Danes: Troublesome Cartoons and Liquor Problems

My blogging has been interrupted by troubles with Internet Explorer---Gates & Co are too busy hosting Hu Jing Tao in Seattle to mind their browser! So excuse the hiatus and weird linking problems that are only partly my fault.

The Miami Herald has an article on a Danish supermodel getting arrested for a brawl with a [presumably female] flight attendant on a Martinair flight to Miami from Amsterdam.

I flew in Martinair both ways from Jeddah to Jakarta and back, in the company of some former Dutch bush pilots who let me fly in the cockpit of the giant McDonnell-Douglas DC-10.

More vividly, when I was US Vice Consul in Lyon, my Vice Consul colleague from Denmark introduced me to the wonders of Akvavit [sp?]

I was young and strong in those days and ended up carrying him from a French bar on my back partly across downtown Lyon when he passed out trying to do shooters with the appropriate fish aperitif-amuse-gueles.

Ah yes, I wasn't even stopped by the gendarmes or CRS, who were always on the prowl for disruptive students back in the day. I was in my late twenties, and our consular IDs would have sufficed, but no notice was taken since it was after dark and a cold winter night.

So Danes and liquor are one of those subliminal memories; as is another bizarre episode with the Dutch Judo Team at Expo 67 in Montreal, when I was almost creamed by a Dutch gentleman [allegedly a Judo champion] built like a house who accused me of drinking a giant stein of his excellent Dutch beer while chatting up his girl. [I was guilty and afterward actually made it to third base with the girl from Missouri.] But I ran and lived to fight another day. French genes somewhere back there, I guess.

I have many more memories that occasionally surface after decades.

"Others drink to forget, the Irish drink to remember."