December 8, 2010

Criminal walks out of prison and nobody noticed

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:26 am

A 31-year-old man escaped from Vught prison on Tuesday by just walking out the door with a group of visitors, according to newspaper De Telegraaf. “The man, who was serving time for a violent crime, was spotted later on security cameras mingling with visitors and leaving through the front door.” It took guards hours to figure out how the man went missing. They realised it by watching video footage of him leaving.

Incompetence, you say? At the beginning of this year, one of the Netherlands’ eight most wanted criminals turned out to be in jail in Belgium since 2008.

(Links: dutchnews, zibb.nl, Photo by Ken Mayer, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

December 7, 2010

An interactive history of KLM’s house-shaped genever bottles

Filed under: Architecture,Aviation,Design,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:29 pm

First you follow the link to the cute little Delft blue houses, and then you can click on any of the 91 bottles and find out what house it is and where. Most of them can be found in Amsterdam, but a few of them are from towns like Amersfoort, Delft, Breda and Schiedam.

I spontaneously clicked on number 81 and got ‘proeflokaal’ (roughly ‘tasting pub’) De Drie Fleschjes (The Three Bottles) in Amsterdam pictured above (here is what it looks like today). Ironically, it is a place to sample gin and have a drink.

What I thought was odd though is that there is the same house twice (11 and 23), another ‘proeflokaal’ in Amsterdam, Wijnand Fockink. I think the makers of the site made a mistake, as 90 is a much nicer number.

(Link and image: klom.com, via amsterdamadblog.com)

Tags: , , , , , , ,

December 3, 2010

Direct flight Amsterdam-Miami to party using Twitter

Filed under: Aviation,Music by Orangemaster @ 11:03 am
airplane1.JPG

Two dance music fans wanted to go to the Ultra Music dance festival in Miami in late March, but there were no direct flights to Miami in that period. The guys decided to challenge KLM on Twitter: if they could get 150 people for a flight, KLM would fly them to Miami. KLM agreed, but they had to have the people before 6 December. They started a website and got 285 people!

If this is not a creative use of Twitter, I don’t know what is. It also sounds like a Christmas tale. Well, OK, a little bit like one.

(Link: sevendays.nl, Photo of an unrelated Lufthansa Canadair regional jet 900 (or 700?) flying to Munich out of Schiphol airport)

Tags: , , ,

December 2, 2010

The News Kids film: white trash is hot

Filed under: Fashion,Film,Music by Orangemaster @ 10:28 am

A film nobody has really been waiting for is coming out on 9 December: the New Kids film ‘Turbo’. Website Flabber also tell us that they’ll be a German version of the film as well because these wild and crazy guys have fans in Germany. Yes, it sounds and even looks like an American film trailer, but do not be fooled by the voice-over! The English subtitles are both inaccurate on purpose and not on purpose (the swear word ‘kut’ (used like ‘damn’ or ‘shit’, but meaning ‘cunt’) is left intact, while ‘your fired’ should be ‘you’re fired’. And it’s so not about the dialogue.

From the province of Noord-Brabant or just Brabant (there’s no South Brabant, that would be Brabant in Belgium and a long story), the New Kids are popular because they represent relatively modern Dutch white trash with accompanying music, known as happy hardcore and matching late 1990s clothing: sporty camping comfort with mustaches and mullet hairdoes.

“They’re basically always drunk, driving around and destroying everything that comes in their way, which sometimes leads to getting a good beating themselves.”

For the beginners, it’s time to learn what ‘doe normaal!’ (literally, ‘act normal’!, meaning ‘stop it!’), a lesson you’ll not soon forget.

(Link: flabber)

Tags: , ,

December 1, 2010

Please remove the jet fighter from your garden

Filed under: Art,Aviation,Comics,History,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:09 pm

Artist Marte Röling (often misspelled Martha) has a Lockheed F-104 starfighter in her garden in Uithuizen, Groningen that apparently has to be removed if she hasn’t removed it already. Although it has been sitting there since 1989, some boffins at the Ministry of Defense now think it could be slightly radioactive. Röling received the starfighter as a long-term loan art project. This reminds me of some Peter Tooms in Schoonloo, Drenthe who has a Russian MiG in his yard, although maybe it has been removed as well.

Back in 1976 Prince Bernhard (husband of Queen Juliana) cashed a US$1.1 million bribe from American aviation company Lockheed to ensure that the Lockheed F-104 would win out over France’s Mirage 5 made by Dassault for the purchase contract. Long story short, Bernhard refused to admit it, but after his death in 2004, it turned out to be ‘highly plausible’, but I don’t know if proven is the right word. Lockheed deposited large sums of cash into an account of some guy called Victor Baarn, a person that could never be traced. Co-blogger Branko tells me that Dutch comic strip artist Martin Lodewijk has been milking that story for ages, as in almost every Agent 327 comic book (a character loosely based on James Bond) the secret identity of Victor Baarn threatens to come out.

