Filed under: Animals,Sports by Branko Collin @ 9:01 am
Yesterday Wiel Kuypers set the new world endurance record for recreational fishing at 160 hours.
Kuypers had started the Sunday before at fishing pond De Bus of his home town Mill in Noord-Brabant with his daughter Marjolein and his son-in-law Rick who both quit their attempts during the week. According to Omroep Brabant, an inflammation in Kuyper’s foot nearly threatened a happy end to the record attempt on Friday night.
After his successful attempt Kuypers went home to catch some sleep. He and his buddies had made plans to get up bright and early today, to go fishing. “By now I am pretty sure I know how to.”
The second Dutch football league may not exactly be known for the defensive capabilities of its teams, but when the oldest Dutch professional football team Sparta Rotterdam (1888) relegated last year they probably did not expect the red carpet either.
The second division is called Eerste Divisie (‘first division’) because the first division is called Eredivisie (‘honorary division’).
Henk Schouten scored nine goals for Feijenoord in 1956, in what was then still called the Hoofdklasse. The Eredivisie and Eerste Divisie were introduced a season later. All time top scorer for a single match in the Eredivisie is Afonso Alves (Heerenveen) with 7 goals in a match against Heracles in 2007. The previous record holders for the Eerste Divisie were Jerry Taihuttu (1997) and Ugur Yildirim (2003), with 6 goals each. Both players went on to play in the top tier the next season.
Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 10:13 am
It sounds a lot like a soap opera: daddy was all for it, mommy was too, then she changed her mind. Lawyers got involved, child services got involved and stalled last year’s plans, and then the girl ‘threatened’ to emigrate.
Then, the Dutch public had their opinion, which ranged from ‘let the girl do her thing, you only live once’ to ‘what kind of horrible parents lets a teenager sail alone it’s dangerous’, as if the parents couldn’t vouch for their daughter’s talent. I couldn’t resist mentioning that Mike Perham and Zac Sunderland, both boys, were encouraged for their feats and wondering if Laura Dekker was a boy would that have made a difference.
And to ward off future criticism, if and when Laura Dekker does become the youngest person to sail around the world solo, all the Dutch, including the ones with the forked tongues will be all thrilled that she did it after all. If she crashes and burns, I’ll let you go all out in the comments, but for now, let’s see what happens first and comment later.
(Link: dutchnews.nl, photo of an entirely unrelated boat by the US Navy)
As of September, a sports park in Eindhoven (three football pitches, four tennis courts and the rest of the place) will be entirely lit using LED lights, made popular in its mordern-day version sometime around 1999 by Dutch firm Philips, headquartered in Eindhoven.
Local newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad claims that this is a world first, as they couldn’t find anyone else who did this. LED lighting is much less energy consuming that regular lighting, up to 60% according to measurements quoted in the newspaper.
As I write this, some 500,000 people are currently not at work and partying with the Dutch football team back from South Africa at the Museumplein in Amsterdam almost like they actually won the World Cup. The team first took a boat tour through Amsterdam’s canals and I can see them drinking beer and dancing to our beloved techno-trance music on telly.
Why bother when your team has lost? Because getting that far in the World Cup feels like a win. Because it was planned in case we won, and hey, people want to party. Because it’s summer and nobody really wants to be working.
Because the newly elected goverment can’t agree on a coaltion formation, meaning we have no government at the moment and therefore, not too much news.
Here’s what it looked like in 1988 when the Dutch won the European Cup:
Filed under: Sports,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:09 pm
Sloppy American journalism from ‘trusted’ news source CBS.
Surely this was a draft that never should have gone online, but the sloppy people at CBS news are making headlines and freaking people out with their glaring incompetence.
Filed under: Health,Sports by Branko Collin @ 3:29 pm
Researchers of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam will be paying both Dutch and Spanish fans 150 euro a person to come over and watch the final of the 2010 World Cup football between Spain and the Netherlands at an on-campus bar tonight.
The scientists wish to find out more about stress. Subjects will be hooked up to equipment that tracks their heart rate. The fans had to show up yesterday for a pre-measurement, and have to stay for an hour and a half after the match, so it’s not all fun and games.
The last time the Dutch football team were in the World Cup final I was 10 years old and I had yet to discover the joys of watching the sport on television. I much rather went outside and played football in person with the neighbourhood children on a patch of grass that sharply declined towards the street, so that you always had to try and kick uphill, just to be sure.
Before our matches started, the other children would shout “Kempes!” For a while I thought this had something to do with determining which side got to start the game, and I shouted along, trying to gain our side an advantage, and drawing bewildered looks. Later, I learned that the kids shouting “Kempes” wanted to ‘be’ Mario Kempes, the Argentinian forward who helped beat the Netherlands in the final of that year. You always pretended to be a superstar football player, and since there could not be two of you on the pitch, you had to make sure you called your guy first, lest you ended up being Jan Jongbloed (an accomplished goal keeper, but a goal keeper nonetheless).
Mario Kempes was held to be the absolute top brand footballer that year. No other player came close in popularity (although the loser’s call was almost always “Cruyff,” even though Cruyff had refrained from playing in the Argentinian World Cup).
Silly season (lack of newsworthy news, due to summer vacation, aka ‘komkommertijd’ (‘cucumber season’) is upon us.
And whether we like it or not (we do, of course), nothing counts more right now than the Dutch winning the World Cup football.
After Paul the Octopus from Oberhausen predicted all the German matches correctly, including their loss to Spain, Mani the psychic parakeet in Singapore has chosen the Netherlands as a winner over Spain to win the World Cup football.
“Muniyappan, Mani’s owner, has helped him predict the future for five years at a table in front of a restaurant in the Little India neighbourhood, but this year’s World Cup is the first time the parakeet has attempted to forecast the outcome of sports competitions.”
We are all dying to find out what Paul thinks, too. The rumours so far are that he has predicted Spain, but considering the lack of links and typos in those links, I’m not sure Paul has spoken at this time.
The Netherlands currently has the biggest bout of ‘oranjekoorts’ (‘orange fever’) in over 32 years. Everything everywhere from the baker to the cafe on the corner is decorated orange, worse than on Queen’s Day. Win or lose, we’ll surely be taking pictures.
UPDATE: Dutch telly has shown footage of Paul the Octopus choosing Spain.
Dutch pornostar Bobbi Eden twittered that she and her girlfriends will give out free blowjobs to her followers if Oranje (Dutch football team) wins the cup.
The link below said she had 5,000 followers, now 20,000, but I just checked and she’s up to 60,532. I say, recruit some more girlfriends.
If that’s not weird enough, we’re all waiting for Paul the psychic octopus to make his predictions for the final, Netherlands vs. Spain. Paul, in an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, predicted Spain would win the semi-final against Germany and they did. “He correctly predicted all five of the team’s previous World Cup games – including a shock defeat by Serbia in the group stages.”
Yesterday Wiel Kuypers set the new world endurance record for recreational fishing at 160 hours. 
The second Dutch football league may not exactly be known for the defensive capabilities of its teams, but when the oldest Dutch professional football team Sparta Rotterdam (1888) relegated last year they probably did not expect the red carpet either.
Researchers of the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam will be paying both Dutch and Spanish fans 150 euro a person to come over and watch the final of the 2010 World Cup football between Spain and the Netherlands at an on-campus bar tonight.
The last time the Dutch football team were in the World Cup final I was 10 years old and I had yet to discover the joys of watching the sport on television. I much rather went outside and played football in person with the neighbourhood children on a patch of grass that sharply declined towards the street, so that you always had to try and kick uphill, just to be sure.
