June 9, 2016
Nobody likes a long and hot traffic jam due to an accident, and neither did Adriaan Stoop, drummer of the band The Moods from Eindhoven, who pulled out his kit from the back of his truck and jammed it out on a Dutch motorway last Sunday.
“At first, I didn’t want to do it, but people were saying ‘go for i!’,” he told the AD newspaper. “I saw the queue of cars and figured it was going to last quite a while, so I started drumming on the motorway.”
(Link: www.francetvinfo.fr)
June 7, 2016
Just last week we told you about the ‘frikandellen vlaai’ and many other frikandel-related ‘inventions’, but we can now call it a hype.
Joining in is Roberto Gelato from Utrecht with a video of the owner listing off other frikandel delights such as pizza-frikandel from Urk, but then what about Utrecht, he says to the camera. Well, Utrecht is going to make frikandel ice cream!
According to Waarmaarraar, the ice cream is ready to roll. Foodies could combine it with Van Gogh potato ice cream and be all set.
(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl)
May 31, 2016
There’s been a run of weird food combos lately, including pancakes with fries and the discodel. Now the frikandel sans disco has made its appearance in ‘vlaai’ (‘pie’) from Limburg turning a sweet dessert into a savoury one.
Bakers from Grubbenvorst, Limburg whipped up a ‘frikandellen vlaai’ for a friend’s birthday. It can have curry sauce, chopped onions and mayonnaise on it if you like that sort of garnish. Other frikandel fans started asking for the pie after a picture of it was placed on Facebook.
(Link: www.gelderlander.nl)
May 22, 2016
A bunch of students from the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam have decided to open up what they claim to be the country’s first ‘demolition space’ called Bij de Buurman (‘At the Neighbour’s). And everything you’ll read about it is for men, men and men, although I can’t imagine they would ban women, but it is ‘where men can be men’.
Besides wrecking all kinds of things with a baseball bat or a hammer, patrons can come there to have a drink and chill, presumably after they’ve trashed something. Bij de Buurman says their demolition palace is for “frustrated men between the ages of 25 and 50 who need to work out job and relationship stress”, according to two of the six students, men, who themselves don’t have any of these issues because they go out and drink instead, possibly with your money. Cashing in on your fellow ‘man’ is fine, but insulting them in the process is an added bonus.
The demolition space is in a container in Rotterdam-Noord and will be open is from 26 to 29 May and from June 2 to 5 June where a demolition sessions of 5 minutes will cost the men 20 euro. Women of Rotterdam between the ages of 25 and 50, if you have job and relationship stress and need to trash something, well too bad. Or maybe you’ll be joined by men under 25 and over 50 who feel left out, and the world will be round again
(Link: www.ad.nl, Photo of locked door by boetter, some rights reserved)
Tags: demolition, men, Rotterdam
May 19, 2016
The theme of this year’s well-known Valtifest festival in Amsterdam is ‘On Fire’, and they are planning to let in some 500 people for free as long as they have natural red hair, which occurs in a small percentage of the Western European population.
Besides upsetting a lot of people who don’t fit the bill, it discriminates against a whole of people whose genes do not lean towards presenting with red hair, like a lot of non white people.
The joke on the festival’s website “don’t shave your pubic hair because we may look in your pants” isn’t going over well either, apparently. An appointed hairdresser downtown needs to check your hair first as well on specific dates, as you can’t just show up at the festival.
For the real red heads who just want to hang out with other red heads, the city of Breda still holds the Red Head Day in the fall, and this year it will be on 3 September 2016.
(Links: trendingvandaag.eenvandaag.nl, www.entertainmentbusiness.nl, Photo of last years visitors by Eddy Van 3000, some rights reserved)
March 29, 2016
World War II grenades pop up on the beach, at flea markets and even in potatoes here in the Netherlands, but this time a grenade was in fact sitting in an old man’s cupboard with its pin out.
A resident of an old folks’ home in Amsterdam East has had a live grenade for years that everybody thought was a fake. Sadly, the man recently passed and when his belongings were collected, the people that found the grenade among his model boats and books had it checked out by the police.
The staff of the home just assumed it was a fake, but once the police checked it out, they realised it was in a fact a live grenade. The bomb squad came and picked it up and had it detonated. All we know is that it was an English grenade that finally came out of the closet, although thankfully not with a bang.
(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of grenade by macspite, some rights reserved)
March 18, 2016
Noord-Brabant, one of the Dutch provinces that unwillingly served as a doormat for invading troops during WWII, now has its very own Anne Frank themed escape room advertised with “Hide before the Germans find you!”.
Located in an old WWII bunker, ‘Het Achterhuis’ (‘the shed’ or ‘back room’ and also the original Dutch title of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’) is the theme of this espace room, and its 19-year-old owner Thijs Verberne swears it has an educational purpose. The Valkenswaard escape room lets you ‘walk in Anne Frank’s shoes’ and fuelled by fear of being sent to the camps you need to find a way to get out of it that I bet doesn’t involve writing in your diary.
