In the Netherlands and Belgium, where I am from, helmets are still very much optional. We have very strong cycling cultures and lots of people are opposed to it. They never used them and have cycled everywhere for decades.

However. There are a lot more helmets riding around than ten years ago. Especially kids wear them a lot. Their parents less so, but their numbers are increasing. Older people are coming around very slowly. They get one when they buy a fast ebike. Not so much for a normal bike.

For myself, I go cycling most weekends and always wear a helmet for that. Purely because it’s an appropriate thing to do. It’s part of the culture. I didn’t wear one for commuting or for getting groceries or going out, while those trips are A LOT more dangerous. So at one point I just realised how weird that was. And that there are no good objective arguments to not always wear a helmet. I’d absolutely hate to see it become mandatory, but I’d love to see more people make a positive choice to wear one.

On a slightly related note: could any US lemmings tell me why non-catholic christians in the US are so involved with the pope?

I have a friend from KY who went to Rome and everything. I asked her why, since she’s protestant, and she genuinely did not understand the question. Her entire family was praying for the pope. And they are methodists?

I have some catholics in my family and they would not bat an eye if the patriarch of Constantinople died. They consider orthodox Christians or protestants as a different religion.

It’s a scene from Reynaert the fox It’s arguably the most amazing text that survived in medieval Dutch. Earliest versions date back to the 13th century.

It’s full of trickery and very dark humor.

Here’s a more recent depiction of the scene:

I’m fine with it if women are allowed to be polygamous as well.

It’s about to be ‘Dodge rammed in the Netherlands’

It’s a great app and it really does help to avoid waste, but… I know a few businesses that went from donating their leftovers to charities for the poor to selling them through TGTG, because that way, they still make some money off of it.

I liked it a lot, more than Tidal (what I have now). But the last few months with Qobuz I had streaming issues, because of something on their end. It was a freak issue though. The catalgue was absolutely wonderful especially if you’re into jazz like me. It allowed you to browse record labels too, which I sorely miss.

I switched because of the streaming issues and because tidal has a connect option, which allows me to send music without compression over wifi to my stereo, natively from tidal (spotify has it too, but lower quality sound)

Qobuz is also French.

It’s projecting. And delusion.

First words are also often ‘mam’ ‘mum’ and a bit later ‘da’ or ‘pa’, not because babies love their parents, but because those are the easiest sounds to mimic.

So we adopted those sounds/words to mean mother and father. Not the other way around. We are really good at finding arguments to fit our view and narrative.

I think the writer meant to say ‘gone rogue’ instead of ‘AWOL’. Just poor writing skills.