August 30, 2017

Dutch world record holder goes for apples

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 10:56 pm

Oranges-Branko1

Luuk Broos, the Guinness World Record holder for biggest champagne glass pyramid (50,116 glasses, watch him pour the champage) since July 2017, is going for his next challenge: the world record for piling up apples.

Together with residents of Vinkel, Noord-Brabant, Broos is going to attempt to pile up some 6000 apples in order to break a world record. Besides champagne glasses, Broos also broke a world record a few years ago for piling up 5500 oranges, a feat he called “the biggest success of my career”.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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October 30, 2009

Chips, Halloween, pumpkins and oranges

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am
old-dutch-chips
pumpkins-mtl
oranges-mtl

I used to associate Old Dutch with a cleanser and now I discover that my Canadian childhood brand of chips (not crisps, eh) went from Humpty Dumpty to Old Dutch. Sure, the real Dutch people have chips (and don’t call them crisps, either), but Halloween chips is a North American invention this time. The bags are small and given to children dressed in costumes when they go trick or treating, which means going door to door asking for candy (and not sweets). We were the people that gave kids small boxes of raisins or pencils and erasers instead of junk food. When your big bag is full, you go home, throw out the stuff you won’t eat and sort your candies. My younger brother used to hide them and eat them all year round.

Right now, on every street corner and market, people are selling pumpkins to make jack-o’- lanterns, which are pumpkins gutted and carved to put candles in that give Halloween its look. We make pumpkin pie and dry the seeds and eat them. Pumpkins seeds are extremely healthy apparently.

Why am I explaining all of this? Because the Dutch do not celebrate Halloween, and although they do throw a few great parties for adults (and people, you really need to work on your costumes), it’s not the big deal it is in Canada and the United States. Dutch friends have told me that children of North American parents have a celebration for their kids, which is something they cannot skip. And in Canada once it’s over, all the Halloween stuff will disppear instantly in the stores and make way for Christmas stuff.

The market picture of these oranges in Montréal where I have been hiding for the last 10 days is totally unrelated and should be plural.

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March 10, 2008

Director fakes rampant racism, gets sacked

Filed under: General,Religion by Branko Collin @ 2:20 pm

Last week, a director working on a fake TV news item about racism in the Netherlands got caught with his pants down because a competing station happened to have a crew nearby filming the whole thing. The director had set out to film a piece exposing rampant bigotry by showing that people in Amsterdam will not stop and help a woman in need if dressed in a niqab.

In order to measure this bigotry, the crew’s reporter would drop a bag of oranges and see who would help her pick them up. After a while she would change to a niqab, a garb worn by some Muslim women that covers everything except the eyes, and repeat the exercise.

And it seemed the crew got exactly the sort of result they expected. When dressed as a Westerner, people would help the reporter pick up her oranges. But the moment she switched to the niqab, help was no longer forthcoming. The cold eye of the camera registered a forlorn woman, crouching in the middle of the street amidst her belongings, while passers-by took a wide berth around her.

Except that it was all staged. Local TV station AT5 was there, and filmed the whole thing. People who wanted to help the woman in the niqab were shouted at by the director who told them to move on. Even then that did not stop some of them to actually help. After 101 had streamed its program, AT5 contacted them for commentary. Originally, the youth channel denied that anything shady had been going on. They thought the attention was exaggerated, and that people only started to help when they saw the AT5 camera crew. But the station must have smelled a rat, because it later examined raw footage, after which it came out with a full retraction. Apparently, people had been trying to help the niqab-clad woman the whole time. “We ended our collaboration with this director,” the press release concludes.

Even in the 101.tv segment there are hints that not everything is as it seems. The host says that she herself has family members who wear a burqa except of course that she is not wearing a burqa but a niqab.

Via Wij blijven hier (Dutch). Source images: AT5 and 101.

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February 20, 2008

The soothing smell of oranges

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink,Science by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am
Oranges

The scent of oranges is being used in an experiment to create a calm atmosphere at Rotterdam’s main police station, reports news agency ANP. The tests, begun in January, aim to establish if workers find the atmosphere improved and prisoners are less aggressive, ANP reports the force’s in-house magazine as saying. Initial results show the orange scent is having a calming affect in the cells and that demand for sedatives is down, ANP says. The experiment is now being extended for a further six months.

(Link: dutchnews.nl)

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February 13, 2008

Dutch sports fans as seen from space

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 9:00 am

This image is a top down view of the Burgplatz (platz = square in German) in Leipzig on June 11, 2006 as seen on Google maps. We know the date, because all the people on the square are clad in orange, the colour that Dutch sports fans don whenever they wish to cheer on their national team. On June 11, the Dutch national football team was in Leipzig to play the team of Serbia-Montenegro during the 2006 world championships. The Dutch team won 1-0. (The red, white and blue flag across what I presume is the podium is a dead give away too, but probably not as visible from higher up as the orange square.)

Via Google Sightseeing.

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