I went on a day trip with my mom yesterday. As usual, nothing went according to plan, and it was great. We met in Nijmegen because I wanted to see Serious Request in person. This is a yearly event where three radio DJs lock themselves into a booth on a town square for a week and play requests from listeners for charity. This year, they're collecting money for research into ALS, the deadly neurodegenerative illness about which we know shockingly little.
Unfortunately, the weather was completely miserable today, so we didn't stay long. My mom wanted to see an exhibition in Nijmegen about black holes, which was definitely interesting. The museum explained both the theory behind black holes, and showed artistic musings on the concept. For example, they displayed the famous 2019 photo of a black hole but explained that the colors are an artistic interpretation. The idea was that you need both hard science facts and a dash of creativity to really grasp the implications of black holes in our universe. It was a fun exhibit and really interactive too! For example, they had a demonstration of gravity wells in spacetime using a cloth spanned tight with a weight in the middle. Guests were invited to roll marbles across the cloth to see that their orbits were affected by the mass in the middle.
After that, we had planned to go to Utrecht for a Christmas market, but we got derailed by another train having an accident on our track. We hastily packed our lunch boxes back in our bags, and got out at Arnhem instead. We were again drenched by rain on our way to the Museum Arnhem. They had an absolutely fascinating exhibit of fascist art made between 1933 and 1945. For obvious reasons, no pictures were allowed in the exhibit. We both agreed that the art was stunning on a technical level, but what it depicted was drenched in fascist messages about restoring honor and glory. For example, there was a painting depicting German soldiers moving through heavy snow in Poland. They looked determined, strong, etc. But what I noticed is that their equipment was much better than they would have had in real life, and they only had a horse and no heavy equipment at all. A quaint fairytale depiction of "our boys" on the frontlines.
My mom was intrigued by a massive painting of a farmer plowing a field with three horses. Her boyfriend is a farmer, and she's obviously highly knowledgeable about the subject as well. She pointed out that what the farmer was doing made no sense at all. Unless you're plowing bedrock of something, why would you need three horses for one plow? And that farmer probably would have used a tractor for the work, even in 1941. This is what fascist art does: It dazzles you with fancy images that ultimately do not depict reality.
We ended our day at a Greek restaurant, where I had a delicious gyros special that my wife called "basically a Greek lasagna."