February 26, 2012
Last Friday a man in Nijmegen drew the attention of the local constabulary because he failed to reach the pedals of the bicycle he was riding on the Hazenkampseweg.
A quick check of the frame number by the police officers who had been driving in an unmarked car that the bike had been stolen on January 13 from the Dukenberg shopping centre. The 21-year-old man was apprehended on suspicion of theft and handling stolen goods.
The bicycle will be returned to its owner.
(Link: politie.nl)
Tags: bicycle theft, crime, criminals, Nijmegen
February 25, 2012
So this news was already covered two weeks ago by DutchNews.nl, but I thought it so remarkable that I felt it’d warrant another mention.
Six years ago Dawn Arnall, wife to then-US ambassador, sub-prime crisis architect and billionaire Roland Arnall, forgot her 9,000,000 US dollar jewellery in the lobby of an unnamed hotel in The Hague.
She reported the jewellery as stolen, though the press doesn’t say to whom.
Hotel staff found a satchel containing the jewellery, which was apparently so big and garish that they mistook it for costume jewellery.
Presumably neither the insurer (who paid out) nor the police bothered to check with the hotel, and the treasure went unclaimed for six months. It was then handed over to a cleaning lady who left it in her linen closet for five years, until her curiosity got the better of her.
The cleaning lady brought the jewellery for appraisement to a jeweler who, the police of The Hague joke, is probably still on artificial respiration.
She then brought the jewellery to the police, who sent it back to the US, whatever that is supposed to mean.
The jewellery consisted of a necklace containing a 4 million euro pink 5-carat diamond, and various other jewels worth 3 million euro. The finder is hoping for a reward, although it is not certain that anybody is obliged to pay one.
Since there are holes in this story big enough to park an entire zoo in, if our readers have any additional information I would sure like to hear about it.
(Photo of unrelated costume jewellery by GlitzUK, some rights reserved)
Tags: acting, ambassadors, diamonds, finders fees, finding, jewelers, jewellery, lost and found, USA
February 24, 2012
The internal video system of the Dutch defense department was and may even still be online for everyone to see with the factory setting password of the system. Exposed by a security expert, various parts of the department work with a Cisco teleconferencing system that uses Internet and nobody bothered changing the factory password. Names, IP addresses and fun stuff were all online as well.
The Ministry of Defense’s counterargument is that the video system is separate from their network, as it was bought by employees without IT knowing about it and that it was not used very often. Interestingly, log files retrieved by the security expert show that the system was used several times a day.
I bet you the IT people are not happy. And if that’s not sloppy all around, I don’t know what is.
(Link: webwereld.nl, photo: cyberbunker)
February 23, 2012
Two Flemish linguists of Ghent University in Belgium have finally pinpointed the historical origin of the Dutch word ‘fiets’ (‘bicycle’, sounds exactly like ‘feats’). They claim it comes from the German word ‘Vize’ (pronounced ‘vietse’, almost rhymes with ‘pizza’), which means the same as the English ‘vice’ (like in Vice-President, a ‘deputy’ president). In this case, it’s a surrogate horse, a ‘vice horse’. And a ‘vice horse’ is understood to be a bicycle.
The Dutch word ‘fiets’ was very different from the French word ‘vélocipède’, where the bicycle originated from in 1870, the English word and the German word ‘Fahrrad’. The French abbreviation ‘vélo’ couldn’t possibly have turned into ‘fiets’. A man called E.C. Viets from Wageningen started making bicycles around 1880, which was often quoted as a possible origin, but that was historically incorrect.
One day, one of the linguists was pouring some cider for a German colleague from a region who called it ‘Vize’ (vice-wine, surrogate wine), although in Dutch it could have sounded like the German had said ‘bad wine’ (‘vies’ in Dutch means ‘dirty’ or ‘bad quality’ in this case). But the German was speaking German and meant to say ‘surrogate wine’, ‘Vize’ being used for all kinds of surrogate things in his region of Germany.
The German ‘Vize-Pferd’ (‘surrogate horse’) was discovered by the linguists in written documents and then they found German dialect words ‘Fitz’ and ‘Fietse’, which was the missing link to ‘fiets’. A lot of Dutch words come from German, but for some reason, ‘Vize’, a bit like saying ‘bike’ or ‘vélo’ never made it over the German border.
(Link: www.standaard.be)
Tags: bike, etymology, German, linguistics
February 22, 2012
The life of a man from Rotterdam was spared, as the iPhone in his left breast pocket took a wayward bullet, saving his life. Four more bullets were shot at the man, but missed.
The police are still looking for a suspect, and there’s 10,000 euro in it for information leading to an arrest.
The guy took his bullet ridden iPhone home. I can imagine him framing it and putting it on the mantle.
(Link: www.ad.nl, Photo by William Hook, some rights reserved)
February 21, 2012
It’s white, probably taste bland and has cost 250,000 euro to make: it’s laboratory grown meat as proof that it can be done. Considering the future demands for meat due to population increase and a higher cost of living in parts of the world, trying to grow meat sounds like a good idea.