UPDATE: This was our 1,500th posting, hurrah!)

(Link: rtvnoord)

Tags: , ,

November 30, 2010

Radio station gives away chihuahua as prize

Filed under: Animals,Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:13 pm

North Holland radio sation WildFM felt like giving a prize away that was not the usual fare: a chihuahua, a type of dog that became increasingly popular once American socialite Paris Hilton was seen with one. Other unusal prizes the radio station has given away in the past include a breast enlargement (how very man friendly) and a dream wedding worth 50,000 euro.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

Tags: ,

November 26, 2010

Stop snoring by learning the didgeridoo

Filed under: General,Music,Science by Orangemaster @ 11:46 am

Boffins over at the sleep research centre of the Canisius-Wilhelmina hospital in Nijmegen have concluded that learning how to play the Australian musical instrument didgeridoo helps reduce snoring. The specific training of the mouth and throat muscles to play this instrument apparently help reduce sleep apnea, which causing snoring.

Some 50 people were given a didgeridoo training for four months, which was not easy as one third quit, claiming they were not able to sustain the necessary circular breathing, never mind the time committment. No definite conclusions were drawn with such a small bit of research, but the boffins could be on to something. The Dutch were inspired by the Swiss who did something similar and obtained similar results.

To wipe away the associations some of us have of digireedoo players being Caucasian dreadlock-wearing backpackers who play on the street as they need cash while on vacation in major cities during the summer, have a look at the cool, modern sounding didgeridoo player jamming with South African rapper Jack Parow live at De Nieuwe Nor in Heerlen a few weeks back.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

Tags: , , , , ,

November 25, 2010

Dutch not amused by overpriced lolly at amusement parks

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:40 pm

The rocket (raket), the Dutch lolly invented in 1962 that never crash landed, is apparently way too pricy for the Dutch at amusement park Kabouter Plop in Coevorden, Drenthe, a Belgian ‘invention’.

For a Dutch treat that is often handed out for free around the country, the Dutch have complained that they just couldn’t get themselves to pay EUR 2,50 for it. The same themed amusement park also exists in Belgium where the price of the rocket is not an issue.

There have been so many complaints from the Dutch that not only it is news, but the solution has been to pull the product from the Dutch amusement park. Dutch kids will have to wait until they get home to have a rocket and stick to whatever other overpriced junk food the amusement park has to offer.

(Link: zibb.nl)

Tags: , ,

November 24, 2010

Parliament pushes for prenuptial agreements

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

According to NRC newspaper, the Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world where marriage takes place in a standard way under community property (joint ownership) rather than separate property. Drawing up a prenuptial agreement (the Dutch have surely heard that in American television series) costs money and sharing all your stuff is still considered the right thing to do here, someone please tell me why. A prenuptial agreement not only provides in case of divorce, but also protects property during the marriage in case of a bankruptcy or the likes. Don’t give me that it’s all about trust argument because most of the time in heterosexual marriages women get more than they brought in stuff-wise, a reason some women marry in the first place.

Putting aside gay marriage for a moment, women were traditionally dependent on men, and so community property made sense. The politicians who submitted this proposal to parliament to have the rules changes feel married people should have more say in their own marriages like the rest of the Western world, and parliament agrees.

(Link: nrc.nl, Photo of Wedding cake by philipyk, some rights reserved)

Tags:

November 23, 2010

Bra helps control cleavage wrinkles

Filed under: Design,Fashion,General by Orangemaster @ 8:31 am

Dutch inventor Rachel De Boer had wrinkels in her cleavage at an age when women don’t usually have them, and decided to come up with a way to get rid of them.

Her bra, called La Decollette (in Dutch, ‘cleavage’ is ‘decolleté’, from the French ‘décolleté’), is now being sold in about 100 lingerie shops in the Netherlands. It’s not a bra you wear during the day, it’s something you wear at night to keep your breasts apart, tightening the skin in between. It’s not sexy to go to bed with, granted, but if we can believe the results and the news item on telly, it makes a real difference.

I had heard of breast pillows that do the same thing, but this product obviously looks different and more confortable.

Necessity remains the mother of invention. I tend to just stay out of the sun like an 18th century European aristocrat.

(Links: telegraph.co.uk, Photo: decollette.nl)

Tags: ,