CafePress, the world’s leading print-on-demand service, announced a major change yesterday that will have a huge negative impact on its huge community shopkeepers that manage over 6 million shops. More »
The Dutch government is investigating the possibility of building an island off the North Sea coast for highly needed new farmland in our overcrowded country. Dutch contractors also built the Palm Islands in Dubai. Political party CDA suggested this week to build an island in the shape of a tulip. I’m not sure how practical this would be, but it would sure look cool on Google Maps:
10,000 hungry vultures are causing panic in the Pyrenees and Basque Country. They have been attacking live animals and have also been aggressive towards humans. The vultures are starving due to a new EU directive which prohibits farmers from leaving cattle carcasses on their land to rot. The dead animals must now be burned or disposed of in another way. The initiative is to prevent disease spread among cattle but the results have been devastating for the vultures. More »
Passengers of the Python roller coaster in the Dutch theme park De Efteling were lucky to survive a serious incident yesterday. The double-loop roller coaster (constructed in 1981) had gotten stuck at a high point of the track, with its first few cars hanging over the the incline. More »
Last Sunday the cockpit of an Air France Boeing 707 was sunk in De Beldert lake in Zoelen, the Netherlands. The sinking took place over a year later than originally planned. By the end of the day nearly 20 divers had already visited the new wreck. More »
The legendary musician Peter Gabriel was stranded on the A27 highway in the Netherlands on Saturday when his bus broke down in flames. More »
The saga of the Rotterdam ‘parkshuttle’ continues. After nearly eight years of setbacks (including the December 2005 crash), the driverless robot buses — that are supposed to bring commuters from a metro station to an office park on a two-kilometer special road — takes another blow as the company that made the buses has filed for bankruptcy. More »
Park World has a very cool report with figures for theme park attendance over 2006. Eight of the top ten parks are Disney; Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom tops the list with 16,640,000 visitors. I was also surprised to see that Disneyland Paris wasn’t doing all that bad at number five in the world with 10,600,000 visitors, just ahead of Epcot’s 10,460,000. More »
Check out this article from the Guardian about an unusual wildlife operation. More »
Amateur filmmaker Patrick de Wolf won the second prize yesterday at the TAS theme festival in Tilburg, with his film “Haunted House”. The genre of this year’s Dutch short film contest in Noord Brabant was ‘spanning’ (‘thriller’). More »