September 21, 2011

Germany family hiding and living in Dutch woods

Filed under: Animals,Bicycles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:46 pm

A German family of two parents in their thirties and four children (11, 5, 4 and 3 months) is said to be hiding in the woods near Sibculo, Overijssel, just a few kilometres from the German border. They are hiding from the German authorities, as the court ruled that the kids had to be taken away from their parents for reasons the press doesn’t mention. They also own three dogs. The family is originally from Warendorf, East of Münster, much further away, but in a relative beeline from where they are now.

They have been moving around by bike with a trailer hitched to it since September, and the Germans want the Dutch to help them find the family, as they are worried about the children’s well-being. I still would like to know why.

If we can find terrorists, we can find a big family that can’t run, with kids and a baby, and three possibly barking dogs, right? OK, they are pretty cool travelling by bike.

(Link: binnenland.nieuws.nl)

Tags: , ,

September 20, 2011

Laura is not hitting the books anymore

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 3:17 pm

Following Laura Dekker’s voyage as we have been, we left off recently with “still no word on if she has ever touched her homework.”. A report on her birthday today says that she just doesn’t have time to study. She had started to study at the beginning of her one-year sail around the world, but gave that up quickly enough.

One of the legal conditions on which she would be allowed to sail solo was that she do homework. She doesn’t plan to stop studying altogether, but I can totally imagine that repairing and replenishing her boat comes first.

The Dutch authorities can only wave their finger Dutch uncle style about her not studying, as her studies are her parents’ responsibility. And after the whole mess of a legal situation Laura got into with the authorities and her parents, she gave up being Dutch and relied on her dual citizenship with her country of birth, New Zealand.

Mark my words, if and when she completes this amazing feat, we’ll be playing ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (’Find the Dutch person’) soon enough. In Laura’s case it will be a game that consists of constantly dissing a Dutch person in the media and then ignoring all the bad things and claim her victory as a Dutch one.

Follow Laura’s tweets on @laura_and_Guppy (Guppy is the name of her sailboat)

See also all our stories about Laura Dekker .

(Link: rnw.nl)

(Photo of an entirely unrelated boat by the US Navy)

Tags: , , ,

September 19, 2011

Church of giant Lego-like blocks

Filed under: Art,Design by Branko Collin @ 4:33 pm

Well, it had to happen. Somebody had to take the famous stackable concrete blocks that are often used to create temporary barriers and paint them in the famous Lego colours.

That somebody was artist Filip Jonke who started building this temporary ‘church’ on the Grenswerk festival terrain in the centre of Enschede. The building is still being erected and you can follow that process at Jonker’s website.

The building will measure 25 by 10 metres with a 20 metre steeple and will serve as a pavilion for the festival.

(Link: Trendbeheer, Photo: Filip Jonker)

Tags: , ,

Bank managers give cheaper loans to customers of the same sex

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:58 am

If you want to save as much as 0.3 percentage points on your interest rates, close a loan with a bank employee of the same sex.

Thorsten Beck, professor at Tilburg University, claims that there is a measurable difference between how loan officers of microcredit lenders treat customers of the same and of the opposite sex. His report Sex and Credit: Is There a Gender Bias in Microfinance (PDF), co-written with Patrick Behr of the Brazilian business school Fundaco Getulio Vargas and Andreas Madestam of the Bocconi University in Milan, focused on lenders in Albania.

The reason they looked at microcredit lenders is because they do not use standard interest rates the way regular banks do.

The chance that opposite sex customers return for a second loan is 11.5 percent smaller, econtrack.nl reports.

Tags: , , , , , ,

September 18, 2011

Illegally fast mopeds sold everywhere

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 10:32 am

Last week consumer watchdog show Kassa sent reporters with hidden cameras to 10 moped shops, and found out that all of them sell mopeds with illegally tuned up engines. Some of the sales people even volunteered to tune up the engines.

The Dutch traffic code defines two different types of mopeds, the bromfietsen which may go as fast as 45 kilometres per hour in built up areas, and the snorfietsen, which can only go 25. Bromfietsen are not considered cool though, because their drivers are obliged to wear helmets and must mix it with the cars.

Besides the maximum speed there is no technical difference between a bromfiets and a snorfiets. The speed is limited by a chip that either the shop attendant or the owners can swap out.

Although moped riders only make up one to two percent of road users, they are responsible for 10 to 20 percent of all accidents in the Netherlands. According to cyclists union Fietsersbond, 2,000 cyclists had to visit the emergency room after a collision with a moped last year. Snorfietsen are allowed to use bike paths, where some of them terrorize cyclists.

Dealer association BOVAG played a nifty game of pass the buck during the show, claiming that if shop keepers do not volunteer to swap out speed limiters, customers will take their business elsewhere. The association feels the ball is in the politicians’ court now.

(Photo by the inestimable Facemepls, some rights reserved)

Tags:

September 17, 2011

Judges not allowed to piece verdict together on the internet

Filed under: General,IT by Branko Collin @ 1:43 pm

The appeals court of Den Bosch got bitch slapped by the Dutch supreme court for inserting its own facts into a verdict without giving the parties involved a chance to respond.

A legal guardian had bought a license for Smart FMS, a sort of bookkeeping package, to take care of the accounts of his ward. It’s not clear to me who sued whom, but at some point the protagonists of this case found themselves in front of the appeals court of Den Bosch. And when the dust settled and the verdict came out, it turned out that the judge had been googling for extra information, and had concluded that

this software is first and foremost a system to aid the guardian’s administration, and it only helps clarify the payments of the clients as a side-effect. The clients furthermore have no say about the usage of this particular system, assuming they are even willing to bear the costs, and are capable of using it. […] Although the guardian did not provide [this court] with information about the software, the internet did.

