April 26, 2011
The VVV Venlo football club in Limburg has signed a symbolic professional contract of 10 years for this wee boy of 1.5 years who has a good shot. Sure, it’s a YouTube thing, but 900,000 people if not more around the world have seen this video and now you can too. The little boy, Baerke, even tried out on the field with a VVV Venlo midfielder and apparently the toddler’s grandfather used to play with this team way back.
(Link: telegraaf)
April 21, 2011
A neighbourhood in the town of Schagen, North Holland won 2,000 bicycles from a national lottery that picks its winners using their postal codes. Normally a few streets win prizes, usually money, but this time it was a bigazz pile of bicycles. That’s all really nice, but some man ended up with 14 bikes, which is a bit much.
The bike shops in the small town have told local telly station they were not happy with the possibility of losing business, but in good entrepreneurial spirit, they have stepped up advertising accessories and theft insurance.
Quikc idea: give your 10 extra bikes to the poor? Of course you can also sell them, but obviously not to your neighbours.
(Link: waarmaarraar)
April 20, 2011
Ice Man Wim Hof holds many ice-related records, including one he broke just last week in Lapland, Finland: he walked 10 kilometers uphill in his bare feet and shorts in -10 degrees celsius in 56 minutes without having trained for it.
A while back we told about Dutch scientists who wanted to poke and prod him to find out what makes him so special, although Hof himself attributes his feats to Tummo meditaion.
The quick and dirty version is that Hof can control his central nervous system through his meditation, blocking out feelings of cold and also in the process his immune system, so that he doesn’t get sick. The boffins experimented on 240 people and Hof’s results were remarkably different.
A big Happy Birdthday to Wim Hof who turned 52 today, and who is now certified a really cool freak of nature. And even if you do this kind of meditation, chances are you won’t achieve any of the same results.
(Link: gelderlander)
April 17, 2011
I don’t often have the time to prepare breakfast, so I tend to end up taking a bottle of Fruit2day to the workplace. The manufacturer, Swiss company Hero, promises that these drinks contain all the fruit you need in a day. (The drinks also contain a quarter of all the sugar you need in a day, but the producer doesn’t give that factoid as much prominence.)
Can you guess what the two main (fruit) ingredients of each drink are? Answers after the break. To get you started, the names of the drinks from left to right, when translated to English, are: “Strawberry Orange”, “Raspberry Grape”, and “Mango Peach”.
(more…)
Tags: advertising
April 15, 2011
A student had to write her thesis based on applied scientific research done in a company or institution, in this case, a hospital. The hospital demanded that her thesis be written in Dutch. The exam commission who will judge her thesis at the Radboud Univesity in Nijmegen demanded that her thesis be written in English.
The student couldn’t fulfil the requirements of her studies and decided to appeal the decision to be able to write her thesis in Dutch, which sounds weird. Exceptions have been made in the past to the English only rule, but that was then and those days are over: it’s English or nothing, which still sounds weird.
Her mentor also supported her appeal. It’s all fine that English be encouraged for the Dutch to be internationally recognised, but sabotaging someone’s studies to uphold a principle seems ludicrous. The University then blamed companies and institutions for not allowing students to do their thesis in English, but that doesn’t help this student at all.
Can’t it just be translated? In any case, if anything shows how English has became more important than Dutch (not that that is a good thing), this is a scary example of how things can go too far.
(Link: ru.nl)
April 14, 2011
Utrecht marathon bans foreign runners door tvnportal
On Monday 25 April, the city of Utrecht will hold its annual marathon, and the organisers have decided that non-Dutch participants are less worthy of winning this race as they’re simply too good and win too much. Sounds like something an elementary school teacher would say to the smart children not to hurt the stupid kids’ feelings.
Organisers are trying to discourage Kenyans in particular from taking part, saying only invited runners can win ‘big money’ prizes. Only Dutch nationals have been invited to take part.
If this isn’t discrimination, I don’t know what is. No other Dutch marathon does this.
(Link dutchnews.nl, Tip: Stefan)
Tags: discrimination, marathon, Utrecht
April 8, 2011
Every country in the world has that one town that people make fun of and in the Netherlands, that town is Urk, Flevoland.
The former island (that could explain some weirdness) seems to attract attention by making decisions based on its strong religious beliefs that are akin to fighting windmills because nothing they do seems to work, it just seems to get worse.
After banning strippers, attempting beer confiscation and littering the rest of the country with creationist folders, it’s now time to score some drug sniffing dogs to enforce the town-wide marijuana ban, which ironically is illegal. Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten warned Urk’s city council that it cannot declare the entire village a drug-free zone because that’s illegal. But hey, when you do things based on your religious beliefs the law goes out the window pretty fast and you can get away with murder.
The word on the Internet is that the kids in Urk are some of the most messed up youth in the area not because of some sort of preponderance of drugs and booze, but because of the very religious city council constantly making them the object of their problems. We’ll save the hard drug use and unwanted pregnancies stories for later.
Slightly unrelated, but I had to.
Lard – I want to be a drug sniffing dog
(Link: dutchnews.nl)
March 29, 2011
Yesterday, scuba diving club De Waterman in Oss, Brabant got 173 divers together to break the World Record Underwater Ironing. The former world record was held by a Polish scuba diving club with 130 divers. De Waterman said they worked really hard, right up to the last minute to find enough divers and enough ironing gear.
De Waterman can now proudly be included in the Guinness Book of Records just in time for the club’s 40th anniversary.
(Link: depers.nl, Photo Photo of Underwater ironing by BlueBeyond, some rights reserved)
Tags: Brabant, Guinness Book of Records, ironing, Oss, scuba diving
March 24, 2011
Air guitar star Tremelo Theun is duking it out over money with the town of Hengelo, Overijssel. Bureaucrats have calculated that in addition to his unemployment benefits, he has earned about 3,760 euro that he didn’t declare, accounting for some 43 gigs since 2005.
He claims that he’s only had 32 gigs, that he once received 40 euro for costs and that with a few exceptions, he hasn’t made any real money. Bureaucrats have decided to multiply it all up and give him a fine for not declaring his earnings.
Twice world champion air guitar has had to lawyer up to fight the man.
Stay tuned (bad pun).
(Link: deweekkrant.nl)
Tags: air guitar, Overijssel, taxes, Tremolo Theun
March 23, 2011
It has all the trappings of the opening scene of a B-movie. Employees in the ‘quiet’ town of Bolsward, Friesland were working at the supermarket, doing their thing. All of a sudden, an employee was in the fruit section and saw something big and brown crawl out of the bananas to say Bom Dia! to the world.
It was big and is apparently high venimous. It was a Brazilian wandering spider (phoneutria nigriventer) that hitched a ride on a bunch of bananas from Costa Rica to the Netherlands.
If you get bitten by the Brazilian, it does things only its maker could have come up with after a bender of mojitos and samba. Here’s what Wikipedia tells us:
Aside from causing intense pain, the venom of the spider can also cause priapism in humans. Erections resulting from the bite are uncomfortable, can last for many hours and can lead to impotence. A component of the venom (Tx2-6) is being studied for use in erectile dysfunction treatments.
In true sober Dutch style, an employee caught the spider, put it in a jar, and eventually drowned it and threw it in the bin.
(Link: hartvannederland.nl, Photo of Ctenus exlineae (F Ctenidae) by Marshal Hedin, some rights reserved)
