Or, what Dutch really sounds like to foreigners.
Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
There’s No Bloody-Mindedness Like Dutch Bloody-Mindedness
From King Aardvark’s Kick in the Nuts via the ever reliable Pharyngula (did you know Karl Rove’s stepdad was a model for a genital piercings mag? No, neither did I):
Breaking New: Dutch Priest is a Contemptible Jerk
From CBC.ca, a catholic priest in the Netherlands by the name of Harm Schilder is being a assheaded jerkwad to his neighbours. Schilder’s church holds services every weekday morning. Much to the dismay of the townsfolk around him, at the ungodly hour of 7:15am, he rings the church bells loudly and proudly (well, 7:15am is ungodly for me, though everything is ungodly for me, but anything taking place at 7:15am is more ungodly than most things). And the townsfolk want him to stop, or at least turn down the volume a bit. Municipal officials have been urging Schilder to stop ringing the bells for months (Update: according to www.katholieknederland.nl, since March 16th)and recently told him that, starting Aug 16, if he didn’t stop he would be fined a whopping 5000 euros each morning.
Says municipal spokesman Thomas Heesters, “The council does not want to get involved in this – it’s a house of prayer – but we have to take into account the feelings of local residents.” That actually bothers me a bit. Just because Schilder runs a church instead of any other establishment, the council isn’t keen to get involved. Thankfully, they are putting aside their misplaced respect for the church and are proceding with the fines. The church rang its bells on Thursday and Friday, incurring fines worth 10000 euros.
That Schilder fellow sure seems like a nice accomodating person.
What’s Schilder’s reply? “People who are bothered by the bell should know that we pray for them in the mass.” Seriously, this is what he said on the church website. What a dillhole. That’s basically a giant “screw you” to everyone who is pissed off at loud noises in the morning. He’s saying that, because he’s on the side of God, he can be as inconsiderate as he wants.
If I had to pick one national trait to ascribe to the Dutch nation above any other it would be just this kind of mule-headed bloody obstinacy – yes, I’m looking at YOU, the neighbours who’ve been leisurely banging away and drilling* for the past 6 weeks from sunup till sunset and beyond.
*That’s not a double entendre, they really are banging and drilling. Ecstatic moans I can handle, hammer-drills not so much.
They’re Coming! Flee!
Giant Person Lands In Netherlands
Updated: 08:17, Wednesday August 08, 2007
A giant Lego man has been fished out of the sea in the Netherlands.
The smiling effigy was spotted in the sea at the resort of Zandvoort.
Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5 metre (8 foot) tall plastic character, which has a yellow head and blue torso.
They placed it on the sand, where holidaymakers quickly gathered round.
“We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water,” said a stall worker.
“It was a life-sized Lego toy.”
Perhaps it’s the long lost brother to this giant Lego Lakers player I snapped in the Bijenkorf department store on Dam square recently.
I Do Hope It Wasn’t Used….
Via The Santa Monica Mercury:
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands—Concertgoers at a festival in the Dutch city of Lichtenvoorde were treated to an unusual sight Friday: A pink hot air balloon 127 feet high, shaped exactly like a condom, drifting lazily across the sky.
The balloon, with the words “Vrij Veilig”—Dutch for “Safe Sex”—was launched by the public health service in the eastern district of Gelre-Ijssel, near the German border.
The director of the health service, known by its Dutch acronym GGD, said the festival was an ideal opportunity to reach young people. More than 80,000 are expected to attend the three-day Zwarte Cross event—a combination motor-cross race and hard rock concert, with Dutch gothic metal band “Within Temptation” headlining.
“This is a playful way of asking for attention to the problem of sexually transmitted diseases, HIV and AIDS,” said Laurent de Vries.
Nurses on the concert grounds also handed out educational material and free condoms as part of the campaign, he said.
Flying a giant condom is by no means an unusual event in the Netherlands or in Europe generally; condoms are not the same hotbutton moral issue they are oin America, which is why the US media find it odd.
I expect if say, Planned Parenthood tried it at a US rock concert they’d find themselves picketed by a bunch of Headbangers For Christ and the condom brought down by citizen anti-aircraft fire.
Screw Politics, Let’s Dance!
I’m having a day off reading thinking or talking about politics today, it’s making me depressed and snappy, or should I say more depressed and snappy than usual. The almost stationary Arctic-melt-fed low pressure weather system that’s obliterated summer like a great wet pancake isn’t helping. You can bet what you like that today’ll be the day Bush resigns and I’ll miss it, but what the hell, we all need a little light relief.
So instead, as you’ll have seen from the previous post, I’ve been tootling around YouTube sniffing out amusing inconsequentialities, like jumpstyle.
What’s jumpstyle? Here’s a fairly representative Dutch example, done to the Fratellis’ Chelsea Dagger :
Wikipedia, as always, has more:
Originally, the gabber dance style called “hakken” was used to dance to jumpstyle music, although it is slower than hardcore; but later a new dance evolved called “Skiën” (to ski). Skiën means kicking one’s feet forward and backward on the bass line, while the torso goes the opposite way (right foot forward, torso back), once in a while lifting one foot significantly higher than usual to indicate a break in the beat. This dance, usually called “jumpen” nowadays (derived from English, to jump), originated in Belgium in 1997 but has seen a real popularity boost in recent years, gaining widespread fame in Belgium and Northern France around 2002 and more recently in the Netherlands. In other countries such as Germany and Austria it has also garnered some interest, albeit among a limited public. The Belgian DJs Da Boy Tommy and Da Rick are often credited with its invention.
It is also called skank but is different from the skank associated with ska and reggae music.
Often another variation of this dance called “Duo-Jump” is performed by two people who choreograph their movements and perform them in unison along side one another. This variation of the jumpstyle dance also originated in Belgium. Some see similarities in the dance style with inline dancing
Jumpers can go to special jump discotheques, often called “Jumpotheques”; for example “The Oh!” in Gavere. Also special events, like the yearly Bassleader-event in Flanders Expo Ghent, are mostly kept in Belgium, but also events like ReverZe and Explosive Car Tuning or Jumping Is Not A Crime(JINAC) do their part in spreading this music style.
This choppy, jumpy dance, mostly performed by nerdy young white working-class guys, preferably performed in an unexpected public place and filmed on cameraphones, has been the latest craze amongst Netherlandish youth and all over Northern Europe for a quite a while now. There’s a massive seam of homemade jumpstyle videos online and some of them are quite brilliant.
My personal favourite is this French jumpstyler:
It’s the reactions from the passers-by, or rather the lack of them, that’s so funny. I must say I prefer the French jumpstyle style, the NL and DE styles are a bit too much like goosestepping for my liking and besides we all know what Germanic dancing can lead to.
This being YouTube, jumpstyle videos’ve led, inevitably, to cartoon jumpstyle mashups, (if ‘mashup”s still a word that’s acceptable to use – no doubt I’m showing my middle-age there).
Simpsons jumpstyle
Family guy jumpstyle
Futuruma jumpstyle (a bit lame)
Much better and cleverer, here’s Lego jumpstyle
Borat jumpstyle:
You want to have a go now, don’t you? Well to get you started, here’s a tutorial.
Have fun and don’t scare the cats.