There’s nothing that embodies the kind of hotel I’m in better than the smallish TV set, which is made to hover in a corner of the room by means of this kind of suspension. Since the last photo I took of one of these already disappeared in what one might imagine to be the depths of the internet (reality is much too mundane for modern man or woman), I had to take a new photo, somewhat fittingly this time a digital one. I still have the old Polaroid, though, somewhere at home, and I have the nagging feeling that it will continue to exist, physically, beyond the digital life time of this new photo, and I’m not saying that because I’m old-fashioned or a cynic (even though, deep down, I might be a bit of both).

Note, also, that the TV set is unplugged, which goes to show two things, namely first, that in general, I do dislike watching TV (but that’s no reason to unplug a TV set), and second, that I had to plug in my laptop computer somewhere (and that is). I’ve worked on this blog under a whole lot of circumstances, many of which too mundane to even mention them here (even though the anti-authoritarian in me, who, to some non-negligible extent, is co-responsible for me writing this blog in the first place, often wants to let out some air from what occasionally appears to be a somewhat inflated image of this blog [now, there we got some quintessentially bad writing, and to add insult to injury I am finishing off the guardians of good writing with yet another convoluted sentence inside a pair of brackets, which are embedded in an already existing one - if that doesn’t do the job, I don’t know what will!]). The spectacularly unspectacular hotel next to the highway in what I imagine to be the Dutch countryside is yet another addition to those circumstance, not something that is necessarily new for me as a scientist, because if there’s anything that will forever be the almost defining criterion of a scientist’s life, it’s those hotels where the TV sets are made to hover in the corner of the room.