table at Winkel Café takes up more space than the country of Hungary; where that bridge in eastern Amsterdam looks more ominous than Iraq; where my primary school, Het Wespennest, seems huger than Oxford and Harvard taken together.

And on that map, Amsterdam will finally appear as the center of the world I know it to be...

It is a well-known fact that truth is stranger than fiction, but to paraphrase George Orwell, some truths are more strange than others.

For instance, there is a man in Paris who has written 86,000 books. Assuming extreme precociousness, and assuming he is around 45 at this time, that number amounts to about 8 books every day of his productive life.

This is even more amazing if you take into account that Philip Parker isn't actually a writer, but in fact a Professor of Marketing.

How did Prof. Parker accomplish this amazing feat? Not through especially fast writing, obviously. No, he has developed an automated method to collect public domain knowledge on any subject through Google, and collate that knowledge into book form. Through this method, he's created such fascinating tomes as:

• The Economic Competitiveness of Groenlo*
• Webster's Persian (Farsi) to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 5
• The 2007-2012 Outlook for Lemon-Flavored Bottled Water in Japan

These and 85,997 other titles are available from the prolific "author's" website for prices ranging from the bizarre to the criminal.

I don't know if I should despise or admire this man.

* A tiny, insignificant village in Holland's extreme east, within sight of the German border.