On Facebook there’s people totally into it and there’s a lot of disgusted folks as well. The espace room apparently looks like the Anne Frank’s house, the original of which is about 87 kilometres away in Amsterdam, although there are others around the country.
The city of Valkenswaard, which was always planning to do something with the bunker, will make sure the escape room is being run properly, although this sounds like something you would say to the media. The Anne Frank Foundation has not yet made any statements about the escape room.
UPDATE: The Anne Frank Foundation is not amused in the slightest.
(Link:www.ed.nl)
Tags: Anne Frank, Eindhoven, espace room, Germans, Noord-Brabant
March 16, 2016
An e-mail written by the team leader of the district council of Nieuw-West in Amsterdam has told women they cannot wear ‘skirts/dresses above the knee’ and ‘knee-high boots’ if they work at the council office counter, where citizens come and get municipal permits and documents. By extension, if this were to be applied, they might have to fear for their jobs. And a happy belated International Women’s Day to you, too.
Assuming the team leader is a man, although their identity is currently being investigated, he has no power to tell women or anyone else what to wear, which clearly goes against the regulations of the city of Amsterdam as a whole. Questions are being asked by local politicians we know personally about these ‘absurd’ rules that target women. The assumption being made is that Nieuw-West, a district with a large Muslim population, is trying to spare them the view of decadent Western women as spring approaches, but nobody asked their opinion. Assumption number three is that the team leader saw a short skirt with knee-high boots that ‘bothered’ him, to use 1920s parlance, and so he decided to attack all women and offend a lot of men in the process.
Why fill in an entire group’s opinion without asking them? Not a single letter of complaint can be found at the offices, either. Sadly, Nieuw-West is the butt of many jokes, despite having a vibrantly diverse community. If it had more bars and wasn’t so far from the city centre, it could be my kind of ‘hood. It’s cheaper that most places, has big green parks, world-class street art, and food markets that makes you feel like you’re not in Amsterdam. But it takes one absurd e-mail to give the Dutch Internet a reason to trash Nieuw-West and attack its Muslim community.
Maybe this team leader needs to take a course on how to deal with his 1950s view on women in the workplace and not try and change the world around him to suit his backwards views.
UPDATE: The team leader was actually a woman who saw a colleague wearing a skirt she found too short, but instead of communicating with her one on one like a normal person, she felt an email that would cause an unnecessary stir was the way to go.
(Link: www.nu.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)
Tags: Amsterdam, Muslims, Nieuw-West, women
January 6, 2016
Lottery story No. 1: young man from Sittard, Limburg buys four tickets for the New Year’s Eve lottery draw and figures he’s won because the draw is done based on your exact postal code (numbers and letters).
However, he had a standing order with the bank for his tickets and it didn’t go through because he didn’t have enough money in his account. He wants to sue, but he’ll probably lose.
The jackpot was 43.9 million euro, half of which was divided among 15 winners and the other half divided among other people in the same postal code, save the letters.
Then there’s lottery story No. 2: a man from Amsterdam thought he had won 2.1 million euro, but his ex wife had something to say about it.
Married for 30 years, a couple separated, the man moved out of their home while going through the divorce, but sometime after he had moved out, the postal code of their home was the winning lottery number.
Although the couple was still married but separated and not living together, the man didn’t jointly pay for the ticket, his wife argued. He took her to court and lost.
They had played the lottery together for 30 years, but once he moved, he stopped paying his share. She proved that they had actually been living separately for four years and that he had moved in with his new, younger girlfriend.
The judge took the woman’s side purely because the man had not paid for the lottery ticket and that he had already moved out and moved on.
Moral of both stories: make sure you’ve actually paid for your lottery tickets.
(Links: www.waarmaarraar.nl, nos.nl)
December 14, 2015
In 2006 Dutch scientist Bart Knols observed that malaria-carrying mosquitoes are attracted to smelly human feet, convincing fellow scientist Renate Smallegange’s to follow in his smelly footsteps devising mosquito traps using human foot odour. Knols figured out that when standing up, mosquitoes would go for people’s feet, prompting Smallegange to zoom in on this discovery. At Wageningen University she collects people’s smelly socks to carry out research on trapping mosquitoes who transmit malaria through their bite, affecting millions of people every year.
According to this radio interview, carbon dioxide is what first attracts mosquitoes to people, however since 2006, we also know that smelly feet do that as well. She explains that clean socks are not attractive at all to mosquitoes, smelly socks are very attractive, but when you add carbon dioxide, you could trap roughly 45 to 75% of all malaria-carrying mosquitoes. And the sock only needs to be worn for a day!
No, foot odour doesn’t work on ‘regular’ mosquitoes, and yes, the idea is to design traps with a specific built-in odour, not some African villager’s dirty socks or shipping socks over to Africa.
(Link: www.improbable.com, Image by A.E. Goeldi, in the public domain)
Tags: feet, malaria, mosquitoes, smell, socks, Wageningen University
