February 18, 2009

Limburg carnival protest song written by policitians

Filed under: Music,Shows,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:27 am

The Socialist Party (SP) in the southernmost province of Limburg have written a carnival song protesting against the upcoming sale of the province’s share of utility Essent to the Germans. It is called ‘Zoëlang um maar get te zoepe haet’, which is in Limburgs dialect and probably means ‘As long as you havehe has enough to drink’. This is co-blogger Branko’s mother tongue and he speaks the Venlo variant. You may notice the softer sound of the gutteral ‘g’, which is the dead giveaway.

Carnival is just a few days away (22- 24 February) and what better way to express your anger than to get everybody drunk and singing along, protesting against losing more local clout during a recession. You may notice German is also being sung in the video, making it a multicultural all-arounder.

I can’t help but point out that many people in the northern part of the country (there’s this invisible line somewhere near a river or two) don’t celebrate carnival at all, which is seen as a more Catholic shindig, but have utter contempt for it because it’s just a huge piss up with a dress up flavour to it. Oddly enough, the same argument goes for the national holiday Queen’s Day and major football matches, but apparently some parties are more equal than others.

(Link: rtl.nl)

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February 15, 2009

City of Leeuwarden lost its porn

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 10:35 am

The city of Leeuwarden has lost its porn stash archive, a staff member of the Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden reported last Thursday. The collection was part of a larger archive about everything to do with the Frisian capital, and was put together in the 1970s. Apparently the porn archive got lost during a move.

“It did not have its own spot,” the staff member told De Telegraaf (Dutch). The paper speculates that somebody stole the collection. Somehow it takes a Telegraaf reporter to imagine appreciation of second hand porn.

Totally unrelated photo of the Achmea Tower in Leeuwarden by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved. It was either this or a picture of a nun. I talk too much.

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February 12, 2009

Don’t eat bulbs, warns supermarket

Filed under: General,Nature,Weird by Branko Collin @ 7:51 am

This is one of those inside-the-asylum moments: Supermarket Albert Heijn sells baskets with flower bulbs, and at the bottom it says: “For decorative purposes only, do not eat.”

Inside-the-asylum moment? A reference to the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, in which one Wonko the Sane explains why the rest of us are living at the funny farm:

The sign read:

“Hold stick near center of its length. Moisten pointed end in mouth. Insert in tooth space, blunt end next to gum. Use gentle in-out motion.”

“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

This is why he built himself a house that’s ‘outside’ the asylum.

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February 6, 2009

Sexist advert denigrates Dutch women and men

Filed under: General,Literature,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:15 pm

FD

This just in! It features a woman doing an invisible pole dance and reads “Manipulate your manager” and then, roughly “Serious about moving up in your career? Register for the FD career challenge ’09!”

Women are complete idiots and have to use their bodies to climb up the ladder of success and all managers are of course all men (and straight!) and have no brains. Ouch. Looking forward to finding out who came up with this one.

The FD is the Netherlands’ top financial paper, which basically is stooping pretty low with this one. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the press is going to say. I’d also like to say that I am surprised social networking site LinkedIn agrees with this.

You’ll hear more from us on this.

I clicked the online version away somewhere today when I was working (the girl dances!), but after seeing this photo from a shocked Dutch girlfriend on Twitter, I put lunch on hold and had to write this up.

(Tip and photo: Jacqueline)

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January 22, 2009

Dousing a hangover with drinks

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Branko Collin @ 9:53 am

National Geographic made this handy interactive chart that shows how different cultures deal with hangovers. According to the chart, only one people kills its “brackish” feeling, as they say here, by pouring alcohol on top of alcohol, and that’s the Dutch. Visit the site and hover the images for more illumination about inebriation.

Via Sargasso (Dutch).

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January 21, 2009

Text message got students to see Obama live

Filed under: Aviation,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:15 am
virgin1.jpg

On 16 January, two ‘poor students’ were at a congress called the Big Improvement Day in Amsterdam where Sir Richard Branson, CEO of the Virgin Group was a guest speaker. Through a back channel screen and using text messages (and oddly enough not free Twitter), people could ask Branson questions. Two guys jokingly asked him, “Would you bring two poor students to Washington?” to which Branson answered “yes” right away. They actually got to jet off to see Obama live yesterday. Cliché number one: ask, and you shall receive. Cliché number two: it’s easy to be off the cuff when you’re loaded.

Branson dropped the guys off in Washington, while the organisers of the congress offered to pay for their accommodations. Not bad.

(Link: rtl.nl)

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January 12, 2009

New Year’s dive girl gets free cheese for a year

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:23 am
Beemster cheese

What started out as a the traditional New Year’s Dive turned into the search for the 17-year-old blonde girl with the big breasts flopping out of her bikini top. The more ‘common’ newspaper De Telegraaf could not do anything else than print that picture and create even more news.

And now, having avoided the obvious news this picture created once they found the girl, the story gets interesting. Smoked sausage producer Unox, which sponsors the dive every year (she was wearing a Unox hat in the picture), offered the blonde girl free smoked sausage for one year. But lo and behold, she is a vegetarian and refused their offer. Then Beemster cheese moved in and offered her a year’s supply of cheese, which she went for instead.

I just know we’ll be hearing more about Luca the big breasted blonde this year.

(Link: rtl.nl)

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January 8, 2009

Dutch advert about washing one’s vagina

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:14 pm

I thought I had seen everything: adverts with female frontal nudity (very normal occurrence here) and some naked male DJ with his not very impressive kit facing the camera at 9 am in the morning, but this advert just made me stop everything I was doing and post. It’s pushing (no pun intended) a vagina wash product and it is filmed from the between a woman’s legs point of view. Ickeepoo squared.

Besides the obvious OMG (Oh My God!) response I just had, as a woman I am sick and tired of any product advertising that seeks to generate even more useless insecurity in women and their bodies, especially in teenage girls, just to sell a product. Ickeepoo some more.

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December 31, 2008

Bad advertising and Happy New Year!

Filed under: Technology,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:59 pm
Hardware

Give it to me straight: Bad taste? Stupid? Clever? Sexist? No way she could have had those identical triplets? This advert was on the front page of December’s Dutch IT newspaper Automatisering Gids. It reads “Need additional temporary hardware?”

Off to New Year’s celebrations now. Happy New Year to all our readers!

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December 15, 2008

Revolving door generates power

Filed under: Sustainability,Weird by Branko Collin @ 10:11 am

As if it isn’t bad enough that since they privatized, the national railroad monopolist barely seems to manage to run a train on time, to boot the NS (Dutch Railways) has now resorted to forced labour. Everybody passing through this revolving door helps the Driebergen-Zeist railway station generate a little bit of electricity. According to an enthousiastic manufacturer, Boon Edam, this is the world’s first energy generating revolving door and a breakthrough in “entrance technology.” There’s a word I bet you did not know existed. They estimate the amount of revolutions to be a scientific “gazillion times.”

The electricity thus won is used to illuminate a sign that says how much electricity the door has generated so far.

Link: Forever Geek. Photo Boon Edam.

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