July 30, 2010

HEMA shop incites children to cheat on exams

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:23 pm

HEMA, a popular Dutch chain store, has set up a website encouraging children to share their exam cheating tips, as a way to draw attention to their back to school products. The smarty pants who send in tips get a free invisible ink pen.

According to Bizz.nl, some 18,000 (!) kids have already left tips. Now all teachers have to learn these tips by heart during their vacation, the article jokes.

Teachers are pissed at Hema, while the folks at HEMA don’t think it’s a big deal. In the past HEMA has had a Top 5 of most stolen products campaign, showing they have a good sense of humour.

One of the comments reads “Let’s hope that the students make the grade this way since working at HEMA is probably what they’ll end up doing later.”

(Link: bizz.nl, Photo by Hans Vandenbogaerde, some rights reserved)

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July 29, 2010

Scotland’s Sink the Bismarck beer sunk by the Dutch

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:23 pm

Someone was telling me at a dinner party about this beer (not the one in the picture) and the (pardon the pun) pissing contest it became to brew the world’s strongest beer. Back in February Scottish brewery BrewDog could still claimed it brewed the world’s strongest beer called Sink the Bismarck! at 41 per cent. It has now been surpassed by Almere’s Jan Nijboer of brewery ‘t Koelschip with a beer called Start the Future that comes in at a whopping 60 per cent.

Game on.

(Link: spitsnieuws.nl)

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Thieves make off with church bells

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 7:01 am

While increasingly more copper is being stolen from train tracks, warehouses, lighting rods, construction containers and the likes, some thieves have moved up to bronze church bells.

In Apeldoorn, two 100 kg bronze bells were stolen from a church sometime on Tuesday 27 July. In nearby Twello, thieves scored 11 17 kg worth of bells.

(Link: dutchnews.nl. Photo: bells in Valkenburg, Limburg)

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July 28, 2010

Underaged boy re-enacts film with mom’s car

Filed under: Automobiles,Film,Gaming,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:09 pm

First there was our world-famous story about a man causing a blackout in a hospital, thinking he was playing horror video game Silent Hill, now there’s a 17-year-old boy in Veenendaal who re-enacted the movie ‘The Fast and the Furious’ by driving his mom’s car into someone’s yard.

Legal driving age is 18 here, so he borrowed mom’s car illegally. Not only did the boy trash someone’s yard, he also drove the car home, parked it, and pretended nothing happened. He got caught by the cops because a licence plate fell off in said yard. Damn. His excuse to the police was that he had watched ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and wanted to try out drifting, a driving technique “where the driver intentionally oversteers, causing loss of traction in the rear wheels through turns,” and “make smoke come out of the tires”.

Watch how it’s done on British television show Top Gear with cool Japanese guys:

(Link: gelderlander.nl)

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July 27, 2010

The Ice Man breaks his own ice sitting record

Filed under: Dutch first,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:57 am

On Saturday in Utrecht’s busiest shopping mall, Wim Hof, aka the Ice Man, broke his record of sitting in ice for 1 hour and 13 minutes by a whopping 31 minutes 23 seconds (1 h 44 min 23 sec).

Back in May, after having put Hof through tests, two Dutch scientists in Nijmegen concluded that what he can do “is medically impossible”.

He’s just the definition of cool.

Read and watch more about The Ice Man being a freak of nature.

(Link: rtvutrecht)

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July 12, 2010

US news site claims Netherlands won World Cup

Filed under: Sports,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:09 pm

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Sloppy American journalism from ‘trusted’ news source CBS.

Surely this was a draft that never should have gone online, but the sloppy people at CBS news are making headlines and freaking people out with their glaring incompetence.

Read the whole sloppy story.

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July 9, 2010

Psychic parakeet picks the Netherlands to win

Filed under: Animals,Sports,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:24 pm
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Silly season (lack of newsworthy news, due to summer vacation, aka ‘komkommertijd’ (‘cucumber season’) is upon us.

And whether we like it or not (we do, of course), nothing counts more right now than the Dutch winning the World Cup football.

After Paul the Octopus from Oberhausen predicted all the German matches correctly, including their loss to Spain, Mani the psychic parakeet in Singapore has chosen the Netherlands as a winner over Spain to win the World Cup football.

“Muniyappan, Mani’s owner, has helped him predict the future for five years at a table in front of a restaurant in the Little India neighbourhood, but this year’s World Cup is the first time the parakeet has attempted to forecast the outcome of sports competitions.”

We are all dying to find out what Paul thinks, too. The rumours so far are that he has predicted Spain, but considering the lack of links and typos in those links, I’m not sure Paul has spoken at this time.

The Netherlands currently has the biggest bout of ‘oranjekoorts’ (‘orange fever’) in over 32 years. Everything everywhere from the baker to the cafe on the corner is decorated orange, worse than on Queen’s Day. Win or lose, we’ll surely be taking pictures.

UPDATE: Dutch telly has shown footage of Paul the Octopus choosing Spain.

(Link: guardian.co.uk)

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July 8, 2010

Free oral sex if Netherlands wins the World Cup

Filed under: Animals,Sports,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:57 am

Dutch pornostar Bobbi Eden twittered that she and her girlfriends will give out free blowjobs to her followers if Oranje (Dutch football team) wins the cup.

The link below said she had 5,000 followers, now 20,000, but I just checked and she’s up to 60,532. I say, recruit some more girlfriends.

If that’s not weird enough, we’re all waiting for Paul the psychic octopus to make his predictions for the final, Netherlands vs. Spain. Paul, in an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, predicted Spain would win the semi-final against Germany and they did. “He correctly predicted all five of the team’s previous World Cup games – including a shock defeat by Serbia in the group stages.”

Watch Paul (not Bobbi) in action:

(Link: rtl.nl)

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July 7, 2010

Man heavily fined for groping policewoman

Filed under: Sports,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:40 am
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A 29-year-old man from Bunschoten near Utrecht was fined 1000 euro for pinching a policewoman’s read end back in April. He was drunk, the cop told him to stop and he didn’t. The drunken man had to pay compensation for damages, as the woman was made the laughing stock of her department and was eventually transferred.

I admit to not taking two female cops seriously once because they didn’t exude any authority or understanding. I was double parked in Amsterdam unloading DJ gear where major construction (the Amsterdam metro) was literally blocking the entrance way to a building I had to get into. There was no other entrance way but a side door where I had to double park for about 10 minutes.

They told me I couldn’t, I said I knew, but I asked them what their solution was. They repeated you can’t, I asked again what their solution was, pointing to my gear and all. They stared at each other, I stared back with a smile and then they pissed off on their mountain bikes. Yes, it could have been two men, then I would have smiled more and been less smug.

In other news, if you’ve been living in a cave with terrorists, the Dutch football team is in the final for the World Cup.

reformatorischeomroep.nl)

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June 28, 2010

Rotterdam teachers tested on grading speed

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 2:11 pm

Not only does Hogeschool Rotterdam test its students, it is also planning to ‘test’ its teachers. After having received many complaints from students about having to wait too long to get their test scores, the school will now evaluate its teachers based on the turnaround time for grading exams, according to De Telegraaf.

If a teacher takes longer than 20 working days to come up with a grade for any given test, they will be denied a raise at the end of the year, writes Algemeen Dagblad.

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