In our vigilant reporting on the ‘Jihad against fun’ sweeping the Netherlands, some heavy duty Protestant (unintentional pun intended) towns in the provinces of South Holland and Zealand where the Tour de France is planning to kick off on 4 July 2010 are saying ‘non, merci’ to the great cycling event because it kicks off on a Sunday. The SGP (Political Reformed Party) do not want townspeople to be forced to work on a Sunday because, well, it’s Sunday, and according to them, you’re not supposed to work. Some law actually gives them the right to refuse to work on Sunday, which was surely a good thing back when people worked six days a week like madmen. Lucky for us, we could save face if the organisers and the SGP can agree on a route that would not disturb the people that really want to rest on Sunday.
It’s comforting to know that a small group of people are mainly thinking of themselves and not of the greater good of the Tour starting in the Netherlands again (Den Bosch, 1996). Or maybe they really enjoy getting press and making sure the rest of the world knows that that ‘being tolerant thing’ is just a tourist trap.
Before anyone says, “yes, but they have a right to rest by law…”, let me provide a concrete solution to the problem. If you can’t (won’t) do work on the Sabbath, you get/hire/ask someone to do it for you. It doesn’t stop the Jews I know, it shouldn’t stop a single Protestant, either.
(Link: depers.nl, Photo: Orangemaster at the finish line in Paris, 2007)
No Elfstedentocht for now. National weather institute KNMI predicts that Monday a period of thaw will set in, with wind coming from the South and from the South West. That also means that the country will not have had an official cold wave, which in the Netherlands is defined as at least five consecutive days of frost of which three dip below -10 degrees.
In 1990 Piet Hein Eek made his first cupboard from reclaimed scrapwood and the rest, as they say, is history. Soon you couldn’t step into a somewhat upmarket furniture store without stumbling into one or two scrapwood items. The only problem with these, and one that’s persisted ever since, is despite that they’re made out of garbage they’re so damned expensive.
Soup and sausage manufacturer Unox are busy producing 25,000 litres of pea soup and 80,000 smoked sausages in time for a possible Elfstedentocht, 
The municipality of Haren in Groningen is considering outlawing the use of metal detectors, 
A couple of years ago a Project Gutenberg volunteer called Jeroen Hellingman managed to buy 25 public domain versions of Dutch translations of Jules Verne’s 54 “Voyages extraordinaires.” These books are working their way slowly through the Distributed Proofreaders digitization process and have started to appear at the other end, at gutenberg.org. The most recent 
