@pommerlis....
I'm glad you had a great birthday and I hope you got lots of neat presents.
I thank you for the compliment about my knowledge, but it's really an illusion...
It's like when you go to a friend's house and their dog goes "Rrrrwoof, ruff... Wooo!", and they are like "Oh my my god... Did you hear that... He was doing that bit from Hamlet?!"
It just seems like something else...
Before you start reading this, I just want to say I have nothing to do for the next hour and a half, so this might get long...
Anyway...
No, sadly I don't speak any real Dutch...
I can curse in about 17 languages and know dozens of random words in dozens of languages...
Mostly I can recognize "call the authorities, I'm sure it's him" in about ten...
But that's more of a Pavlovian thing and the pointing, than actual knowledge.
I'm terrible at human languages...
Both my parents were fluent in multiple languages and my dad in his later years actually tutored in about five... So I always felt like an idiot in that regard...
I'm fluent in zero languages... I don't even speak English that great...
The fact that any of this is even remotely legible, is purely coincidental.
I do like the color orange... I definitely saw orange when the big can of coffee fell out of the cupboard and hit me in the forehead this morning...
But that was more jarred neurons than joy...
A lot of places in New York tend to use orange in their flags and team colors...
In fact New York City's flag (where I grew up) has quite a bit of Dutch references...
Since this is going to go on for a while, I thought I show you NYC's flag and explain all its Dutchness...
Right off, on the right side you see the orange stripe... Very Dutch... In the center you have some white, the Dutch colonists loved fresh linens and clean underwear...
And over on the left you have the blue which was the color of William of Orange's favorite pajamas...
Fact is this being before copyright laws and what with New Yorkers being pretty lazy back then, they pretty much ripped off the Dutch flag completely.
Except for the center seal... on the left of it you have the fellow with the yo-yo who is dressed in common dutch colonial garb from the 1600s, he is a very flattering image of the very corpulent Wouter van Twiller who was famous for shipping cattle places and whacking people with his yo-yo.
In the center of the seal, you have a lot going on...
You have the two beavers who are a tribute to Frederik and Hannes Beaver, two of the most ferocious and heroic beavers of old New York, the pair helped the Dutch colonists defeat the hamsters in the the First Sort Of Great Hamster War of 1632.
You also have the two huge kegs of what some people insist is flour, but is actually beer which despite what history says, the colonists were crazy about... Some might say they had a bit of a problem, but they claimed they could stop anytime they wanted...
They just didn't and that's pretty much what lead to the First Not So Great Hamster War of 1632...
In the very center of the center you see a tribute to a little known Dutch colonial invention, the wooden helicopter... It wasn't very successful or practical and most just caught on fire right away, but the leftover rotor blades were often used to repair many of the fashionable windmills that everyone lived in back then.
At the top you have Bart the Bird, whom some think is an eagle, but was actually a very burly canary...
A little known fact- Bart the Bird is actually who Sesame Street's creators modeled Big Bid after, since they were all New Yorkers...
Bart is carrying a "Vis Hoed" which may or may not be spelled correctly, or even be a Dutch word or even be very real, but it was a hat people kept fish in on their way to church and for centuries it was the traditional formal hat of the mayor of New York until formerly sane Rudolph Giuliani, abolished it in 1994 because earlier NYC mayor Ed Kotch was always lording over him with his fancy gold, satin and tilapia filled one.
On the right you have the nice fellow whom for years I thought was an anthropomorphic rabbit, but eventually when I finally got a good look close-up look, turned out to be a caricature of one of the Lenape people, possibly chief Saysays of the Canarsee tribe, whom Peter Minuit swindled the island of Manhattan from for 60 Guilders worth of assorted merchandise he was going to get rid of at a garage sale, but unbeknownst to Minuit, it was actually mostly land belonging to the Weckquaegeeks, which left for some awkward moments later.
Right below you have "1625 "which were the winning lottery numbers for the first New Hamsterdamn Lotto jackpot of one half guilder, one copper teapot and a hamster pelt codpiece.
Surrounding the lower crest you'll see "Sigillum Civitatis Novi Eboraci" which isn't actually Dutch at all, but Latin which snobby wealthy Dutch colonists loved to speak when they were making rude comments about the attire of poor colonists.
All it really means in Latin is "the really gnarly seal of New York"... Eboracum was the Roman word for "place where hamsters congregate" in Latin, Eboracum which would later be known as York, and thusly when the English got a new one they named it similarly...
