April 17, 2010

Man stages distress to win damsel back

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:01 pm

A 18-year-old man from The Hague staged a robbery two weeks ago in order to impress his ex-girlfriend with his heroic intervention and win her back that way.

A friend in a white ski mask pulled a knife on the 17-year-old girl on the Grote Markt and demanded her purse, only to see his ‘robbery’ thwarted by the ex-boyfriend who ‘happened’ to be on the scene. After studying security camera footage (the girl reported the attempted robbery to the police), the police concluded the ‘robber’ and the ex-boyfriend were in cahoots.

Both conspirators were arrested.

According to De Volkskrant, the ploy did not have the desired effect.

Tags: , , ,

April 16, 2010

Using thin people’s poop to lose weight

Filed under: Health,Science by Orangemaster @ 5:09 pm
consult

According to a study carried out by doctor and reseacher Anne Vrieze at the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, fat people have a different gut flora than thin people and you can use thin people’s poop, insert it into fat people and help them lose weight. It already works with rats, now it’s being rested on humans.

The idea is not new and dates back to 1955, where in one trial of ‘poop transplant’, a woman was cured from an intestinal disease by having her son’s healthy poop injected into her own intestines.

Vrieze explains that gut flora is as unique as fingerprints, and science still does not know why. Fat people shold have the chance to have more efficient bacteria in their intestines, which would help them poop out the bad stuff easier, which is what happens with thin people.

Vrieze was also surprised that so many men (they didn’t test women) were willing to have a tube shoved down their noses down to their intestines with poop to see if this could increase their chances of losing weight. Never mind the fact that so many things are just not tested on women for reasons that include getting sued because a woman might be pregnant, this time, the reason was that “we don’t know what influence hormone levels could have on gut flora.”

If the effects are temporary, getting a month poop transplant does not sound like much of a solution. The idea Vrieze has is to develop a capsule that could be taken, which would contain the ‘thinning’ bacteria. She responsibly adds that this would not replace proper dieting and exercise.

(Link: kennislink.nl)

Tags: ,

April 15, 2010

One million euro to research eating bugs

Filed under: Animals,Science by Orangemaster @ 8:25 pm
126741969_32b8899256

Our current governement is on its way out, and there are elections in early June. This means no major decisions can be taken, and it’s more about tying up loose ends and cleaning out desks. But hey, let’s stir things up and give one million euro for research into eating bugs. Nom!

For the next three years, the Wageningen University & Research Centre gets to research which insects are worth eating. And then, the clichés: scientists say they’re just as good for you as meat, it’s good for the environment, and also my favourites, people in Asia and Africa eat them, they’re good with chocolate (bye bye health argument) and so on.

Why not just ask the Asians and Africans for recipes and/or their research instead of throwing all that money out the window? No, wait, why not start a marketing campaign to eat bugs? Wait, we don’t eat bugs, and unless we totally run out of food, we’re not going to consider eating bugs any time soon.

I grew up near one of the only, if not the only place where you can gawk at insects and then eat some: the Montréal Insectarium. If only they did that at the farm with burgers. Or maybe fast food chains should sell bug burgers. Nom!

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo of Worms by Wahj, some rights reserved.)

Tags: ,

April 14, 2010

Dutch vodka with programmable LED label

Filed under: Gadgets by Orangemaster @ 7:45 pm

How to Program a Message on Your MEDEA Bottle from Medea Spirits on Vimeo.

I love a good troika: First, we had Guus Hiddink vodka, then Trump vodka made in The Netherlands and now, hi-tech Medea vodka from Schiedam, the birth place of genever (gin).

Medea vodka has a programmable LED label. It can be up to 225 characters, which is more than a Twitter ‘tweet’ (140 characters) or a text message (160 characters). You can turn off the text to save batteries, if so inclined and a bottle costs 30 euro. Being a regular buyer of vodka, Dutch vodka is often pricy at 30 euro a bottle, as compared to Polish and Russian vodka at 15-20 euro a bottle. But hey, this time you get a gadget with your booze.

Oh and by the way, the music in the video is Chopin’s Prelude No. 4 in E minor (Op. 28), which is the work that French composer and artist Serge Gainsbourg’s song ‘Jane B.’ is based on. You get that tidbit extra, as Serge drank more vodka and other alcohol than you drink water.

(Link: idealize.nl)

Tags: ,

April 13, 2010

Very Short Film Festival now also in Amsterdam

Filed under: Dutch first,Film by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am
affiche

For the first time ever Amsterdam will be one of the cities hosting the 11th edition of the Very Short Film Festival, featuring movies of less than three minutes, without titles and credits. On 8 and 9 May, the CREA in Amsterdam will play host to all kinds of movies, chosen for their originality, boldness, sense of humour, generosity and even bad taste. The festival has always been very francophone in nature, but this year films are being shown in and from countries such as The Netherlands, Brazil, Hungary, Moldavia, Israel, Romania, Singapore, Serbia, Palestine and the United Kingdom.

In the spirit of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (Find the Dutch person), Alix over at drooderfiets tells me that the Public’s Award of the fifth edition went to a Dutch short by Jeroen Annokkeé called ‘Road Kill’.

Road Kill

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Short Films | Existential Crisis

(Link: Very Short)

Tags: ,

April 12, 2010

Bed and breakfast at former madam’s

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:37 pm

Xaviera Hollander is a former New York call-girl and madam who got world famous with her autobiography The Happy Hooker. Nowadays she runs a bed and breakfast from her villa in the posh part of Amsterdam (right around my corner, although I live in the ‘poor’ part of the posh part).

