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This adorable old picture would have made a great postcard. It is part of a collection of photographs of Dutch life published in the 1906 book De Aarde en haar volken (The Earth and Its People). See more at IllustratedPast.com. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Starting December 1st, the Netherlands will be giving their drunk drivers a holiday gift. Drivers who have been pulled over with high blood alcohol content will be given “alcolocks” to install into their cars. The device acts as a breathalyzer that can keep an engine turned off.
The way the alcolock works is that the driver must first breathe into it to unlock the engine, and will have to repeat the same process at regular intervals during the journey.
If the mini-breathalyzer, which is fitted to the dashboard, indicates a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, the engine will not turn on.
The alcolocks will be installed for two years with a possible six-year extension if the driver continues to drink and drive. In the worst cases, the driver’s license will be revoked, and the driver will have to wait five years before he or she can take a new test.
About 200 people die every year because of drink-driving, Dutch media reported.
Link | Image Credit Felix Triller
Divorce Hotel is not a particular place, but a service available to splitting couples in the Netherlands, in which they can go to a hotel for three days to work out an agreement. It’s the brainchild of Jim Halfens, who is not a lawyer.
Couples thinking about going through the Divorce Hotel process have to start with a set of extensive interviews. If they decide they can settle their differences quickly, with a mediator instead of lawyers, then they choose a four or five star hotel.
Over three days, the mediator and other specialists – notaries, even psychologists – are on hand to help the couple.
“If the marriage can be saved, we always tell people they are at the wrong address at the divorce hotel,” said Marie-Louise Van As, a lawyer who works as a mediator at the Divorce Hotel.
She notes that the three-day hotel stays are not a vacation. There are checklists, homework she calls it, that the couples have to do ahead of time.
But, Van As says, it’s worth it for many couples.
“In Holland to get divorced usually lasts six to nine months,” Van As said. “A bad divorce, a fighting divorce, can last five to 10 years. And cost 50,000 Euros or more.
The Divorce Hotel process costs about 5% of that. So far, participating couples have booked separate rooms. Link -via Fortean Times
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Last week, it was marmite. Soon, it will be pot-smoking tourists who will be banned from Dutch cannabis shops:
The Dutch government on Friday said it would start banning tourists from buying cannabis from "coffee shops" and impose restrictions on Dutch customers by the end of the year.
The Netherlands is well known for having one of Europe’s most liberal soft drug policies that has made its cannabis shops a popular tourist attraction, particularly in Amsterdam.
Backed by the far-right party of anti-immigrant politician Geert Wilders, the coalition government that came into power last year announced plans to curb drug tourism as part of a nationwide program to promote health and fight crime.
"In order to tackle the nuisance and criminality associated with coffee shops and drug trafficking, the open-door policy of coffee shops will end," the Dutch health and justice ministers wrote in a letter to the country’s parliament on Friday.
The wooden shoe is symbolic of the Dutch for many of us, but how did they come about, and why? The shoes have several advantages, including one illustrated by a Jackie Chan video in this post at Rue the Day. Link
The Nothing team took the idea behind the company name (taking nothing and turning it into something) as the starting point for the physical design of the office; which included creating walls, signage, beams, tables, shelving and even a set of stairs out of cardboard.
(image credit: Joachim Baan)
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by Frau.
Hundreds of thousands of skaters, their cheeks as red as apples in the freezing temperatures, took to the ice, and hospital wards were filled with dozens of people with fractured arms, sprained ankles and broken legs.Train engineers were ordered to go slowly to avoid hitting skaters who clambered across railway tracks to get from one frozen canal to another. Even the minister of defense, an avid skater, fell and broke his wrist. His ministry announced that the national defense remained in safe hands, even if one of them was in a cast.
Do we have any readers here who have found themselves out on the ice in this winter? I’ve heard that canal skating is popular in Ottawa, Ontario. Is anyone enjoying any other skating hot-spots?
[International Herald Tribune]
