I knew I should have gotten that spare tire fixed!

Wednesday when I left work I found that the rear tire of my bicycle was flat. It had been a bit soft in the previous, well weeks actually. That's not necessarily a sign it is going to have a real and proper puncture. The extra annoying thing about a flat tire is that it obviously causes a delay which is rather inconvenient: my schedule is rather tight because I time the end of my day so that I can just get in time to the university's restaurant before it closes.

Fortunately it is also not very far so I did manage to be there just in time, by cycling on the flat tire (which is something you should not do because it is rather bad for the tires).

Better news is that my biological consultant (i.e. my mother) diagnosed the extreme yellowness of my plant (her name is Greenie) as "oh that is normal for this time of the year". I was a bit worried because I have no green fingers at all, and Greenie is a special plant of T. and me. In a way it is her representation while we're not together - T. is always very interested in Greenie's wellbeing, if she has flowered yet and other accomplishments, and it would not be nice if she somehow died because of bad treatment.

Right now I'm watching some romantic film called See Jane Date with Charisma Carpenter (from Buffy) and Holly Marie Combs (from Charmed). It is not very original.

Sjors en Sjimmie

Today I went into town and spent a lot (well actually in retrospect, a bit too much) on new old books. Fact is that I found a very big pile of reprinted "Sjors en Sjimmie" books from the 1950's and '60s. They have some historic information in them which is a very nice addition to the nostalgy of reading the stories.

"Sjors en Sjimmie" is a comic which started in 1932 as a translation of the american strip "Perry and the Rinkydinks". They were published weekly in a magazine and later published in albums - for the 1930s this was uniqe in the netherlands. In the beginning the strips were one-page gags; Longer stories were only introduced in 1950. The collected episodes in a single volume at first did not correspond to complete stories. The books were simply published after about a year's worth of episodes was collected, so sometimes it ended in the middle of a story.

When I was a kid, I found several of those books in my grandmother's attic - books which used to belong to my uncles. I have a bunch of them right now, and I think they have some collector's value.

In those days the word "racism" did not exist yet. So Sjimmie was a black boy with big red lips, earrings and he spoke crooked dutch. Nobody thought that was strange (or even that he was strange). When the strips continued in the 1970s after the original artist (Frans Piët) had retired, things were modernised a lot. But somehow the more modern strips don't have the strange appeal the older ones have.

Oh and there is also a bar in town which is called Sjors & Sjimmie. It is a horrible place. I've been there only once; maybe I'll write about that later sometime.