Last Wednesday famous cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants got a tulip named after him in the Keukenhof flower garden. Under the watchful of eye of many a young fan and the great big yellow sponge himself, the flower got baptized with perfectly good champagne by Nickelodeon presenter Patrick Martens.
It took grower Jan Ligthart from Breezand 18 years to develop the tulip, writes De Telegraaf (Dutch). Presumably that time was not spent exclusively on this new tulip, as many companies have already paid the man to do the same. Ligthart told the paper it would take four years for the bulbs to arrive in Dutch stores: “The first bulbs are for the US, because they pay better abroad. It’s as simple as that.”
(Photo of a totally unrelated yellow tulip by Hisa Fujimoto, some rights reserved.)
Aart Staartjes, the actor who has been playing the grumpy Mr Aart in the Dutch version of Sesame Street for over twenty years, is threatening to leave the show over a programming dispute. He said this last week on the 
The Instituut Collectie Nederland, the agency that manages the national government’s art collection, is 
The elderly avoid tear-jerker television programmes such as Memories, Spoorloos (Lost without a trace, about finding lost family members), and Het Familiediner (The Family Dinner, about broken family relations), according to research by Margot van der Goot at the University of Nijmegen. She says these shows evoke emotions that the elderly typically try to avoid. Van der Goot will get her Ph.D. in two weeks based on a study on the viewing patterns of people older than 65, 
