Xaviera Hollander is a former New York call-girl and madam who got world famous with her autobiography The Happy Hooker. Nowadays she runs a bed and breakfast from her villa in the posh part of Amsterdam (right around my corner, although I live in the ‘poor’ part of the posh part).
She has two rooms on offer and a chalet in the back yard, the cheapest for 100 euro, and there is a sort of half-promise of being entertained by the ‘author, Penthouse columnist, legend, performer, [and] raconteur’ Xaviera Hollander herself. If you like, you can let her husband Philip cook you dinner.
(Source image: xavierahollander.com)
Last autumn a study project had eleven architecture students from the University of Delft create a house for a person based on their tweets and on other statements the ‘client’ made on-line. The eleven virtual clients were not told about the project, so the students could only go by these on-line statements.
Spice trader Van Eeghen, founded in 1662, has put its Amsterdam office up for rent. 
A man with Parkinson’s Diseased treated in the Nijmegen academic hospital recently demonstrated that he can ride a bicycle, but not walk. 
Selma Wijnberg (87) was the only Dutch survivor of the Nazi concentration camp Sobibor, but the Dutch government once almost made sure that even she would not have had that distinction. 
It would seem corn and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night are indelibly connected in the American imagination. First Don McLean wrote a popular song about the painting, and now pupils of Sky View high school in Smithfield, USA, have recreated the work in breakfast cereal.
A particularly dumb thief from The Hague was caught twice on the same day last Tuesday for stealing police bait bikes.
This polypropylene wine rack was designed by Robert Bronwasser from Amsterdam. 