The guardian was not pleased, as he had had no chance to defend himself against the court’s allegation. Last week the supreme court agreed with him. That the parties involved in legal proceedings have a right to be heard is a Dutch legal principle.

(Link: Iusmentis. Verdict in Dutch at Jure.nl.)

Tags: , , ,

September 16, 2011

Man arrested after trying to pay for pizza using stolen coupons

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Branko Collin @ 10:02 pm

A 22-year-old man from The Hague was arrested today at a pizza place on the Laan van Meerdervoort when he tried to pay with stolen coupons.

The owner called the cops because the coupons had not been published yet. In fact, they had just been printed, and had been stolen earlier that same day from a car in the Torenstraat.

While in gaol, the suspect will have plenty of time to listen to André van Duin’s song Pizza: “Wait a bit … a little longer … a little longer … even longer … pizza!”

(Link: Police Haaglanden region. Photo by Uggboy, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , ,

September 15, 2011

2012 government budget hack explained

Filed under: IT by Branko Collin @ 7:24 pm

Ha ha! As Dutch News reports:

The government’s 2012 spending plans have been leaked on the internet, a day ahead of their official publication.

A spokesman for the finance ministry has confirmed the leaked documents are genuine. They were apparently found by hackers on a part of the government website which was not protected by a password.

And here’s how NOS Nieuws explains the hack:

[Somebody] typed in the address of last year’s budget, and changed ‘2010’ in ‘2011’.

The original budget busting tweet can be found here.

Traditionally the yearly budget is presented on Prinsjesdag, Day of the Princelings, after the Queen addresses both houses of parliament in joint session. Reporters who promise to not divulge the contents of the budget get an advance copy—others just wait until the traditional leak. In 2007, the budget was sent to the press in the form of a USB stick.

Dutch News has the low down on the contents of the budget, by the way.

(Photo of marechaussée practicing at the beach for a Prinsjesdag parade by the ever prolific Facemepls, some rights reserved)

Tags: , ,

September 14, 2011

Dutch punk band Heideroosjes calls it a day

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 9:57 pm

Arguably one of the Netherlands’ best known punk bands internationally, De Heideroosjes from Horst aan de Maas, Limburg, have decided to stop making music after 22 years. Their last album entitled Cease Fire will be out on 21 November. The band started out called Fire, so this last album has a full circle ring to it.

Founded in 1989, the band has been on Epitath records in California for years, arguably one of the world’s best punk labels. They sing in English, Dutch, German and the dialect Limburgish (see below). Contrary to so many other bands, De Heideroosjes have had the exact same band members ever since they started, and they claim that stopping won’t be easy to do.

And in 1998 friend and music lover Guuz Hoogaerts wrote their biography entitled ‘De Heideroosjes, een teringtyfustakkeband’ (‘De Heideroosjes, a freakinfuckinfantastic band’)(rough translation, pardon the pun, the Dutch bit is in reference to one of their older songs), being a big fan of good music from Limburg. The book tells us how the band earned their internal status not by ‘blowing the right people’, but through hard work, great songs and remaining true to their ideals.

Even Lady Gaga actually ‘ripped off’ the intro of De Heideroosjes’ song ‘We Are Share the Same Sun’ in Electric Chapel. Follow the above link and compare, I’m convinced.

De Heideroosjes – Jerry rules in the land of the free (in English)

De Heideroosjes – Boore Lul (‘Dumbass farmer, rougly) (in Limburgs)

De Heideroosjes – Wurst und Käse (Sausage and Cheese) (in German)

(Link: volkskrant.nl)

Tags: , , ,

September 13, 2011

Blinded by false research about meat eaters

Filed under: Food & Drink,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:02 pm
anti-meatjpg

Professor Diederik Stapel from the University of Tilburg was recently suspended for making up research that the media actually took seriously and wrote about. The university is apparently looking into his previous ‘research’.

His latest nonsense that hit the papers was that meat eaters are more ill-mannered (aggressive, selfish, asocial, you know) than vegetarians. Professor Roos Vonk of the Radboud University in Nijmegen ran with this story and got nailed for doing so, once the media figured out it was made up. She claimed that she never thought for a moment that it could be false. Vonk explained that her expectations were that vegetarians were more empathic towards others than meat eaters, which turns out is 100% pure crapola. Vonk used to chair the animal activitst group Wakker Dier and is a member of the Party for the Animals. Call me crazy, but I suspect she’s a vegetarian.

She candidly admitted to have been stupid about trusting this research as she did have some doubts about Stapel’s methods. Human behaviour has shown throughout history that people believe what sounds good to them all the time.

And if Vonk truly believes that meat eaters are douche bags, she’ll want to buy into any nonsense that says what she would like to think could be true, making her vulnerable and gullible. You could argue that by not eating meat you’re doing a good thing, but placing yourself above others for that reason makes you a douche bag and in this case, a blinded, crappy scientist. It insults the intelligent, open-minded vegetarians and vegans out there that are not douche bags, for starters.

Oh and if you need to believe that your lifestyle choices are better by denigrating others, you’re also a douche bag.

UPDATE: Vonk eats meat sometimes, albeit organic. She admitted on Dutch telly that if the research had shown the opposite or that it didn’t matter what people ate, she wouldn’t have bothered with it. She also thinks meat eaters have a superiority complex, while she’s in fact the one thinking she’s a superior douche bag.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl, Photo: veggieunwrapped.com)

Tags: , ,