163. Down the paths, into the gardens

I.

The NS walking route is something wonderful. You start at one train station, follow the red-and-yellow flags through a beautiful natural area and end up at another station. That’s how I stepped off the train at Culemborg on an early Saturday morning and walked through woods and meadows to Beesd.

Online I can’t find this route in the top lists of NS walks, but I enjoyed every one of the 14.5 kilometres. It helps that it’s spring, that yellow rapeseed is in bloom everywhere and that in every ditch a convoy of chicks is swimming. The cuckoo is back in the country too. Its call followed me for kilometres. You never know whether a cuckoo is nearby or far away. It rarely shows itself.

Other birds do. The robin, the blue tit, the chiffchaff and the blackcap. If you don’t see them, you hear them. The beginning birder (me) gratefully relies on the app Merlin, which listens along and identifies. I don’t have the patience to stare up into treetops. In an open field I spot a lapwing. Unmistakeable — the crest gives it away. The great spotted woodpecker shows itself a few times; black-and-white with vivid red markings.

The only downside of the NS walk is that you have to take the train back. At Beesd station I see that trains are being cancelled due to a fault. I catch a local bus to the next station. We pass through villages like Enspijk and Deil where entire streets are decked with orange flags. Where do you still see that? People here are ready for King’s Day. After that they can leave the flags up until the World Cup.

The local bus is driven by a man well past retirement age. He floors it and waves at the people he narrowly avoids running over. The little bus flies over the speed bumps so fast that I’m launched out of my seat. Arriving at Geldermalsen station I take the train to Utrecht after all. Because it’s busy, I have to stand.

II.

If you ask comedian Zach Galifianakis, the future is agricultural. He says it in every episode of his new Netflix series This Is a Gardening Show. Galifianakis has a passion for growing his own food.

The series is remarkably charming. With six fifteen-minute episodes, you can get through it in an evening. The format is always roughly the same: Galifianakis meets a group of children to test their knowledge on the episode’s topic, then goes out with experts for the informative segment.

You actually learn quite a bit from it. In the first episode you see how apple trees are grown by cutting a branch from an existing apple tree and grafting it onto a different trunk. “As if I were to chop off your head and put it on my body”, is the explanation.

Galifianakis keeps things light with teasing and jokes. In that role, which you know from Between Two Ferns, he is at his best. “You should have been in charge of the search for Bin Laden”, he says to two French foragers with whom he is out in the woods hunting for edible mushrooms. He gets into an increasingly absurd conversation with a five-year-old who claims to have eleven children. And the swearing corn farmer in the penultimate episode is a story in himself.

Galifianakis manages in this very accessible format to enthuse the viewer about gardening (I say as someone without green fingers). It helps that the series is beautifully filmed and colourful. The leaves of the crops seem to glow dreamily.

PS.

Writer Colson Whitehead on AI: “It really makes those midnight chats with the love bot sort of bittersweet to know that the orgasms are measured in metric tons of melted glacier. Do you realize how much water and power it’d take to replicate the average writer’s narcissism, self-loathing and despair? It’d drain the Indian Ocean. You could light up Times Square for a year. We can’t afford it.”

In my weekly blog at NU.nl I also wrote about AI. Don’t be alarmed — my photo now appears above the piece at full size. I’m not anti-AI — please, transcribe the rough text of my recorded interviews — but I am when we stand passively by and watch our capacity for thought being eroded.

Is it actually okay to respond to something posted online five years ago? Blogger David Friedman wonders, and decides to go ahead and do it anyway.

There is finally a trailer for Coyote vs. ACME. The backstory of this film is quite interesting. In 1990, Ian Frazier wrote a piece in The New Yorker about a fictional lawsuit by Wile E. Coyote against ACME. Years later there were plans to turn the article into a film. Involved: James Gunn and Will Forte. Then Warner Bros shelved the film to write it off against taxes. Now the rights have been bought by Ketchup Entertainment and the film is happening after all.

You just read blog №163, written in the week of 20 to 26 April 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and receive it in your inbox every Sunday for free.