She has two rooms on offer and a chalet in the back yard, the cheapest for 100 euro, and there is a sort of half-promise of being entertained by the ‘author, Penthouse columnist, legend, performer, [and] raconteur’ Xaviera Hollander herself. If you like, you can let her husband Philip cook you dinner.

(Source image: xavierahollander.com)

Tags: , ,

April 11, 2010

Twitter-based architecture

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 11:31 am

Last autumn a study project had eleven architecture students from the University of Delft create a house for a person based on their tweets and on other statements the ‘client’ made on-line. The eleven virtual clients were not told about the project, so the students could only go by these on-line statements.

Each student was given an area of 500 x 500 metres in Amsterdam in which to find a suitable location for a 130 square metre house.

A book made about project Twitterhouse can be viewed here, and a video about one of the cases, fashion designer Joline Jolink, is below:

Says Jolink:

@KimTextilia Kim moet je dit zien: http://www.bright.nl/ontwerp-een-huis-op-basis-van-tweets SCARY!!

(Links: Bright, The Mobile City. Source image: Twitter.)

Tags:

April 10, 2010

Oldest family-owned company of Amsterdam may leave the city

Filed under: Food & Drink,History by Branko Collin @ 5:09 pm

Spice trader Van Eeghen, founded in 1662, has put its Amsterdam office up for rent. According to Parool, the oldest family-owned company of Amsterdam is even considering leaving the city.

Van Eeghen is housed in the Sweedenrijk building on Herengracht 462, smack in the middle of the Golden Bend, an extension of the Herengracht created in 1663. Prospective owners were encouraged to buy double lots, with the result that the city’s most affluent would build their little palaces there.

“Nothing lasts for ever,” Willem van Eeghen (14th generation) told the paper. Most of the company’s activities take place in Canada these days, and only 20 people work at the Amsterdam office. The first two floors are now for rent for 250 euro per square metre, per year, which I am guessing is a steal for that location. If the right offer comes along, the company will even consider moving out altogether.

Perhaps the neighbourhood isn’t what it used to be. To the right of Van Eeghen is lawyer Bram Moscowicz, whose nickname is ‘maffiamaatje’ (mob buddy), and two doors to the left is a subsidiary of internet mogul Yahoo, supplier of dissidents to torture chambers since 2005.

According to Wikipedia, the oldest still existing company in the Netherlands is Brand (beer, 1340), although that example neatly displays the major flaw of that list: these days Brand is merely—nomen est omen—a brand of Heineken’s.

The image is a detail of Berckheyde‘s famous De Bocht van de Herengracht, painted in 1671. Sweedenrijk is in the middle of the frame, with Moscowicz’ slither attached to it. As you can see, the lot to the left was still unoccupied that year.

Tags: , , ,

Parkinson’s sufferer can ride bike, not walk

Filed under: Bicycles,Health by Branko Collin @ 10:06 am

A man with Parkinson’s Diseased treated in the Nijmegen academic hospital recently demonstrated that he can ride a bicycle, but not walk.

Dr. Bastiaan Bloem of Radboud University told the New York Times:

He said, ‘Just yesterday I rode my bicycle for 10 kilometers’ — six miles. He said he rides his bicycle for miles and miles every day.

I said, ‘This cannot be. This man has end-stage Parkinson’s disease. He is unable to walk.’

We helped him mount the bike, gave him a little push, and he was gone.

The 58-year-old man can only take a few steps before he falls to the ground, his hands shaking uncontrollably all the while. Dr. Bloem hypothesizes that bicycling may use a different part of the brain than walking. Another explanation could be that the pedals provide a pacing cue to the patients’ nervous system.

The Times’ article provides a video that shows the patient trying to walk, and that also shows him bicycling effortlessly.

The New England Journal of Medicine added this ‘helpful’ note:

(Editor’s note: In Video 2, the patient is not wearing a safety helmet because in the Netherlands, unlike the United States, wearing a safety helmet is neither required by law nor customary.)

Is anybody besides me reminded of this story?

(Photo by Flickr user heliosphan, some rights reserved)

Tags:

April 9, 2010

Holocaust survivor finally to receive Dutch apologies

Filed under: General,History by Branko Collin @ 3:23 pm

Selma Wijnberg (87) was the only Dutch survivor of the Nazi concentration camp Sobibor, but the Dutch government once almost made sure that even she would not have had that distinction.

Wijnberg managed to escape the death camp in Poland in 1943 and to hide in the countryside. After the war she returned to the Netherlands where she married a fellow escapee, Polish Jew Chaim Engel. Her marriage was reason for the Dutch government to threaten to revoke her Dutch nationality.

Although the government never acted upon its threat, Wijnberg was incensed about her treatment, and emigrated to the US, where she has lived ever since.

Wijnberg’s children managed to convince her to return to the Netherlands to attend the commemoration ceremony at Westerbork, a camp in the Netherlands from which Jews were transported to the death camps. At Westerbork Dutch minister Ab Klink will offer Wijnberg apologies on behalf of the Dutch government, according to De Volkskrant.

Many Jews were treated badly by their fellow Dutch countrymen after the war. During the war, 100,000 of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were killed in concentration camps, a percentage only trumped by Poland. The government’s policy of storing much information about its citizens enabled the Nazis to efficiently murder as many Jews as possible.

(Photo by Jacques Lahitte, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,