Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:34 pm
Customs at Schiphol airport intercepted some Germans with over 200 live tarantulas and other creepy crawlies they brought back in their suitcases from their travels to Peru. This could have been their idea of money making souvenirs just in time for Halloween.
Not only did they ‘hide’ the arachnoids and insects in plastic containers, but also in their clothes and shoes. The whole lot is poisonous and will be examined by entomologists and whatever the name is of experts who analyse spiders.
Dutch researchers have won two Ig Nobel prizes this year, fun science awards which ‘honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think’.
Researchers Anita Eerland, Rolf Zwaan and Tulio M. Guadalupe of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam won the psychology prize for their study on why leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller.
US-based Dutch biologist Frans de Wal and American partner Jennifer Pokorny won the anatomy prize for research showing that chimpanzees can recognize their fellow chimps from photographs of their butts.
We reported several times about Laura Dekker, the sailor girl who was allowed to circumnavigate the globe for a year, and more recently we told you about two teenage brothers, Enrique and Hugo who are being denied an education because of their special needs as dyslexics and decided to sail off to get one the same way Dekker did.
The national ombudsman finally got wind of the situation and wants to find out why these kids can’t or don’t attend classes, as there are thousands of them. The brothers set sail today although Child Protection Services recently took their parents to court, but the court is delaying their verdict until December. I bet they are doing this because they know the parents aren’t at fault, and with general elections coming up on September 12, a lot could change in the meantime.
Child Protection Services can’t prosecute the parents for not trying to put their children in a school, as all schools within a large radius have refused the brothers. I don’t understand why the government doesn’t force a school to take them or at least try and resolve this situation. This imbroglio is far from over, and it is quite embarrassing.
Since Dekker got special schooling from the World School once she set sail, the same should apply to these kids or else someone will call out ‘discrimination’. Of course, the problem is that children of school-going age are being kept out of school by the educational system. What’s more, the parents aren’t legally allowed to home school their children, but I really do hope they are, I know I would.
Filed under: History,Weird by Branko Collin @ 5:11 pm
The legend of the Bokkenrijders (‘Goat riders’) from Limburg knows many forms. Crossroads Magazine poured one of them in an essay in 2008, contrasting the popular form quoted below with the opinion that the Goat Riders were a precursor to the enlightenment.
In the 18th century, while most of Europe was shaking off centuries of superstition and beginning to prepare for the age of reason, the lands which now form the Dutch and Belgian regions of Limburg were terrorised by hordes of flying devil worshippers.
These mysterious robber bands met in caves or at isolated roadside chapels. Riding through the nightly sky on the backs of big black goats, they plundered farms and churches. The Goat Rider owned the night throughout most of the 18th century, until they were finally brought to justice by brave and god-fearing officers of the law. This is a story that practically everyone in Limburg knows to this very day.
And:
If one thing is clear about the Goat Rider, it is the fact that a great number of people must have met violent, degrading deaths while being completely innocent of any crime. Indeed it is quite likely that the Goat Rider’s bands as such never even existed outside of the human imagination.
Via Metafilter. I cannot believe I’ve never blogged about the goat riders before.
Two brothers, Enrique (15) and Hugo (13), both said to be highly intelligent and very dyslexic, have been denied education for more than a year (two years for Enrique) because local schools are unable to provide them with a suitable, adapted education. However, they are required to go to school until the age of 18, and home schooling is forbidden in the Netherlands, so staying home is illegal, but no school will have them. According to television show EenVandaag, some 16,000 children (!) are not attending school because there’s no adapted education for them, something the government keeps cutting down on.
Their mom explains that they had to work hard to read as good as the rest of the class in secondary school, but they couldn’t take proper notes, even legible ones. However, they understand better than the rest everything they are being taught and are being held back because they are dyslexic.
Remember Laura Dekker, the sailor girl who was allowed to circumnavigate the globe for a year? Well, she was allowed adapted education from the World School, so the brothers are going to do the same thing to force the government to give them an education. They are going to pull a ‘Laura Dekker’: they’re going to sail for a year and do their homework. Oh, and they are totally going to hit up children rights’ groups abroad to plead their cause and point fingers at the Ministry of Education. Their dad is a sailor and will follow them around by boat as well as help with their homework.
The man on the bike, Chriet Titulaer, who people made fun of because he looked like a Mormon — I just think he looks way out there, him being an astronomer and all, explains to us that some people needed phones on their bikes back in the 1980s.
