I caught a glimpse of Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer on telly who the orange-clad audience in the stands were basically waiting for to win as expected at the World Speed Skating Championships in Vancouver, Canada last weekend. I was happy to hear that they spoke French at the event (it’s not the plague anymore), so I kept watching.
There were adverts from Dutch utility Essent that read ‘Svencouver’. If you read it in Dutch, the ‘Sven’ rhymes with ‘Van’ and it’s very cute. Essent wants to get customers to sign up with Essent under the name ‘Svencouver’ so they can get a discount depending on how many gold medals Kramer wins, which apparently is just a question of time. Problem is, they’re not an official Olympic sponsor.
In true Dutch uncle style, the Dutch Olympic committee asked Essent to lose their excellent slogan because it sounds too much like Vancouver. And that’s apparently not good because Vancouver is supposed to be synonymous with the Olympics, the five coloured rings and all, but not Essent or our man Sven.
Luckily for Essent, they also had a back up — ‘Svenergy’. In fact, Essent has no legal obligation to stop using ‘Svencouver’, but are literally being sports about it.
What bugs me is the Dutch Olympic Committee publically reprimanding a good sponsor in times of crisis.
(Link: sportwereld.nl)
A 56-year-old Dutch woman, Anna B. as she calls herself, was caught smuggling 8 kilos of “very good Dutch weed” into Italy, two years ago. Her lawyer managed to make it so that after a few months she could spend the rest of her 3 year 4 month sentence under house arrest. Friends got her an apartment in what appears to be a very idyllic village in Lombardia, and another stroke of luck made it so that she got two hours a day to go to the supermarket, time she uses to go hiking.
The headline may be a little misleading, because when the police stopped Simon de Bruin at an unknown date in Amstelveen and fined him 150 euro, it was for sticking a finger in his own ear. To be even more precise, the police thought he was making a phone call while driving a car which is only allowed if you do it hands-free. When De Bruin protested that he had just showered, that he was merely removing the last bit of water from his ear and that the police could check his phone logs, the officers were unimpressed and uninterested. “Tell it to the judge,” they told De Bruin. 
Here’s the 1981 party programme of… can you guess? The programme was for the parliamentary elections. I left out #10, because that one’s a bit of a dead give-away, even today. (No peeking at the picture now!)
Physiotherapists from the province of Groningen have noticed a rise in Wii related sports injuries,
What do you do, when all the money you invested in stocks and options is losing weight faster than the contestants in the tv show 
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Miep Gies, the woman who was important in Anne Frank’s life and pivotal in what we now know about Anne Frank