January 31, 2019

Dutch company to let a woman give birth in space

Filed under: Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:09 pm

Feel free to look up having sex in space regardless of who is involved, which I filed under ‘complicated/pass’ in my mind palace. However, if you want to move on to giving birth in space, there’s a Dutch company that wants to tell you about its plans.

Dutch company SpaceLife Origin, a collaboration between business people (dudes, right?) and organisational expert Egbert Edelbroek (a man) from Eindhoven. In 2024, the company’s goal would be to have a Dutch woman give birth in space.

“If we don’t learn how we can procreate in space, then as humans we’re bound to Earth, while life on Earth is increasingly under threat”, explains Edelbroek. It’s under threat because we’re billions of morons using the planet as our own personal rubbish bin, but sure. If we want to go to Mars, we’re theoretically going to have to find out what it’s like to procreate in space. I’m secretly hoping women just won’t want to, but that’s me talking science-fiction.

SpaceLife Origin wants to start with fertilisation in space using an embryo incubator called Mission Lotus. Experts warn against problems such as a baby being exposed to ionising radiation that causes cancer and the g-force that occurs with space flight. Oh, and weightlessness, and I’m sure a whole bunch of other things.

I hope the woman (women?) who sign up and anyone else really know what they are getting into, but that also goes for anybody who thinks getting to Mars is easy at this point.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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January 7, 2019

‘Roundabout with pizza cutter needs pineapples’

Filed under: Art,Automobiles,Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:37 pm

Dutch journalist Lex Boon has just published a book called ‘Ananas’ (‘Pineapple’) about his love of pineapples. In his hometown of Beverwijk, North Holland, there’s a roundabout with a pizza cutter as art.

Boon figured the roundabout could conveniently use a new name and a new look: “My dream is to rename this pizza roundabout’ the ‘Pizza Hawaï Rotonde’ (‘Hawaiian Pizza Roundabout’) as a tribute to the pineapple.”

Putting pineapple on a pizza was a Canadian ‘invention’, thanks to Greek-born Canadian, Sam Panopoulos from Ontario, Canada. Follow the Wikipedia link and read the recent story about Canadian Prime Minister and the President of Iceland ‘debating’ the issue of whether pineapple belongs on pizza.

Boon also interviewed Panopoulos for his book, surely before the summer of 2017 when the latter passed away. The pizza cutter is not an officially commissioned art work, it’s advertisement for a local pizza parlour. Boon would love to see that thing full with piece of pineapple at some point.

I’m off for lunch.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl, Photo of Pizza pie without pineapple by Adam Kuban, some rights reserved)

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January 5, 2019

Sexing up Amsterdam real estate with French names

Filed under: Architecture,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:59 pm

Amsterdam real estate is in the hands of a selected few, including Prince Bernhard who owns a staggering 349 buildings in Amsterdam.

In the neighbourhood of ‘Bos en Lommer’ (aka Bolo, where 24HQ is located), a bunch of tall flat buildings are coming and will be sold to whomever can afford them: either rich Dutch folks or rich foreigners, the latter being bashed for buying houses that Dutch people in Amsterdam cannot afford, as if that was a new thing. And if rich Dutch people buy them, there’s much less bashing somehow.

And selling nice houses in a good neighbourhood needs a sexy name, n’est-ce pas? The brochure that is doing the rounds and making people laugh out loud swaps out ‘Bos en Lommer’ for a poor French translation, ’Bois & Lombre’ (‘Bois’ like ‘Bos’ means either woods, wood or forest and ‘Lombre’, meaning ‘shadow’ should be spelled ‘l’ombre’. And ‘Bos’ in Amsterdam usually refers to a park with lots of trees because we don’t have forests, a prime example of a sexed up term.

There’s a beautiful Dutch word that describes when someone uses English to make a Dutch word sounds sexier: ‘aandikengels’ (roughly, ‘thickening English’, thickening as in pouring it on thick).

