No news this weekend about the record attempts of Edwin van der Sar, the Dutch keeper playing for Manchester United who hasn’t conceded a goal for more than 1,300 hours. There’s nothing to report, because Van der Sar was rested during yesterday’s league game. His replacement promptly let a ball past, so that if Van der Sar keeps his net clean for at least one more minute he no longer has to share his league record with the rest of his defense.
The Flyswatter bridge we wrote about has been getting quite some attention in the blogosphere. Popular Mechanics talked a bit longer with architect Van Driel than we did and discovered some more flyswatter bridges in the Netherlands and France. But why, when mentioning in passing Dutch bicycle paths, do they link to a website about biking in Copenhagen?
Speaking of bikes in the Netherlands: people from Amsterdam use their bicycles more often than their cars. Worldchanging.com reports:
Between 2005 and 2007, Amsterdam residents rode their bicycle 0.87 times a day on average, compared to 0.84 trips by car. It was the first time on record that average bike trips surpassed cars, the research group FietsBeraad reported last month.
The ‘box of pixels’ at the top of this posting is not the lazy work of a photoshopper, but an actual office building made in 2007 by Dutch-Austrian architects Splitterwerk, and forms the headquarters for a firm called Prisma Engineering in Graz, Austria. Link: Bright.nl.
The Olympic athletes arrived home today, and they were given a warm welcome at the 1928 Olympic stadium in Amsterdam. I live right around the corner, and decided to take my crummy old digital camera there. As luck would have it, the organizers had decided that the athletes would enter through the front gate, where there is ample opportunity for non-accredited press (i.e. l’il ole me) to climb onto flowerbeds and the pedestals of pompous statues. 
As any European can tell you, nothing says “Dutch” more than caravans … except bicycles. And so it was bound to happen that somebody would try and combine the two. That somebody was design agency Reggs’ Thijs Bouman, whose Fietscaravan reached the final round of design competition Het Beste Idee van Nederland last year. Two of these trailers can be connected to form a double bed. For something so small this looks mighty comfortable to me, although I could use some pockets for books and a reading light at the head end.
