April 21, 2017

Scottish murder suspect fakes Dutch accent

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 5:57 pm

windmill-leiden-branko-collin

Called a ‘bizarre European twang’ from a Scottish newspaper (pot, kettle, black, no?), fugitive murder suspect Harris Binotti has been faking a Dutch accent while living in Glasgow in order to stay under the radar. Even though he’s currently on Interpol’s most wanted list, Scottish police cannot arrest him unless overseas officials issue a warrant for his arrest, so he’s just hanging out now scaring the crap out of everyone.

Binotti fled Yangon, Myanmar after the death of Northern Irish colleague Gary Ferguson in November 2016, where they both taught English at a school there.

In the meantime, people living near Binotti are alarmed and the neighbours have complained about the smell of weed coming from the flat Binotti and his girlfriend are holed up in, which he’s also getting away with at the moment.

(Links: thescottishsun, news.sky.com)

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November 6, 2016

Ajax FC send 27 crates of beer to Scots

Filed under: Food & Drink,Sports by Orangemaster @ 11:55 am

Amsterdam’s football club Ajax has sent 27 crates of beer to Scottish club East Kilbride FC of South Lanarkshire to congratulate them for breaking Ajax’s world record of most games won in a row last Saturday by winning against BSC Glasgow FC.

Former goalkeeper and now Ajax’s general manager Edwin van der Sar recorded a video message to congratulate the Scots telling them to ‘have some beer on us’.

A truck full of beer, Belgian Jupiler beer, basically Stella’s big brother, was driven right onto a dark and cold pitch with patches of snow.

Enjoy this classy football moment in English:

(Link: www.at5.nl, Photo by Wikimedia user Carolus Ludovicus, some rights reserved)

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March 23, 2009

First bar where smoking is legal?

Filed under: Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 10:29 am

When the smoking ban for bars was introduced last year, it hit Groningen bar De Balk as hard as any other café. Owner Aethne McGhie, originally from Scotland, turned a storage room into a smoking room, but the result was that the bar area itself looked absolutely dead. Her remaining customers came up with an idea: why not turn things around, move the actual bar into the storage room, and the former bar area into the smoking area. And so it was done. The result is that people now have to walk to the former storage room to get their drinks, but, McGhie told Parool (Dutch), even the toughest customers soon learned how to play nice.

The professional busy bodies who have to enforce the ban on fun, the Voedsel en Warenautoriteit (VWA), grudgingly admitted to De Telegraaf (Dutch) that this ploy is actually legal. “But we wouldn’t necessarily call it a legal bar,” a spokesperson said. Turns out that they found a technicality with which they can still cause problems for De Balk. Apparently, the law that says that a room where drinks are served must have a minimal size hasn’t been adapted to take the new circumstances that the smoking ban created into account.

Another entity that won’t call De Balk “the first legal smoking bar” is perhaps not surprisingly Hiermaghetwel.nl (Dutch), the website that keeps track of all the bars in the Netherlands where you can legally smoke. They point out that Café Populair in Amsterdam was the first to come up with the idea of a small bar section and large smoking area, way back in September last year (AT5, Dutch).

Source photo: Google Street View, a Dutch version of which was introduced a couple of days ago.

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