And that weird thing surrounding the whole dealie is another Dutch tribute, this one to a very popular style of braided mustache or nose hair that was very trendy in the 1600s. I have no idea what it was called, but I'd be happy to make something up.
So besides that being several minutes of your life you just wasted, you can see my connection to certain Dutch traditions... In fact I'm wearing a fish hat now... Only mine is cheap straw and I ate all the tuna.
Never get the ones with mushy tuna, it makes the hat soggy... Get solid albacore or even the little herrings... Those are great...
Be careful around seagulls though... Things go south real fast when they are around.
Incidentally I wouldn't rely on any of this information in a test situation or as conversational material in any intellectual setting.
But... Uh... Anyway...
So in a way, I've never been that far from Dutch influence.
Also, I'm half German and Holland is not that far away, so it's not inconceivable that some of the "weirdness" may be distantly genetically linked... Or at least spread from something in the winds...?
The Kabouters I know about from an old fellow in upstate New York (near Monticello) when I was a kid... Back then I thought they were a German folklore (he was German) and more like nasty kobolds, not potentially nice gnomes...
But I guess when folklore is separated from its native land it tends to evolve into something different...(Like Santa Claus and Santa Claws)...
In reality the "Kabouters" were just very malcontent raccoons, but late at night hearing them fight in the dark woods, I could see how that was just a frightening tale waiting to be told.
For a long time I thought maybe they were made up by the old guy (kabouters, not raccoons), because none of my German relatives (or pretty much anyone at all) ever heard of them...
Seriously, most of German folklore is devoted to gruesome monsters that maim or eat naughty children and there are so many, it's probably hard to keep track of.
But years later when I was researching supernatural tales and myths from old New York, I came across mention of them.(using actual paper books in the NYC public library... The big one with the lion statues you see in movies... An awesome place BTW, if you like books).
I totally was mispronouncing the word, thinking it was Cobooters (the old guy had a very odd German accent and the two missing teeth and slight touch of alcoholism did help any), but the book was not much help because it was written in an old style of English from the late 1700s... It was actually a book from the late 1700s or early 1800s...
I remember being shocked each and every time I was being handed one of those old books... You had to go to a special temperature controlled room, request the specific books and you could only read them there and you had to wear white cotton gloves... If you could see me back then you'd understand...
I was alway thinking "seriously... You are handing this book to me... Me... Did you even look at me.?... Do you have a working sense of smell?"
Back then I tended to look more like the crazy stalker guy from "Taxi Driver" then anyone doing any sort of research.
I couldn't browse $2 magazines at a smoke shop without getting eyed up and down, and here she is handing me a piece of history...
Irreplaceable history...
Yeeesh...
I just figured the librarian hated books and was hoping I was gonna destroy the place so she could get legitimately fired and collect unemployment benefits.
Aside from the army jacket full of scorch marks, in my defense, it's hard to bike around NYC (especially in 80s NY), without looking and smelling crazy.
Anyway, my impression after that was kabouters were more like mischievous Travelocity gnomes and less like murderous chupacabras.
Which now I'm guessing, based on them planting unwanted mushrooms in your garden, is probably more correct...
To be honest, I'm actually really glad you knew about kabouters and they weren't obscure or unheard of...
Half the stuff I say, nobody knows what the hell I'm talking about and they think I'm making it up as I go...
I only do that when giving a formal deposition at a trial or when being questioned at the scene...
While I'm being honest, I have to share an image I got when you mentioned them planting mushrooms...
Here in the U.S. "shrooms" is now common slang or lighthearted reference to mushrooms, but back in the 70s, amongst the hippy folk, it was a reference to magic psychedelic mushrooms... "Like groovy shrooms dude... Try some... You can hear the colors maaaan..."
So now I'm picturing your naughty gnomes in tie dyed tee shirts, denim shorts and flip flops, doing the Cheech & Chong thing, waiting for you to go inside so they can harvest their magic shrooms and mellow out on the patio...
"Groovy... Rijklof dude... pass me more of them shrooms... Shame the nice lady won't let us grow them in the open, man... But she's alright for a human... Even if she mowed old Guustaaf when he was sleepin' it off in the grass..."
Don't worry... He was old and really clumsy... It was just a matter of time until something got him.
And now I've added that to the list of 40,000 other things I intend to make one day...
Sculpt a stoned hippy garden gnome statue.
Groovy.
Okay... This has gone on long enough and I should grant your eyeballs rest, if anyone is still reading this.
Once again, happy birthday and many more!