The Monkey Island adventure games were some of my favorite games ever. I loved to play the adventures of Guybrush Threepwood in the original Secret of Monkey Island back in 1990. Now Disney comes out with Pirates of the Carribean 2: Dead Man’s Chest this summer, and the designer of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, is struck at the resemblance of his Monkey Island’s LeChuck and the bad guy Davy Jones in Dead Man’s Chest. More »

The Almere-Buiten branch of the Dutch supermarket “Plus” has introduced special shopping baskets for single customers. Shoppers who use a purple shopping basket are indicating to other shoppers that they are available. More »

One of the headlines in today’s paper read “Exodus na WK-Verlies” (Exodus after World Cup Loss). Since Holland’s loss to Portugal Sunday night, Dutch soccer fans (almost everyone) can forget about following the World Cup and finally move on to more important things: VACATION! More »

The new version of my favorite news source digg was just released. The extremely popular site that allows users to digg for stories so that the most popular ones appear on the homepage, was always focused at technology news only, but today new topics have been added for science, world & business, videos, entertainment and gaming!

In the last months we have been having a lot of fun going to bird hides and nature reserves here in the Netherlands. It turns out that this country is great for bird watching, and we have suddenly turned into serious birders! It’s incredible how many easy-to-spot birds there are that I had never even noticed before; just this morning we saw four spoonbill from the car along the A4 highway! More »

The news headlines on page 101 of CNN International teletext here in the Netherlands sometimes don’t make any sense. It seems that they are just grabbed from cnn.com and stop whenever the space on the page runs out. Have a look at this strange and unclear story that was one of their leading teletext stories this week. More »

Dog poop is a big problem in the Netherlands — there are heaps all over the place. You always have to watch your step and walking on any grass in this country is like walking a minefield. Here in Leiden they have started a billboard campaign with posters that are quite explicit: one of them shows a child running after a ball that is about to roll into a fresh pile, and another shows an old lady with a steamy heap in the foreground. More »

For the Soccer World Cup in Germany this month, Dutch grocer Albert Heijn has started an immensely popular ‘wuppie’ campaign; for every €15 spent at the grocery store you get a small red, white, blue or orange wuppie, a small woolly ball with two eyes, feet and antennas. Each wuppie comes with a saving stamp, and with three stamps and an additional €2.49 you can buy a large wuppie. Albert Heijn had 700,000 so-called ‘mega wuppies’ made in China, but most of those have already sold. Now customers are fighting for the last remaining mega wuppies. One wuppie has already sold online for €100 and there have been reports of wuppies being stolen from cars! More »

Unsurprisingly, Disney announced today that it’s free online broadcasts of ABC shows, including Desperate Housewives and Lost, were a big hit. The shows were watched more than 11 million times online in the first month of the test, and an online exit survey showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched. A retooled version of the free site, with more shows and features, will be launched in the fall. Unfortunately the free site is only available to Internet users in the United States, but there are easy ways around this.

On June 30^th the Dutch government will decide on a new road connection between Amsterdam, Schiphol airport and Almere. It is Transport Minister Peijs’ preferred option for beating the congestion in the area. Many are against this plan, as the new tunnel and highway will go very close near the oldest nature reserve of the Netherlands, the Naardermeer. More »