Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 5:44 pm
It could be the abrupt end of summer here or something in the air, but the ‘rules are rules’ motto can sometimes goes too far and be called ‘anti-social’. Of course, you could also say it’s bad timing.
A blind and wheelchair-bound woman from Groningen was fined for throwing out her old bed in the trash too early, probably before 8 pm. She had asked a girlfriend to do it for her who obviously didn’t observe the rules. The handicapped woman plans to contest the fine.
Ironically, just today right over the border in Germany (in Dutch) a similar case was lost. Some man braked to avoid running over a poodle, and apparently the law applies only to braking for kids and not animals, effectively implying the man should have ran over the poodle to avoid the accident he caused.
In the Student Handbook 2010-2011 for students in Breda there’s apparently a two-page advert to get students, most probably girls, to work for phone sex lines. While students usually work at the supermarket for about EUR 7,50 or so an hour, talking dirty on the phone pays a cool EUR 24 an hour, which is a lot of money for a student. The advert has a funny title as well: ‘Geld verdienen met lullen’ (‘Earn money with talking’, although ‘lullen’ (infinitive verb) just happens to be the plural of ‘cocks’ as well). The students have to be 18 years of age to be hired.
Why did this make national news? Well, it preys on poor students. However, a job is a job, the company is legit and I don’t really see the problem. I know for a fact that talking dirty as a job for money is hard work because when I was a student, I used to translate such delightful phone messages before all of this was online for good money. Some of what you hear is very difficult and not funny or sexy at all. I can’t even imagine being the one answering to or saying these things on the phone for hours on end. The students deserve that EUR 24 an hour.
A Russian trucker in Dordrecht involved in a bar brawl was released because the summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google translate. When the trucker was being questioned at the police station, he had a Russian interpreter and claimed to have understood what he had to do, although he never signed the summons.
The Russian interpreter showed up in court, but not the trucker. She was asked to then translate what was written in the summons. Instead of (here I am translating this from Dutch) ‘you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010′, it went more like ‘you have to avoid being in court on 3 August 2010′. In Dutch, ‘vóórkomen’, with the stress on the first syllable, means ‘to appear’, while ‘voorkómen’ means ‘to prevent’.
With Google translate, the Dutch infinitive verb ‘voorkomen’ (no way to indicate which of the two identically spelled verbs you want translated) still today produced the infinitive verb ‘to prevent’ ‘предотвращать’ (imperfective aspect) and not even a hint of the perfective aspect of the same verb, ‘предотвратить’. In any decent dictionary both aspects are given so people can use the right one.
In Russian, if you pronouce the perfective verb ‘to write’ ‘написать’ with the wrong stress, you’re pissing instead of writing, so yes, stress matters.
The city of Rotterdam has felt it necessary that the Kralingse Bos, a big park, get these colourful signs to warn families and the likes that gay men are getting busy (think closeted or married gay hooking up). The direction of the feet in this pictogramme is a bit confusing to those in the know. If gays are caught outside the marked zone in Rotterdam, they will be fined. The sign also implies that lesbians stay at home and watch telly. That was sarcasm.
Ironically, many of the places where straight couples and parties of three or more have sex in the woods or near the beach are illegal, and people just get fined. They should stay home and watch telly as well.
The person in charge of this typical show of Dutch tolerance was quoted as saying, “everybody has the right to have fun”. Straights, however, don’t have their own signs or special party places. Interesting reverse discrimination.
Baarle is a town in the Netherlands … and Belgium. It contains 39 Belgian enclaves on Dutch soil and 5 Dutch enclaves on Belgian soil, and some of them are inside each other, so that you get “this whole ridiculous Russian Doll situation,” to quote New Zealand’s fourth most popular folk parody duo.
The dashed line you see in the photo above is one of the borders, and as you can see, the Google Streetview car refuses to drive onto Belgian territory. I am not sure why that is, but perhaps it is because Belgian copyright law prohibits the publishing of photos of architecture.
A pity really, because otherwise you could have taken a virtual tour of one of the politically strangest towns in the world.
Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:23 pm
HEMA, a popular Dutch chain store, has set up a website encouraging children to share their exam cheating tips, as a way to draw attention to their back to school products. The smarty pants who send in tips get a free invisible ink pen.
According to Bizz.nl, some 18,000 (!) kids have already left tips. Now all teachers have to learn these tips by heart during their vacation, the article jokes.
Teachers are pissed at Hema, while the folks at HEMA don’t think it’s a big deal. In the past HEMA has had a Top 5 of most stolen products campaign, showing they have a good sense of humour.
One of the comments reads “Let’s hope that the students make the grade this way since working at HEMA is probably what they’ll end up doing later.”
Someone was telling me at a dinner party about this beer (not the one in the picture) and the (pardon the pun) pissing contest it became to brew the world’s strongest beer. Back in February Scottish brewery BrewDog could still claimed it brewed the world’s strongest beer called Sink the Bismarck! at 41 per cent. It has now been surpassed by Almere’s Jan Nijboer of brewery ‘t Koelschip with a beer called Start the Future that comes in at a whopping 60 per cent.
While increasingly more copper is being stolen from train tracks, warehouses, lighting rods, construction containers and the likes, some thieves have moved up to bronze church bells.
In Apeldoorn, two 100 kg bronze bells were stolen from a church sometime on Tuesday 27 July. In nearby Twello, thieves scored 11 17 kg worth of bells.
First there was our world-famous story about a man causing a blackout in a hospital, thinking he was playing horror video game Silent Hill, now there’s a 17-year-old boy in Veenendaal who re-enacted the movie ‘The Fast and the Furious’ by driving his mom’s car into someone’s yard.
Legal driving age is 18 here, so he borrowed mom’s car illegally. Not only did the boy trash someone’s yard, he also drove the car home, parked it, and pretended nothing happened. He got caught by the cops because a licence plate fell off in said yard. Damn. His excuse to the police was that he had watched ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and wanted to try out drifting, a driving technique “where the driver intentionally oversteers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns,” and “make smoke come out of the tires”.
Watch how it’s done on British television show Top Gear with cool Japanese guys:
On Saturday in Utrecht’s busiest shopping mall, Wim Hof, aka the Ice Man, broke his record of sitting in ice for 1 hour and 13 minutes by a whopping 31 minutes 23 seconds (1 h 44 min 23 sec).
Back in May, after having put Hof through tests, two Dutch scientists in Nijmegen concluded that what he can do “is medically impossible”.