“People who want to cycle for sports or health reasons to their work, but are managers (men, right?) would need to be available.” Dude, what about people in their cars, in the train or on the bus at the time? You couldn’t reach any of them, either, managers or burger flippers.
It could be comedy. Is this comedy? I think it is.
Titulaer can’t even bike and answer the phone without toppling over. I can’t even imagine someone hanging up properly while cycling. It makes me almost want to try it.
“The phone can be charged with the alternator when the battery is running low.” How much dial time does that get me is all my 2012 brain can think about. You’d almost have to cycle to charge up your phone, hoping nobody calls you in the mean time. Hilarious.
He continues, as if he were talking sense:
“It’s not sure this will be come onto the market, but if it does, we’ll need 200 volunteers for six months who can use it for free”. And he asks people to send a letter if they’re interested – not call.
Lucky us, we get to see the prototype on this show De Wonder Wereld (The Wonder World).
In March, but also just last month, there have been disruptions of the emergency number 112 throughout the country. In fact, the last time a man died because an ambulance came too late, as a result of 112 being difficult to reach.
This month, Dutch news programme Eenvandaag reports that the country’s deaf and hard of hearing population have had no access whatsoever to 112 for more than 70 days now. The clincher is that the company that provided them with a chat service to access 112, AnnieS, went bankrupt in late May, early June. Interest groups ask: why doesn’t 112 have the technology to supply this service themselves? AnnieS also helped people communicate with the tax office and other organisations as well as with one another.
Before this service, they had a text service that wasn’t great, but worked most of the time. When AnnieS was launched in September 2010, they didn’t hook up the existing text service dating back from 1997 and some deaths ensued.
The government is working on getting a Swedish company to get the AnnieS-like service up and running, which it says should be around mid September. However, in the mean time when a hearing man dies because 112 is not available it’s news, but if a deaf person dies because of this discriminatory situation, they’ll be treated as second class citizens due to the government’s inability to plan properly.
Imagine you’re chilling on a terrace in downtown Nijmegen, minding your own beeswax when along comes a swarm of bees heading right for your table like a homing device.
Last Tuesday, some 15,000 bees decided to go shopping for a new home and took a liking to the underside of one of the terrace tables. The patrons fled inside and the cafe shut its doors and windows. Forget calling the police, the owner called up a beekeeper to explain to the bees in bee speak that his cafe was not a good place to expand their honey business.
It was a battle to the end, with the queen bee not wanting to go gently. Finally, the beekeeper grabbed her with gloves on and they were all sorted. Nobody was stung.
The year 2012 is the year of the bee, but this major hive meeting was not on the agenda.
Filed under: Shows,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:20 pm
After Dutch reality show Big Brother went galactic, the Dutch have been producing and copying other countries’ reality shows like there’s no tomorrow. However, this next idea is way out there — literally.
The man behind the Mars One idea is Bas Lansdorp who claims that in 2023 we’ll finally put people on Mars. Not only that, but he’s thinking, why not have a reality show on the red planet as well, while we’re there. What scares me as I write this is that he has devised a way to get there, costing about 5 billion euro, but no way whatsoever of getting back. It’s a one-way journey. Getting back is currently too complicated to work out, which sounds like every movie I’ve seen featuring Mars, and they end badly.
Only four people can go at once, a trip that lasts seven months. “We’ve had hundreds of people who are willing to go and settle Mars, even families with children.”
And why would this actually work? There has been plans galore to settle Mars. You have to read his reasons for yourself, it scares me too. Why would anyone want to leave this planet and go somewhere where you couldn’t see your friends or travel as you would on Earth? It sounds like a prison to me.
When I watch any space movie, I actually get freaked out by people dying of asphyxiation or being thrown out a space lock. Of course the idea of going to Mars is cool, but is it worth dying for, I wonder.
And then there’s this old Dutch beer commercial that echoes a Mars landing as well.
On a football pitch in Leiden, a game of “Where will the cow poop?” took a very unexpected turn when a cow went for the corner flag and popped out a calf instead of a cow patty.
One guy hosting the event looked at another guy and said “Dude, there’s a calf coming out of this cow!”. The first guy thought it was a joke, but soon figured out it wasn’t. The event organisers wanted ‘relaxed’ cows since children were present at the event. Oh the irony!
The farmer who supplied the cows knew that that particular cow was pregnant, but she was supposed to give birth in about six weeks. Having been transported and subjected to the crowd, the cow was probably stressed and had it out in the corner — in just five minutes. Cow and calf are doing fine.
The person who picked the pitch parcel closest to the birthing corner won 250 euro.