Some estimate that food production will have to double within the next 50 years to meet the requirements of a growing population. During this period, climate change, water shortages and greater urbanisation will make it more difficult to produce food.
Professor Mark Post’s group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle, and claims that synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.
It seems to me that eating less meat or none at all is easier and way cheaper than all of this, even for meat eaters. Nobody has to eat meat every day, and vegetarian alternatives don’t have to be of a lesser status than actual meat. And why a burger? That’s so junk food like.
(Link: www.bbc.co.uk)
Tags: Maastricht Univesity, meat
February 20, 2012
The Dutch Red Cross reports that its smart phone first aid app EHBO Op Zak (‘first aid in the pocket’) has been downloaded 322,000 times.
A survey among 6,400 users also indicated that the app has been used to help give first aid 1,500 times.
The app is free and is available for the IOS, Android and Mango platforms. It contains instructions on what to do for 54 types of emergencies. The app was launched in the Summer of 2011 in the Netherlands, and a similar app was launched in December 2011 in the UK.
For those without a smart phone there is a PDF with 7 scenarios.
(iPhone screenshot: iTunes / rodekruis.nl)
Tags: apps, Red Cross, Smartphones
February 19, 2012
Said conservative US presidential candidate Rick Santorum during a campaign stop:
Well in the Netherlands people wear a different bracelet if you are elderly. And the bracelet is ‘do not euthanise me’. Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands. But half the people that are euthanised every year, and it’s ten percent of all deaths, half of those people are euthanised involuntarily at the hospitals, because they are older and sick.
And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital. They go to another country. Because they are afraid, because of budget purposes, that they will not come out of that hospital to [inaudible].
Look at what has happened just in our tolerance of abortion. Fifty years ago, people who did abortions, sixty years ago, people who did abortions were, you know, in the shadows, or people who were considered really bad doctors. Now abortion is something that is just accepted. Well, of course people do abortions, it’s legal, it’s fine, there are no moral and ethical problems. This is the erosion, and it happens in the medical profession, and it can happen very fast, and I think Obamacare will lead us down that road.
None of this is true, of course, and even though it is the weekend the Dutch press is already having a field day with this. NRC writes: “Santorum thinks he knows the Netherlands“. Powned dubs Santorum’s “a surreal view“, OK, so maybe not a field day. Everybody knows that you just let a madman spout his gibberish, I guess.
Should this mentally unhinged person ever become president of the USA though, he will control the world’s largest arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons. Besides that minor worry, just enjoy this bit of mainstream crazy, because it does not get much sillier than this.
(Video: Youtube / RightWingWatch.org. Photo by Gage Skidmore, some rights reserved.)
Tags: politicians, USA
February 18, 2012
Banks like ING, ABN Amro and Rabobank refuse to fit their ATMs with special anti-skimming devices that have proven successful on ticket vending machines, Webwereld reported last Wednesday.
This despite the fact that, according to the same publication, skimming is still very much a problem in the Netherlands. In January the police caught a Romanian gang of skimmers that stole from the bank accounts of thousands of people.
Dutch Rail and Amsterdam’s public transport company GVB claim that since they introduced the so-called anti-skimming hook, their ticket vending machines have no longer been misused by skimmers.
The hook lets you insert your bank or credit card. If skimmers manage to remove the hook, the entire machine shuts down.
ING and Rabobank claim that they employ their own anti-skimming technology, ABN Amro says that it isn’t easy to fit existing machines with the hooks. Bank cards both chips and magnetic strips on them, the latter being susceptible to misuse. Banks have started a campaign to encourage consumers to use the chip rather than the magnetic strip. The latter cannot fully be replaced, as magnetic strips are still required in countries like the USA which have yet to adopt the chip-based technology.
(Photo of an anti-skimming hook discovered during a police raid, by Politie Haaglanden)
Tags: ABN Amro, ATMs, bank cards, banks, crime, Dutch Rail, ING, Rabobank, Romania, skimming, theft
February 17, 2012
Dutch Green party politician Ineke van Gent called Labour Party Jacques Monasch one of the old whinging geezers Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets during a debate on the high speed train line. She opened the door for him to quip back at her with, “I won’t tell you which Muppet you remind me of”, which most probably meant Miss Piggy, as she’s quite corpulent and blonde.
And if that banter wasn’t insignificant enough, a national supermarket had people saving Kermit points to be able to score Muppet hand puppets, but oh no, they’ve run out and people are pissed, small children are disappointed and a meltdown is in progress.
When the well-known character of said national supermarket commercials finally meets Kermit (notice the magical Dutch to English translation), he impolitely talks over him, calls his friends up and acts like a total douche.
(Link: www.telegraaf.nl)
Tags: Kermit, Miss Piggy, muppets, parliament, Statler and Waldorf