We’re calling it, as a new Dutch word is born: ‘aandikfrans’ (‘thickening French’), which has no Google hits as I write this.

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January 4, 2019

Criminal tries trump card to stay out of jail

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:31 am

Police in Rotterdam arrested a man for threatening his ex and possessing weapons and possibly guns while entering her home. This information was not completely correct, but the man did violate his parole and had to go to prison.

Once arrested, the man showed the cops a ‘get out of jail free’ card that comes with the world-famous Monopoly game and the cops had a good belly laugh.

“We gave the man credit for his originality and laughed really hard together, but unfortunately we’re putting him in jail.” And in jail the man will stay for 84 days.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)

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December 20, 2018

Criminal mistakes cop for partner, cops score big

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:37 pm

politie-uniform-2016

Last weekend, a criminal in Rotterdam was leaving a flat with hundreds of thousands of euro in a bag and mistook a plain clothes policeman in a car for his partner in crime. Oops.

When he realised he had messed up, he ran, tossing the bag full of cash and throwing the key to the flat in a ditch. Both were retrieved by the cops, one easily and one with a bit of fishing.

The cops checked out the flat in question, which was like hitting the jackpot. It had even more money in it, hard drugs, guns, a sealer for drugs and all kinds of gear to build an illegal cannabis plantation. There was also a big safe that was hoisted out of the flat with a crane – who knows what kind of goodies were in there, I’m guessing falsified documents.

The plain clothes cop was staking out the area, having seen the driver waiting on his friend drive quite poorly on the way there. Then, the driver got out of his car to make way for the stash in the boot and that’s when the ‘bagman’ knocked on the wrong car window.

This reads like the third act of a stupid television show.

(Link: crimesite.nl, Photo: of Dutch police officers politie.nl)

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December 3, 2018

Girl tells on daddy’s green plants

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:25 pm

Not long after a goose pointed the cops to a big drugs lab, a young girl got her father into trouble while talking about his extra curricular activities at school.

A man and father from Hengelo, Overijssel was sentenced to 80 hours of community service for illegally growing cannabis. “My dad has green plants in the attic”, the girl said. There was 450 odd plants in said attic, which is 445 more than usually allowed. Daddy was cultivating cannabis to make some much needed extra money due to circumstances, including mommy moving out and his car breaking down.

He used legal equipment bought at the DIY store and legal electricity, which isn’t standard fare. And he didn’t get high on his own supply, but he still got busted.

The moral of this story: maybe let your kid talk about what mommy does on career day even if she might be a housewife, it’s safer.

(Link: nltimes.nl)

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November 28, 2018

Goose’s honking betrays huge XTC lab

Filed under: Animals,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:40 pm
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In the village of Sint Willebrord, North Brabant, people were illegally producing XTC in a large lab in some warehouse, making barrels of cash while keeping their activities on the down low.

Then, one day the cops came knocking on the lab door because they heard a goose honking like the end of the world was coming, on the train tracks near their secret lab.

The goose was a regular at the neighbour’s property, but possibly didn’t like the weird noises it heard and when it heard them, started honking like crazy, waking up the neighbour in the middle of the night. The neighbour then woke up to see a suspicious van making several runs in the night, put two and two together and figured out drugs were being produced.

The neighbour then told the police what she saw, and that’s when the cops went to check it all out.

The cops arrested the 70-year-old owner who claimed to know nothing, saying he rented the warehouse to some guys who paid him cash up front and refused to let him see what they were doing. The owner’s lawyer attacked the woman’s claim, saying ‘she honks as loud as the goose does’, but stick and stones, the man is looking at three years in prison.

The cops had a good day, seizing 1.2 million euro worth of raw materials for producing XTC pills. They said the whole place smelled of anise, a characteristic smell of synthetic drugs. The theory is that the goose wasn’t honking over noise, but about the smell of anise, which attracted it, if we believe the Internet. And since the drugs were made at night, the smell was then at its strongest.

