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Le Grand Jacques

February 6, 2009 By

The Guardian today has a nice article about a new Jacques Brel album recently released with the Belgian legend’s earlier songs from the 1950s – aptly named Jacques Brel in the 50s: The Birth of a Genius. The article has some great quotes from other musical legends like David Bowie about Brel.

Brel is one of my favourite musicians – one of many that I will sadly never get to see. But I never get tired of his music, and here is one of my favourites, Amsterdam. And did I mention he’s from Belgium?

[dailymotion id=k4k3WYxTeBrLX84e6T]

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Today I’m in…..

January 19, 2009 By

The MIRI engineering model, ready for testing

The MIRI engineering model, ready for testing

Today, and for the rest of this week, I’m in the city of Leuven, Belgium. Together with some colleagues from the Catholic University of Leuven and various other institutes in Europe I’m spending a few days working on some aspects of calibration and testing for MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope. The JWST, although offcially its “successor”, will differ from Hubble in that it will be optimised for observations in the infrared, rather than the optical or ultraviolet. Although great science can be done at the shorter wavelengths, achieving top notch image quality is more demanding at shorter wavelengths – with the costs for JWST far exceeding initial estimates as it is, who knows what the budget would have had to be for an optical JWST?

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Belgium rule the Galaxy

November 25, 2008 By

Well, not quite perhaps…. But good news!

ESA announced last week that Belgium’s second man in space, Frank Dewinne, will become the first non-American or non-Russian to command the International Space Station. After a first visit in 2002, Dewinne, 47, will be returning to the ISS on board a Russian Soyuz in May next year. He’ll be part of the first 6-man crew on board the station, taking advantage of the upgrades taking place during the current ongoing mission. He may even be able to drink his own pee! During the last few weeks of his 6-month stay, the Belgian civil engineer and pilot will take command of the ISS crew, ending the Americo-Russian dominance of the post.

If you read Dutch you can read more here.

Incidentally, Belgium’s first man in space was Dirk Frimout (in English here!),  who travelled on Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1992. Dirk has since been immortalised in Suske & Wiske, one of Belgium’s most popular comics. He was voted the 161st and 26th Greatest Belgian by the Flemish and Wallonian communities respectively. Placed higher in Wallonia than in Flanders – ha, who says we can’t get along?!

Go Frank, go Belgium!

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Olympics snippets

August 25, 2008 By

I missed a lot of the Olympics while I was on holiday but I really enjoyed what I saw. Special congratulations go to some of the Belgians who did brilliantly, in particular Tia Hellebaut, who won gold on the high jump, and the women’s 4x100m relay team (Olivia Borlée, Hannah Mariën, Elodie Ouedraogo and Kim Gevaert) who got silver. Hellebaut won the first ever female athletics gold for Belgium, yay!

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Happy birthday Belgium

July 21, 2008 By

Oh no I’m 2 minutes too late! Anyway 21 July is Belgium’s national holiday. To celebrate, here’s the lyrics to the national anthem, the Brabanconne, in Flemish.

O dierbaar België
O heilig land der Vaad’ren
Onze ziel en ons hart zijn u gewijd.
Aanvaard ons kracht en het bloed van onze ad’ren,
Wees ons doel in arbeid en in strijd.
Bloei, o land, in eendracht niet te breken;
Wees immer u zelf en ongeknecht,
Het woord getrouw, dat g’ onbevreesd moogt spreken:
Voor Vorst, voor Vrijheid en voor Recht.
Het woord getrouw, dat g’ onbevreesd moogt spreken:
Voor Vorst, voor Vrijheid en voor Recht.
Voor Vorst, voor Vrijheid en voor Recht.
Voor Vorst, voor Vrijheid en voor Recht.

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