Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:35 pm
Women who work in the Dutch military are obliged to buy their sports bras from a sports good chain called Run Today. However, in the province of North Holland (in and around Den Helder) where most of the female military work and live, there is no Run Today, so women have to travel to Haarlem (about 80 km) or Groningen (about 154 km) to buy their two allocated sports bras for work. The women can also declare their travel expenses and do their bra shopping during work hours.
Marine commanders are upset about this because it’s a waste of time. How stupid is the Ministry of Defense? Let the women buy their bras elsewhere! Run Today, open a store in Den Helder, pronto!
And zibb, I also told you you’re a bit dumb for calling sports bras ‘lingerie’. Imagine if we called jock straps ‘sexy underwear’.
I popped into the local cheap stuff store to see if I couldn’t score anything weird – it’s my idea of retail therapy. Just as I walked in the Dutch Christmas cards were already within reach and I had to see how bad it was. We don’t celebrate Halloween here in general, so once summer is over, Christmas and Sinterklaas paraphernalia hits the stores as early as September, a common gripe here, as kids no longer want to wait for December to get goodies from their parents.
Seriously, check these cards out. On the right, we have Santa Claus is petting (!) one of the most dangerous animals I know from my native Great White North. This is just beyond tacky, it’s environmentally incorrect and could mess up small children for life (sarcasm in place). It looks cute at first glance, but I jumped when I saw it. Have a good, hard look at what being mauled by a polar bear actually looks like if you dare, I know you want to.
On the left, we have Santa Claus with the entire white fur dangerous wild animal petting zoo: baby polar bear (Knut look alike), a very still rabbit (unreal), two wolves (surreal), a baby seal (mind blowingly improbable) and what I think is a hermine.
Have a white, über-Caucausian, environmentally incorrect yet cuddly messed up Christmas! If anyone wants to receive one of these cards, let me know I have eight left.
Major Australian cities have decided to ban some Calvin Klein jeans adverts because they are “suggestive of violence and rape”. The sexy pic, shot by British based fashion photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, show Dutch model Lara Stone “fooling around with a group of half naked guys in what looks like a public basketball court.”
No, no wait. Stop. That’s not what I saw. I saw a painfully orchestrated yet very unplausible photo of a girl that’s getting way too much attention due to her choice of (and lack of) jeans. The guy on the left is bored with the entire deal, too busy looking like James Dean, the one holding her head is not pinning her down or anything and the guy giving Lara some attention looks almost too young and inexperienced to be doing so. Granted, it looks like the light version of a gang bang where everybody looks nice and friendly, and it could be provocative to adults if you were living in a cave and missed out on Madonna’s book ‘Sex’ and oh so many other things. If it was a Jean Paul Gaultier perfume advert with just men, would people have said anything? Or all women? Or women tearing up some young guy’s shirt? Hm?
Granted, young children won’t get this and it is risqué, but this kind of advertising is not going away any time soon. Selling jeans hasn’t been about actually seeing jeans for about 15 years. If you want to protect your kids, educate them, methinks.
Dick Bruna, the man who introduced the world to Miffy, one of the Netherlands’ biggest export ‘products’ some 50 years ago, is sueing Japanese company Sanrio for its Japanese Miffy, called Kathy. For the record, Miffy is the English name of Nijntje, a shortened, affectionate name for ‘bunny’ in Dutch (konijntje).
At 83 years of age and basically world famous, Bruna is surely not trying to gain status with this case, but simply make the point that you can’t just make lesser copies of his work and get away with it. We’ll keep you posted if we hear more.
“Japan’s ‘Kathy’ is drawn with the same simple lines, wears an almost identical dress and has very similar ears. The main difference is that Kathy wears a bow.” It really does look like ‘Hello Kitty’ went ‘Hello Bunny’.
Filed under: Religion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:11 pm
A Dutch government television and radio commercial with a social message on domestic violence has caused a scandal for inciting women who get beaten by their male partners to ‘just talk it out’. And this contemptuous Christian valued attempt at keeping a dysfunctional relationship together for no good reason deserves a translation:
A soft spoken woman says: “The first few months I didn’t dare try anything. I let it all wash over me. It hurt, but it will go away, just like the bruises. I thought it was so sweet when a girlfriend of mine said, ‘That’s enough already. You can solve this together, with outside help.’ Then I called.”
