January 29, 2014

Man wins bike from coloring contest after 50 years

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 10:15 am

Here’s a nice publicity stunt from Calvé, the makers of Dutch peanut butter (called ‘pindakaas’ in Dutch, literally ‘peanut cheese’).

A 66-year-old man from Den Helder decided to look for a colored drawing he never sent in for a contest that expired more than 50 years ago on February 1963. “Finish what you’ve started” had been ringing in his head for a while. He dug up the drawing from his attic and finally sent it in to get that feeling of completeness I imagine. And lucky him Calvé decided to give him the contest prize, a new bike albeit a very modern one (see the video).

(Link: www.rtvnh.nl)

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January 28, 2014

Dutch village boasts Lord of The Rings neighbourhood

Filed under: General,Literature by Orangemaster @ 10:58 am

Google-Geldrop

The village of Geldrop in Noord-Brabant apparently has a neighbourhood with streets named after characters from the works of JRR Tolkien. The neighbourhood has been around since 2008 back when 24oranges was just getting started because had we known we would have been all over this one like Orcs.

For anyone who likes a long read, there’s this Master’s thesis on Street names in Noord-Brabant and Holland, which mentions the LOTR streets using an exclamation point.

On the other end of the spectrum, we’ve told you about Fart Street in Capelle aan den IJssel near Rotterdam and a few more odd ones.

(Link: www.huffingtonpost.com)

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January 27, 2014

Lipton tea without sugar contains sugar

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 1:59 pm

lipton-tea-evan-amosIrony is alive! Lipton is currently running an ad campaign on TV with Dutch beauty Nicolette van Dam telling her fake mother how ‘regular’ their regular tea is and therefore still tasty. Their regular tea however is anything but regular, Keuringsdienst van Waarde discovered.

Presumably when Lipton says ‘regular’ it means ‘tastes just like the competition’s’, but consumer watchdog Keuringsdienst van Waarde seemed to suspect something more devious going on. They found little clumps of something that tasted like chewing gum (the flavour expert they consulted narrowed it down to Bazooka—man, that word is a time machine!) hidden among the tea.

After half an hour of fruitless phone calls and visiting experts—the tea expert explained that tea is made of leaves, not of clumps—the solution to the mystery was presented. Lipton apparently adds sugar to its tea to mask its mediocre (perhaps we should say ‘regular’) flavour. So that is how you can drink tea, no sugar, with sugar after all.

(I wrote down the adjectives in the Lipton commercial by the way, here they are: regular, regular, regular, good, lekker, lekker, regular, lovely, rich, smooth.)

(Photo by Evan Amos who released it into the public domain)

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January 26, 2014

Incest no reason for divorce, says protestant theologian

Filed under: Religion by Branko Collin @ 10:08 am

Refoweb, a website for Protestant Christians, has a feature called ‘Vragen’ (‘Questions’) in which people ask an ‘expert’ what a good Christian should do in certain situations.

Last week the question was put before theologian Izak Kole whether incest—and to be clear, what was meant was forced sex of a parent with an underaged child—is grounds for divorce.

The answer of Izak Kole was: “No, incest is not grounds for divorce. Being unfaithful is the only biblical reason for divorce. Incest by the husband with children does cause sadness though.”

Later Izak Kole ‘nuanced’ his answer by stating that where there is penetration, there is adultery and in that case, divorce is acceptable. Until that first real rape happens, Izak Kole suggests it might be an idea (“if necessary”) to call the police.

(Link: De Gelderlander; photo by Johan Wieland, some rights reserved)

January 25, 2014

Win two tickets to the Greg Shapiro & Tom Rhodes show

Filed under: Shows by Branko Collin @ 7:36 am

greg-shapiro-presents-tom-rhodesThis week American stand-up comedians Greg Shapiro and Tom Rhodes are touring the Netherlands and if you are quick, you can win tickets!

24 Oranges is giving away two tickets to one lucky winner for the show on Thursday 30 January at Schiller Theater in Utrecht.

You can enter by sending an e-mail to submissions (at) 24oranges.nl in which you tell us the title of Greg Shapiro’s latest & greatest book. Your entry needs to be in before Tuesday 28 January.

This week Shapiro & Rhodes will be performing in Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Enschede, The Hague and Utrecht. In 2002 and 2003 Tom Rhodes hosted a talk show on Dutch television called Kevin Masters, and he lived in the Netherlands for five years. Greg Shapiro has been working for the Boom Chicago comedy group in Amsterdam since 1994 and calls himself The American Netherlander.

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January 24, 2014

Flasher keeps flashing kids, parents and police not doing enough

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:14 am

In the village of Lent near Nijmegen a man has been reported flashing schoolchildren goods and all, and making sexual comments when they walk by on their way to school. In Dutch a flasher is a ‘potloodventer’, which literally means ‘pencil salesman’, hence my choice of photo.

Open and shut case you say? Nope. Dutch law apparently says the man needs to be caught in the act if the police are to arrest him and keep him in custody. In the meantime, he gets to keep doing his sick shit to children because the cops can’t do their job and the parents are too lame to be proactive.

