An eensie-weensie spider startled a 43-year-old woman from Oostvoorne so much last Monday that she drove her car onto the shoulder of the road, upon which the vehicle made a double somersault and landed on the other side of the road.

The woman and her children of seven and nine got out the car unharmed, Trouw reports. This took place on the Schrijversdijk (‘writer’s dike’) in Brielle, and the time was 9.45 a.m.

No one knows what happened to the spider.

(Via Moors Magazine)

That was only one game, of course, but it seemed to bring into focus what I had been observing at the Ajax youth academy, as well as learning about American soccer. How the US develops its most promising young players is not just different from what the Netherlands and most elite soccer nations do — on fundamental levels, it is diametrically opposed.

Americans like to put together teams, even at Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the US struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type. Americans tend to think of Europeans as collectivists and themselves as individualists. But in sports, it is the opposite. The Europeans build up the assets of individual players. Americans underdevelop the individual, although most of the volunteers who coach at the youngest level would not be cognizant of that.

Michael Sokolove (what’s in a name?) takes a long hard look at what makes the youth academy of Amsterdam’s professional football club Ajax tick, and how this contrasts with the system in the USA.

A very interesting read, even though (or perhaps because of) the author at times keeps a lot of distance from what he essentially describes as something close to modern slavery.

(Photo by Patrick de Laive, some rights reserved. Shown here are Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart in national garb. Both players rose through the ranks of the Ajax youth academy to become world stars. Link: Eamelje.net.)

Last week Marc van Woudenberg won the Bicycle Mania Photo contest with this picture.

Van Woudenberg publishes a photo blog about cyclists in Amsterdam called ‘Amsterdamize’. My favourite photo of his is this one, from a series about biking in the winter. That back tire is almost flattened by the peer pressure.

The winning photo, called Family Cycle Train, can also be viewed on Flickr and distributed using a Creative Commons license.

If you were wondering, yes, this is a fairly common sight in the Netherlands.

We’ve said every year, we get to say it again: Dutch children are the happiest in the world, this time according to new research by Unicef Germany. The Germans founds themselves in 8th place out of the 21 industrialized countries they included in their report. As expected, the top five in so many of these reports include Scandinavian countries: Sweden, Finland, Norway, with Spain in 5th place and Denmark in 7th place, while Iceland is not there, due to problems such as their country’s bankruptcy.

Our past posts on the issue: Dutch kids are happy because they’re egocentric.

(Link: dutchnews.nl, Photo: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Last year around this time, we wrote about Dutch kids being happy because they’re egocentric and in 2007 some Dutch mothers I know justified giving up work and career by pointing out that Dutch children are the happiest in Europe. If you read these two articles, you’ll see that parents teach them to be hedonistic and not take others into consideration and that children almost rule the family. I’m not saying this is true, but where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

However, it’s terribly easy to pick on young people because they’re growing up with more choices, technology and social pressure that previous generations. Hell, the pornography and sex they are exposed to considered normal in advertising and videos (hypersexualisation) scares me as an adult. Having more choices is bad because it makes choosing more difficult. And then mom gave up working just to take care of you and dad is burning out to keep it all together for you as well. That’s a lot of guilt to handle. I’d run out and put my iPod on loud too to drown that out.

Since the 1970s in the Western world, youth have always been called greedy, selfish and whatever, so that’s nothing new. Lack of respect for authority, well, even the authority here has a lack of respect for others and themselves, saying they don’t have the power to do whatever needs to be done and police letting people go because they can’t be bothered. And why would kids obey their parents or even their teachers if their parents and the schools let them walk all over them? Why should they try any harder if there are no consequences to their actions? And we’re back to turning up the iPod really loud.

(Link: nrc.nl, Photo: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Fifty-one percent of all Dutch children think there is too much reporting on swine flu, with only 1% saying there is too little. Seventeen percent say news about swine flu scares them.

A poll held by Jeugdjournaal (kids’ TV news show) among more than 2,000 children and published yesterday also shows that 82% of the children are not afraid of swine flu.

Per year between 250 and 2,000 people die of the regular flu in the Netherlands. So far the swine flu has contributed to 17 deaths since the start of the outbreak last Spring, a little over 1 % of the known infections.

Swine flu is called Mexican flu in the Netherlands—vicious rumours suggest this may be so as not to upset the voters of government party CDA, many of whom presumably are pig farmers.

(Drawing by Ollie Crafoord, some rights reserved.)

Guus Oosterbaan, a Dutch designer living in Denmark, is looking for somebody to take these boxes into production for him.

The boxes can be used to store all kinds of things, and when stacked can be combined into huge toy robots. On his blog, Oosterbaan says that his “kids find it very amusing to build robots that are much taller than them and then knock them over while shouting superhero stuff.”

(Link: Bright.nl. Photos: Guus Oosterbaan.)

Kubikids is an inflatable, square bath tub for children. It works by placing it in the shower stall, and then filling it with air, water and children, in that order. It’s not uncommon for our tiny Dutch apartments to lack a bathtub, in which case this device could add a luxury to an otherwise cramped place for at least part of the family.

Plus, anything that makes it look like you are cooking children just looks nice, but maybe that’s just me.

(Photo: Kubikids. Link: Idealize.)

A Dutch school in The Hague, Nutsschool Bezuidenhout, decided that teaching kids about eating maggots was worthwhile subject matter during a school outing, according to Dutch newspaper AD. Two brave kids ate some maggots on a dare from teachers. Lo and behold, the mother of one of the other children complained to the newspaper of this ‘game’ played by 11 and 12-year-old children who do not have the capacity of making their own choices. Apparently, the kids threw up as well. In true Dutch ‘everything is relative’ form, the school said none of the children threw up, but admitted that eating maggots was ‘a bit disgusting’.

The most digusting thing I have every had to eat was as a preschooler: green Jell-o, a glow-in-the-dark lime green dessert made of sugar and jelly. I ate half, got scolded for not eating it, got sick and my mother yelled at the teacher in front of the entire preschool class for at least 30 minutes for forcing me to ‘crap junk food’. Never had the stuff again.

(Link: vleesmagazine.nl)

Aart Staartjes, the actor who has been playing the grumpy Mr Aart in the Dutch version of Sesame Street for over twenty years, is threatening to leave the show over a programming dispute. He said this last week on the Coen & Sander radio show (Dutch). The ire of Mr Aart was awakened when the starting time of the show was moved around a lot by the NPS public broadcaster. Originally, Sesamstraat started at 6:30 pm, later it was moved to 6 pm, then 5:30 pm, even later to 5 pm, and, starting today, finally back to 5:30 pm, writes sesamstraatnaarhalfzeven.nl (Dutch).

Last week, an emotional Staartjes suggested on De Wereld Draait Door (Dutch) that the network was trying to deliberately kill off the show, which saw a marked decline from 500,000 to 30,000 viewers: “What idiot came up with the idea to program a show at five in the afternoon when the target audience are parents and their young children? Nobody is home at that time. And when I try to find out who’s responsible, everybody’s pointing at someone else.”

Sesamstraat was first broadcast in the Netherlands in 1976, at a time when the country disallowed commercial networks and there were only two or three public channels. Staartjes (1938) joined the show in 1984. He is also well-known for having presented the reception of Sinterklaas for 18 years.

(Photo by Photocapy, some rights reserved.)