Yes, there is a guy who is trying to grow all known beard types on his face, and has managed to collect 25 of the 35 variants so far.

Although my posting frequency here never has been a thing to brag about much, lately it has dropped below the “once a week” that I unconsciously saw as a minimum. This is not because of the dreaded blogging fatigue, but because I’ve joined a couple of other blogs—which I must have written about once or … Read More

This is too important to just leave to my browser’s bookmarks. I just found this absolutely marvelous online dictionary of narrative mechanisms called Television Tropes & Idioms. Despite the name it is not just about TV, but about story telling in all mediums, including games. And every definition I’ve encountered so far is absolutely spot … Read More

As you may know, I blog at a couple of other places too. One of them is 24 Oranges: off-beat news about the Netherlands in English. Somewhere around February, we hit a dry spot in the news. Nothing would come our way. I’d Skype Orangemaster, my co-conspirator, and ask: “And?” And she’d say: “Nothing.” And … Read More

Things young people know, from the perspective of a middle-aged one Things we did not know three years ago Plus a not-a-list: the true cost of your next mobile phone.

The French Eminem does not rap, she chats.

Christians like to pretend that they are meek, they like to put themselves in a victim role and turn that other cheek (“and turn, two, three; turn, two, three…”). But if you want to convince others of the friendliness of your religion it helps to have a friendly holy book, and this is where Christians … Read More

“Territory size shows the proportion of all contributions to international food aid programmes that come from governments there.” Eamelje.net, where I found the link to the Worldmapper service, displays almost exactly the same map, but there the legend says: “Territory size shows the proportion of all McDonalds restaurants that were open in 2004, that were … Read More

A friend and I started a blog that will report trivia from the Netherlands in English. It’s called 24 Oranges. We believe enough interesting things happen in this country that those who don’t speak Dutch might like to know about.

Eamelje has the beginnings of a nice Vrienden van de Poëzie collection. Flemish comedian Wim Helsen has been given a couple of minutes at the end of each Belgian Man Bijt Hond (small news) episode to read poetry, and Eamelje makes it a point to post the best of those. All in Dutch of course.