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 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 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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January 19, 2014

Nude shopper munching on raw trout and shoe salesman forgiven by latter

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 12:10 pm

bobs-adventure-store-google-street-viewFive years ago around this time a man dressed only in shoes and a hat entered Bob’s Adventure Store in Weert, Limburg.

Robert van Dooren, the sales clerk, was busy helping another customer who was trying out shoes, but nevertheless proceeded to make small talk. “I had noticed he was unconventionally dressed, especially considering the time of year. He had a raw trout in his hand from which he took bites now and then. I asked him if he wasn’t cold, but that wasn’t the case.”

Two municipal police officers (stadswacht) entered the store, after which the naked shopper became violent. He started pulling on a display and Van Dooren together with the other customer had to force him down, Limburger wrote at the time. Van Dooren: “I used climbing rope to choke him, but he did manage to bite me in the arm hard enough to draw blood.”

Last week store owner Bob Frantzen talked to nu.nl about the incident: “It turned out the man did what he did in a fit of insanity. There was no intent. The man later told us he was terribly sorry about what happened, which is good enough for us. We harbour no bad feelings.”

(Photo: Google Street View)

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January 18, 2014

Live top speeds on Dutch motorways

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 1:52 pm

best-wel-snelThe site bestwelsnel.nl taps into the National Data Warehouse for Traffic Information (NDW) to bring you the top speeds registered on Dutch motorways.

The NDW registers speeds using over 24,000 detection loop pairs spaced 2.5 metres apart. Bestwelsnel.nl (the name means ‘quite fast’) displays three types of speeds: unconfirmed top speeds (grey), daily confirmed top speeds (green) and confirmed top speeds of all time (red, with all time meaning since 31 December 2013). A value counts as confirmed when it has been registered within the minute by two separate detection loop pairs that were no further than 5 kilometres apart.

In case you were wondering, the Netherlands does have a speed limit which varies depending on which stretch of motorway you are on, but the default (and highest limit) is 130 kilometres per hour. The values you see on bestwelsnel.nl all indicate speeding. The fine for going 39 kph over the speed limit on a motorway is 400 euro, if you go faster than that and get caught you have to appear before a judge.

This is an example of open data slowly getting more traction in the Netherlands—except in some cases it seems.

(Illustration: partial screen capture of bestwelsnel.nl)

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January 13, 2014

Dutch housing prices are historically high

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:35 pm

The Economist has been keeping track of the development of house prices for a while now and this recent graph neatly shows the house price bubble the world is slowly getting out of.

What may surprise you to know is that the Netherlands, typically known as an economically stable country, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to driving up prices to insanity level 11. What is worse, is that unlike most of the world’s nations, the country will see only little decrease of house prices in the near future.

Hendrik Oude Nijhuis looks even further back than The Economist in an article for Z24. He points out that in the past 400 years, house prices in the Netherlands have always followed inflation. Sometimes they rose more quickly than inflation would dictate and sometimes they would lag behind inflation, but they would always go back to a happy medium. Houses in the Netherlands are now 75% more expensive than the historic average, which is a record.

House prices have been decreasing slowly since 2008, but as you can see in the first chart, the process is slow. One giant brake on the current housing market is that the current generation of first-time homeowners is in a bad fix. On the one hand, these young house owners got in when the prices soared, meaning they bought expensive houses, and on the other, they took out mortgage loans that they are not paying off. The result is what Oude Nijhuis calls ‘submarine mortgages’, loans where the collateral is worth way less than the amount owed. This generation (Oude Nijhuis says there are 1.7 million of these submarine loans against 4.3 million privately owned houses) is unable to move on even if it wanted to. Home owners cannot afford new houses and yet if they buy one, they will take a loss on the old one.

Add to this toxic mix the fact that politicians don’t want to be seen touching interest deductions and you have the recipe for an unhealthy housing market for years to come.

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January 12, 2014

Alexine Tinne, 19th century explorer, fashion designer and photographer

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 10:02 pm

alexine-tinne-pdApart from the Arctics, the interior of Africa was one of the last places left for Europeans to ‘discover’ and finding the source of the Nile was a major goal for 19th century explorers.

One of these explorers was a woman from The Hague, Alexine Tinne (b. 1835 – d. 1869). Growing up as one of the richest heiresses of the Netherlands in a time when European women were expected to ‘know their place’, nobody would have batted an eyelid if Tinne had stayed at home and prepared for marriage. But even at a young age Alexine Tinne shared with her mother Henriëtte (a former lady-in-waiting and daughter of an admiral) a thirst for travel.

In 1855 mother and daughter sailed up the Nile for the first time in order to reach Karthoum, but it would take them several expeditions to succeed. In 1861 they not only reached Karthoum but decided to push through to Gondokoro in Sudan (near present-day Juba) and beyond. Gondokoro was known as the last place where the Nile was navigable but Tinne fell ill there.

During an attempt in 1863 Tinne lost her mother, her aunt and two servants; it would be her last voyage up the Nile. Writer Redmond O’Hanlon told Historiek.net that he believes Tinne and her mother wanted to discover the source of the Nile: “that was their goal, I am sure of it.” But contemporaries did not approve of women explorers and O’Hanlon fears this is why the Tinne expedition kept schtum about its real motives. Samuel Baker, another Nile explorer of the time, wrote of the competition: “There are Dutch ladies travelling without any gentlemen… They must be demented. A young lady alone with the Dinka tribe… they really must be mad. All the natives are naked as the day they were born.”

Tinne, who felt responsible for the death of her mother and aunt, stayed in Africa. In 1869 Alexine Tinne, while living in Tunesia, decided to cross the Sahara. On 2 August of that year her caravan was ambushed by Tuaregs at the wadi of Chergui in what is now Algeria. Tinne was killed with two sword blows and a gun shot.

Although she only reached the age of 33, she accomplished quite a lot during her life. She designed clothes that she wore herself, wrote and drew the source materials for a botanical guide about the plant life in Sudan (the Plantae Tinneanae), started a half-way house for freed slaves and, in between two of her Nile expeditions, experimented with photography.

See also:

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January 11, 2014

Dutch classic car collectors dump their darlings

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 3:06 pm

morris-minor-branko-collinFollowing a government decision to start applying road tax to classic cars, the Netherlands saw an exodus of such cars in 2013, Nieuwsblad reports.

Last year 14,115 classic cars were sold to foreign buyers. This number was less than half that in 2012, namely 6,182 cars. The ‘oldtimers’, as classic cars are called in Dutch, were sold mostly to Polish buyers (18.2%), followed by buyers from Libya (12.8%), Lithuania (7.9%) and Belgium (7.7%).

Under the old rules, cars aged 25 years and older were exempt from paying road tax, under the new rules that age has become 40 years.

See also: Number of classic cars and motors doubled in seven years

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