So basically one messed up man who needs help is disrupting other people’s lives and nobody is really doing anything about it but complaining. Maybe one of those stay at home moms with free time on their hands could stalk him with a video camera? I mean, it just takes some proof. Why can’t a squad car pick a busy day and catch the man in the act? How tough can it be to catch him, seriously? He’s obviously not dangerous. I would totally do it if I lived nearby.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl)

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January 23, 2014

Housing corp charges top dollar for slums in Amsterdam

Filed under: Architecture,General by Branko Collin @ 11:19 pm

jeruzalem-amsterdam-google-street-viewThe Rochdale housing corporation is using a legal loophole to charge top rents for slums in the Jeruzalem neighbourhood of Amsterdam, Parool reports.

The houses in question have a floor area of only 32 square metres and lack both central heating and insulated glazing. Until two years ago these were rent-controlled houses for which a tenant would pay 300 euro a month. But the neighbourhood was designated a monument in 2010—the first neighbourhood built since World War II to receive that status in Amsterdam—and the law allows a corporation to add 50 points to the points system that determines whether a property is rent-controlled or not.

Rochdale now charges at least 712 euro for the houses on the free market. The corporation admitted to Parool that “the houses are indeed in a bad state,” and added that it needed to generate more income.

This is not the first time Rochdale made headlines. In 2009 it fired CEO Hubert Möllenkamp who had been living the life of an Italian renaissance prince, using the company credit card for private expenses, driving around Amsterdam in a company Maserati with blue license plates for taxis (meaning he could drive where other people aren’t allowed), accepting bribes and, according to Rochdale, improving his own pension plan.

(Illustration: Google Street View)

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January 22, 2014

It’s a moped… it’s a scooter… it’s a bike! And that’s a problem

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 11:34 am

A German electric bicycle (aka e-bike), the blueLABEL cruiser (the pic is just a run-of-the-mill Vespa) can reach speeds of up to 45 km/h. Only a handful of them have been sold according to De Volkskrant newspaper, but they are popular, even with a price tag of 3,050 euro.

And although the blueLABEL cruiser is a fully functioning bicycle and looks like one too, Dutch law has problems classifying it as a bike, and apparently should have it down as either a moped (‘snorfiets’) or a scooter (‘bromfiets’) allowed to go up to 45 km/h.

If the blueLABEL cruiser is in fact a scooter, then you’d need a helmet, insurance and a different license plate (a blue one) to ‘drive’ it. If it’s a moped, you’d need yet another license plate (a yellow one). And when it goes over 25 km/h, it has to be driven on the road, not on a bike path.

The clincher is, the blueLABEL cruiser looks just like an ordinary bike, making the cops’ life difficult. In 2017 this type of bike, known as a ‘speed pedelec’ will be considered a scooter, which sounds about right. In the mean time, pricy German stealth bike it is.

Remember the Segway? That was a huge headache as well in the Netherlands.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl, Photo by Facemepls, some rights reserved)

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January 21, 2014

HEMA caught plagiarising French wine label

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:58 pm

Screen shot 2014-01-21 at 1.02.41 PM

It looked to many as if La Tulipe wine was available at the HEMA chain stores, but no, it was just a bottle of South African wine that had a very similar logo.

Coincidence or done on purpose who knows, but Dutch winemaker Ilya Gort cried sour grapes and wanted to take HEMA to court over it. In the meantime, HEMA has agreed to change the labels on the cheap South African wine which Gort gladly spits out on television right outside HEMA being the showman that his is (see Telegraaf link below).

If you want some cheap red wine with a very silly pun from the HEMA there’s always Chat-en-Oeuf .

Screen shot 2014-01-21 at 12.58.00 PM

And some tips again on wine tasting for cheap bottles, Dutch-style by Ilya Gort himself:

– Look at the wine.
Take a few seconds to actually look at the colour of what you’re drinking. Someone worked very hard to get it that way.

– Smell the wine.
You smell your food before you eat it, give your wine the same courtesy.

– Respect the wine and use a proper glass.
I almost can’t drink from my tumbler glasses anymore, it doesn’t taste the same.

(Links and screenshot: www.telegraaf.nl, wijnbloggers.nl)

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January 20, 2014

Dutch have best food in the world, Oxfam says

Filed under: Food & Drink,Health by Branko Collin @ 9:34 am

bitterballen-wikipedia-user-takeaway-pdIf you want to taste the best food in the world, look no further than the Netherlands, a new report claims.

There is a snag (isn’t there always?). The report was written by international aid organisation and poverty fighters Oxfam and they did not look at how good our restaurants are, nor did they look at what our dishes taste. As an organisation that tries to combat hunger among other things, their goal was to determine in which country (from a list of 125) citizens had the best access to “plentiful, nutritious, healthy and affordable” food.

The core questions Oxfam looked at were whether people had enough to eat, food was affordable, diets were diverse, people had access to both clean and safe water and how unhealthy people ate.

Dutchnews writes: “European countries occupy the entire top 20 bar one – Australia ties in 8th place—while the US, Japan, New Zealand, Brazil and Canada all fall outside. African countries occupy all the bottom 30 places in the table except for four—Laos, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India.”

Der Spiegel thinks the top ranking for the Netherlands is hilarious: “specialities like bitterballen, fried breadcrumbed balls containing a ragout, will excite neither gourmets nor advocates of healthy living.” (Bitterballen are small, round krokets that are served as bar snacks, usually with mustard).

See also:

(Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Takeaway, some rights reserved)

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