November 4, 2010

Homeless man finds out his father was a millionaire

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:15 pm

A former homeless man, Jerry Winkler, 28, recently found out who his real father was: millionaire Alfred Winkler from Bussum who died back in 1992. Apparently, his mother had an affair with the millionaire. Unfortunately, Winkler cannotprobably cannot lay claim to any inheritance, but the foundation his father set up will see what they can do to help him out money wise.

(Link: zibb)

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August 8, 2009

A Caransa died

Filed under: Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 12:56 pm

Amsterdam real-estate multi-millionaire Maurits Caransa died at age 93 yesterday, Z24 reports. Caransa’s story was one of rags-to-riches, from being the son of a coalman to becoming the owner of most of the major hotels in Amsterdam.

The reason I’m reporting his death here though is that he left a linguistic legacy that few others can lay claim to. Back home, when we wanted to point out that we could not afford something, we would say: “I’m no Caransa,” which in English translates pretty much to “I’m no Rockefeller”.

Unlike Rockefeller, Caransa wasn’t anywhere near being the richest man of the world or even the Netherlands, but he had managed to literally become a household name. His fame may have been based on the fact that in 1977 Caransa was the first famous Dutch person to be kidnapped. He was released for a ransom of 10 million guilders. To this day, it is unknown who the kidnappers were.

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