No, it wasn’t aliens or a thunderstorm that did this bit of land-art: this is a brain on cocaine. From The Sunday Times:
Crime pattern: a 35-year-old driver high on cocaine was chased by police through a cornfeild near Dussen in the Netherlands. Four police cars were damaged before the man crashed his car into a ditch (ANP/Camerapress)
Heh. If only there were video too, but still it’s only a matter of time till the field is sold for several hundred thousand euro as an art installation.
From Reuters:
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Dutch students have developed powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.
The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gramme packets that cost 1-1.5 euros ($1.35-$2).
Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.
“We are aiming for the youth market. They are really more into it because you can compare it with Bacardi-mixed drinks,” 20-year-old Harm van Elderen told Reuters.
Van Elderen and four classmates at Helicon Vocational Institute, about an hour’s drive from Amsterdam, came up with the idea as part of their final-year project.
“Because the alcohol is not in liquid form, we can sell it to people below 16,” said project member Martyn van Nierop.
The legal age for drinking alcohol and smoking is 16 in the Netherlands.
Dutch kidney reality TV show a hoax:
which a supposedly dying woman had to decide one of three contestants to whom she would donate a kidney was a hoax, the programme makers have said.
The Big Donor Show, which the programme makers had said was intended to focus on the shortage of donor organs, had sparked controversy worldwide.
Identified only as “Lisa”, the 37-year-old woman who had been said to have a brain tumour was to base her selection on the person’s history and conversations with the candidates’ families and friends.
At the last minute, she was revealed as a healthy actress.
The contestants were also part of the deception.
It may have been a hoax, but it served its purpose: organ donation is back on the political agenda, both in the Netherlands as in the EU. Me, I’ve downloaded a organ donor form and will sent it in on Monday.
And you?
Today’s comedy double is all about sex education The first group is a collection of public service safe sex and condom ads from all over the world, and because they’re ads they’re pretty much worksafe, depending on how tightassed your boss is – or you are, if you’re working from home. But then if you’re such a tightass, what on earth are you doing here?
The bonus clips are longer and much more graphic, though equally funny. Probably not safe for any workplace though. The cats had to go and hide in the bathroom at one point, poor sensitive loves.
On with the motley then.
I love condom ads; unwritten boundaries of sexual taste and decency vary so widely from country to country, testing the transgressive creativity of ad-makers to the benefit of us viewers. So to soften you up for the condomfest to come here’s a sex-ed ad from Canada and oh god, we’ve all been at this school event or something very like it:
An ad like this next one, also from Canada, might prove more effective in its aim. Works for me.
First the stick, then the carrot, hur hur; from South Africa comes a condom ad that does it with subtlety, style, humour and ooh, eyecandy:
Then there’s the typically idiosyncratic Dutch approach. I’ve never seen them do this on KLM, though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they did:
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But some people really do need the message hammered home, if you see what I mean and I think you do.
If you’re male and at all sensitive about the family jewels, I’d suggest you don’t watch this next one, or maybe you could watch it from safely behind your chair. How not to test a condom:
Right, now that we’ve got our condoms and know how to use them, it might be wise to use them responsibly. This one’s from France on the side-effects of easily available contraception:
It’s funny, but I’m not sure exactly what they’re saying there – that contraception makes women bad mothers?
Now for the bonus clips: they’re quite long, so you might want to save them for your lunch break or at home. First, Family Guy on abstinence ed:
Abstinence, schmabstinence. You might as well ask a cat not to lick its itching nads as to ask a teenager to be sexually abstinent. But they tried, and still do: here’s a mashup of American ’50s sex-ed films:
I dunno though, sometimes understanding parents can be worse. Much worse….
That is one of the most cringe-worthy things I’ve seen in a very long time.
Far from hymning abstinence or trumpeting fake understanding, this next ad takes humourous acceptance of sexual diversity to whole new levels. I don’t think they’ll be seeing this one in Kansas, do you? What a great ad though:
The last bonus clip is an animated short which I think may be Czech: it’s pretty sexually graphic so definitely not safe for work, but what an excellent safe sex video, funny and touching with great animation.
Now my work here is done, mwahahaha. I’m off to sit in the garden in the sun for a while, at least until disturbed by local cat politics in action.
The thing to remember is that this is meant as a publicity stunt to draw attention to the precarious donor situation in the Netherlands, where ever since the government started its big publicity campaign the amount of donors has only dropped. It’s not really real; no matter who will be the winner in this show, it’s going to be the doctors who decide who this kidney goes to, based purely on medical grounds. I doubt whether you even can donate your organs for use by specific persons.
As a publicity stunt this show has already served its purpose, as organ donation is back on the political agenda again. It’s clear the current system isn’t working. That’s because it’s an opt-in, rather than an opt-out system and worse a system where the deceased donor’s family can override their wishes even if they’ve registered themselves as donor.
The first step to change this is to switch to an opt-out system where the family cannot override the individual’s decision and you have to specifically state you do not wish to be a donor rather than the other way around.
