Climbing a rope with knots is for pussies! You might just as well take a fucking escalator.

I've met a lot of German people that were annoyed that the Dutch usually can understand them, but not the other way round.

Well, we have to have some reservations about taking someone named Booyakasha at his or her word.

Am I upvoting all this because I'm enjoying it or to be ironic? I can't even tell anymore.

Ha, that explains a lot. I was just spewing a factoid I read sometime. It's amazing that within 5 minutes, there is a response by someone that actually seems to know his shit!

Don't get me wrong, I 100% agree that first getting people addicted and then cutting them off is horrible. A crime against humanity.

Apparently, Frisian is the language linguistically closest to English. After that, Dutch is the next closest. Strange that, while I am pretty fluent in Dutch and English, I understand maybe 20% of Frisian.
Doesn't Dutch sound like a guttural mess to English speakers? That's what I've often heard.
Afrikaans sounds very…

The people already addicted are a huge tragedy that will entail a lot of effort and sadness to get through. But preventing new additions is actually pretty easy. Just don't prescribe opioids for 'normal' pain. Pain can be dealt with in different ways. Opioid addition will kill you.
Where I live, opioids are only…

Oh yeah. My dad is named Wim and so is one of my closest colleagues. I didn't think this through. Also, until some decades ago, Jan was by far the most common boys name for centuries. Pym with a Y might exist but it's very rare. Pim is a little more common.
Edit: Frisian names are a whole different game. My family is…

I've never met an Ub, never even heard of that name until just now. Also all three letter names in Dutch I can think of, are also normal names in English. Like Tim or Bob.
So quit​ it with the blatant RACISM against the Dutch.

We do have a politician called Tiny Cox.

I certainly remember getting tired of all the Clinton jokes. And I didn't even live in the US, so my exposure was a lot less. So I can understand people getting tired of all Trump all the time.
Two big differences: The Clinton jokes went on for years, Trump's presidency is just a few months old. And the Clinton jokes…

As I said above, I make a pretty good focaccia myself​. But it's nothing compared to the real stuff they make in (parts of) Italy. It's just great. And sometimes they include pretty out there toppings for bread, like figs for instance, but they can make it work. But even the plain ones without even rosemary or…

I make a pretty good focaccia with green olives every once in a while. The trick: put in about four times as much olive oil and three times as much salt as any sane person would consider too much.

Oh, there are tons of those things here in the woods. You just have to stay away from the the more fragrant areas, then they won't be much trouble.
Of course, given the fact that you offer the occasional goat with a crown of flowers and a sash of gerbil skulls. That's just basic.

7) Hellgirl
8) Netflix presents: Hellboy the TV show, featuring Ron Perlman

Fun Moscow anecdote:
A few years ago some random Dutch guy was driving through Moscow when he got into some kind of traffic kerfuffle. The other guy turned out to be the owner of a business bank, travelling with an entourage of bodyguards. They got out of their cars with baseball bats and went to town on the Dutch guys…

I do have to admit as a Dutch person, I have much more experience with gin and whiskey than with genever. And even here the good, aged stuff is harder to find than good whiskey. Mediocre young genever is everywhere but mostly drunk by the over 60 crowd.

Well, Bols has been doing it since 1575, so if you want to call out a particular genever, why not that one. Personally I can't stand their young genever, or any young Dutch genever. Too grainy. The barrel aged stuff is better, but really more comparable to whisky than gin. And a good whisky beats a good aged genever…

I'm not sure Hendrick's (Scottish) and Plymouth (English) would appreciate being called American gins. Plymouth gin is also far from new (brand established in 1793).

Well, there's my plan for the evening.