I just stumbled upon a Wikipedia lemma on opencola. The recipy contains a fair amount of Gum Arabic. That reminded me of a book by  Dorrit van Dalen that recently appeared at Bert Bakker publishers that is high on my wishlist. What is below I read in review.

Apperantly Gum Arabic is one of those substances that is imposible to synthesize and that can only be retrieved from damaged barks of certain spiecies of the Accasia tree. In dutch the phenomena is called "Tranen der Accasias" (Accassia tears) which happens to be the title of one of the first novels by Willem Frederik Hermans. The circumstances under which the gum is produced is hardly known so that the production is hardly cultivated.

The name Gum Arabic stems from the fact that the Accasia species  can only be found in the subsahara regions. If I recall well the main production used to be in West Africa but has moved to East African Sudan.  Traditionally the traders in Gum Arabic are powerful men. It is one of the markets that has always been dominated by the traders. The first major buyers of the product were textile printers and they had no choice than to deal with the traders. Those traders needed to protect the sources for their product and therefore these became a pretty secretive bunch.

 The book argues that the Bin Laden familly (Osama in particular) has a large stake as one of the Sudanese gum traders. Sudanese gum was one of the products that was kept out of economic embargos because it is one of the main substances for Coca Cola (and other food and drink). Wikipedia dismisses this as an urban legend. Which makes me want to read the book even more.

Also see the Wikipedia Gum Arabic lemma, that is also where I found the explanation why arabic gum is used in cola: Gum arabic reduces the surface tension of liquids, which leads to increased fizzing in carbonated beverages.

I almost forgot about it... my Korg MS20

The poor machine and has been sitting in the attick of my parents for years.

If I recall well one of the oscilators is broken. Given that this is a electronic instrument that should be easy to fix with a soldering iron, a transistor, condensor, resistor, and/or some knowledge of electronics.

With the latter I am less comfortable. Fortunatelly the Internet provided me with a copy of the Service Manual and the repair job can be done by handy friends.

I remember fabricating a "drum-pad" by covering two layers of duplex wood with aluminium foil and seperating them a tiny bit so that hitting them with a drum stick would control the input. That with the white noise generator would produce that funky "clap" noise.

I should undust the machine and compare how it compares with Korg's Legacy Cell software.

Further googling made me aware that this little machine has quite some cult status. It has been valued at about $1000. I am not sure if I want to sell this memorabilia of my teenage years.

June 1 edit: The appartment has been sold.

I have not been blogging much. I have been having problems with my server and the interface to the blogging software Only recently I found time to look into those. Besides, I am to busy to write coherent and thoughtful blog entries. What I am busy with?

Well for one, we bought a house. The main reason is that we grew out of our appartment; so now that is for sale. So, if you happen to stumble on this page and you are looking for a nice appartment (90 sq m) at 20 minutes distance from Schiphol airport and 20 minutes distance from Amsterdam center, then contact my real estate agent.

See www.nijenrodeweg.info for details.

(This is the kind of posting I probably should have written in Dutch)

 (20-feb-2007 edited to add pictures)