Any usual Western world message is ‘get out of there, call someone, get help, take the kids with you too, etc.’, as we have seen here on billboards, even written in Turkish and Arabic. As we all have learned, a man who beats his wife will most probably continue to do so. Why take that risk? Yes, women do stay with partners because of the children, because they choose to be economically dependent on them, etc. But is it really responsible for my tax money to finance advertising that tells women to stay put and get beaten up? It’s totally disgusting and it won’t solve anything.
De Pers quotes an expert that says the government is trying to tell people in bad relationships with a lot of yelling and stuff that they should talk it out, which is obviously the wrong group to be focusing on. What the government doesn’t understand is that hard core wife beaters are committing a crime and that, like oh so many problems in Dutch society, don’t go away by having tea and a friendly chat.
The Netherlands has even been criticised by the United Nations for being the only member country whose domestic violence phone help lines were not free to call. Apparently, being cheap is a good Christian value to them.
Dutch outgoing Christian government: may you rot in hell.
Two Dutch designers, Jorre van Ast and Nicolai Carels, won a Grand Prix design award from manufacturer Royal VKB. Van Ast scored with a new-fangled drying rack for dishes, the Dish Drainer Geo, while Carels came up with a wok for dummies, the Boomerang Wok (see video).
I have to agree with one of the comments I read: wokking is a skill and spilling the food everywhere like in this video seems like a dummy Western thing to be doing. However, the Boomerang Wok seems like a nice solution.
Filed under: Music,Science by Orangemaster @ 3:57 pm
The Noord Nederlands Orkest of Groningen plans to participate in scientific research into the Mozart effect together with the Univeristy of Groningen.
The Mozart effect is a theory that claims to boost one’s IQ (and that of children) by listening to and/or playing Mozart. During an upcoming concert, the audience’s brain activity is going to be measured, as part of an experiment.
There are all kinds of serious studies on why listening to music is good for your brain, but then the idea that it increases intelligence is controversial at best.
Although I love Mozart, I preferred to go to Salzburg and check him out in person.
Online shop Biocosmetica in Dordrecht announced this week that it will be selling a condom (The ‘Lovepack’) that is carbon neutral, made of rubber from sustainable forests. As well, the rubber planters will be paid fairly for their goods, making them fair trade items as well.
That should give some people a clear conscience, although condoms are bad for the environment no matter how you make them.
Filed under: Design,Gaming by Orangemaster @ 10:55 am
In his spare time, hidden away in his tool shed, 66-year-old trucker Ad Bruynzeel has been coming up with board games for ages. And finally, after decades, he invented a game called Wobble, which now is an international hit and means that work is soon to be his hobby.
Dutch gamemaker Identity Games signed him up just like that, and although already in Europe, you’ll be seeing Wobble in North America soon as well.
I like the catchy ‘Roll to the Hole’ as a slogan. This game looks like a grandpa with grandchildren kind of hit. “The goal of the game is to get the ball in the right hole by moving or replacing the discs on the edge of the board.”
And we’re back with a Nobel Prize winning edition of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (’Find the Dutch person’), with Russian-born Dutch physicist André Konstantinovich Geim, co-winner of these year’s Nobel Prize for Physics and his partner, Konstantin Sergeevich Novoselov, a Russian-British physicist. Geim is happy to have a ‘Western’ passport having chucked his Russian nationality like mouldy bread after years of frustration, while Novoselov has his reasons for enjoy dual citizenship. Either way, both these men were able to make their dream come true and future generations will surely be able to enjoy their discovery.
They were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics this year “for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.” Surf the net and you’ll find cool videos and explanations with magnetized frogs and graphite pencils.
This material called ‘graphene’ was long thought to be unstable, as it is only one atom thick.” Geim and Novoselov used scotch tape to drop graphene, a single layer of graphite onto a piece of silicon, and the rest is history.