The moral of this story is that the cops were not sent on a wild goose chase.

(Link: vice.com)

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November 23, 2018

Why the Dutch are observing Black Friday

Filed under: General,Online,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:19 pm

According to Wikipedia, Black Friday became a thing in the Netherlands about three years ago. Even as a Canadian, it was the first time I’d ever heard of it. In Canada, where Thanksgiving is celebrated in October and for very different reasons that in the United States, we’ve always had Boxing Day (26 December) as our shopping madness day, where shops want to get rid of their stock before the new year. In the Netherlands, 26 December is actually a holiday.

This year the Netherlands has a lot of shops big and small participating in Black Friday, acting like not doing so would be missing out. A lot of people think this ‘commercial appropriation’ is ridiculous, but mark my words, it will continue to grow here and in Europe because it remains a money maker, especially with Cyber Monday a few days later.

One person on Twitter captioned a picture of packages of American cranberries, saying sarcastically “The cranberries are already in the supermarket, so that we can celebrate Thanksgiving tonight and Black Friday tomorrow. But changing anything about Dutch traditions, well no.” The comment alludes to this year’s escalation of the Zwarte Piet (Black Pete) debate, which has turned to hate and violence, two things that do no pair well with gift giving and happy holidays.

And seriously, most Dutch kitchens do not have an oven and if they do, good luck fitting a turkey in there. I’m still bummed I can’t put two trays of 12 muffins in side by side.

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November 12, 2018

PostNL delivers in bins and gardens

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:14 pm

Receiving packages from PostNL, the Dutch postal service, can either be a breeze or a tragedy. Sadly, it can also be a lot of shades of frustration in between, and now there’s a Facebook group entitled ‘We hebben u gemist’ (roughly, ‘Since you weren’t home’) that collects notes left in mailboxes by delivery personnel, and a lot of them are hilarious.

“Package left in the orange bin”: yes, they leave stuff in actual bins. In this case, there was a brown bin and a grey bin, but no orange bin. Another one says ‘PAKITINTAON’ (In Dutch, it should be written as ‘Pakket in tuin’, which means ‘package in garden’, but someone just wrote it phonetically.

One of the reasons they leave a lot of notes is because people are not home during business hours (duh) or because the delivery folks want to ‘drop’ that package as fast as possible, as they are more often than not paid per delivery. For example, since my office is at home, I tend to sign for other people’s packages. You could also be a shit neighbour and steal stuff, which happens, but PostNL just wants to drop those packages wherever they can, including unguarded bins and gardens.

There’s a lot of hilarity to enjoy, especially if you can read Dutch, but I’ll share a note left by someone that sums up PostNL’s passive-aggressive work ethic: “Don’t order if you’re not going to be home. Your neighbours are also fed up of it. So are we.” PostNL pays not much and attracts people who don’t have too many options. As well, many people do this job on the side, such as students, pensioners, and so on, to give you a bit of context.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo: wehebbenugemist)

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November 4, 2018

Indian party mistakenly uses pics of Dutch bridge

Filed under: Architecture,General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:22 pm

Yesterday evening, the official Twitter account of the Aam Aadmi Party, an Indian political party and currently the ruling party of the National Capital Territory of Delhi, posted a tweet saying, “Delhi! Here is your pride The Signature Bridge”, with a couple of pictures, one of which was of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam – the one on the left shown here.

India Today fact checked the photos and corrected the situation quickly by posting a YouTube video, entitled “Illumination of the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam”, featuring the exact frame the AAP tweeted, at 0:27.

I’m wondering how nobody from the AAP noticed that they had a photo that didn’t match their own skyline or they just thought ‘the common man’, which is what the name of the party means apparently, wouldn’t notice. The bridge is said to be inaugurated on 5 November.

Tip: never underestimate your audience.

(Link: indiatoday.in)

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