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+Episode: 4496
+Title: HPR4496: Stroopwafel
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4496/hpr4496.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-11-22 15:04:54
+
+---
+
+This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4496 from Monday the 27th of October 2025.
+Today's show is entitled True Puyful.
+It is hosted by Lee and is about 29 minutes long.
+It carries an explicit flag.
+The summary is, Lee, Ellsbeth and Ken Fallon meet in the Utrecht province in the Netherlands.
+Hi, this is Lee, I'm joined today by Ken Fallon and Ellsbeth and we are in a market
+town in Holland and the name of the town is Amersport.
+We're at a cafe.
+We have some waffles and we have some respectively lattes and cappuccino.
+Although technically I think Amersport is in Utrecht, but it could be one.
+And Utrecht is not in Holland.
+Yeah, sorry.
+We are in the Netherlands.
+It's locally we call in the Netherlands Holland.
+And so do the Dutch tourist board.
+So yeah, if they're happy enough with it.
+And also the football team is hot Holland.
+So yeah.
+Yeah.
+So to give a bit of context, I'm staying over here in Holland, Ellsbeth is here too.
+Sorry, in the Netherlands.
+We're staying near Utrecht.
+We've spent a day in Utrecht.
+We've gone to a museum in Utrecht called The Spiel Clock, which is about mechanical
+musical instruments and I wed it out with the arms and arms.
+No bother.
+No, no, no, no.
+Not an initial dilemma.
+OK.
+We have to lower the bars so other people will be gone.
+Well, I can do better than that.
+Yeah.
+That's home.
+Yeah.
+We went on a canal tour around Utrecht and now we've met up with Ken today.
+We've been to Amersport Camp, which was a holding camp run by the Nazis during World
+War II.
+So we looked around that this morning and then this afternoon we've been in Central Amersport
+and we've been to the Mondrian exhibition, the Mondrian Macouse, as it's called, and seen
+lots of artwork there.
+And this leaves us on a rainy afternoon.
+I'm hiding my iPad under the table to stop it getting totally rained on.
+And we're just having a nice time here.
+That's nice here.
+The Amersport itself is one of the few cities to survive the war.
+The noise here behind me is the markets that has been dismantled.
+So there's still quite a lot of the old city remaining.
+So what do you want to talk about?
+That's a good question.
+Life, universe, life, universe, everything.
+What was the best in the game?
+The noise you're hearing is dismantling the markets.
+So around the Netherlands most of the towns have a central market area for one day only during the week.
+Probably more often in bigger cities.
+They put out metal frames with tarpulions like these rolled out and then because the Netherlands is the Netherlands, it's windy.
+So they tied them down with ropes to the streets and that hanging here heard was then removing that.
+And currently there's a flower shop in this town.
+And we're eating stru poffles.
+Stru poffles, yes.
+Stru poffles.
+A syrupy honeycomb.
+Think of them like the wafer that you have around the night-screen cone.
+You take two of them, you make them flat.
+And in between you put in sort of golden syrupy type maple syrupy type.
+In other words, come here.
+Yeah, get more of them up.
+So I'll say a little bit about the spill museum yesterday.
+This is in Utrecht's central, quite close to the train station, Utrecht Central.
+And it's got all kinds of mechanical musical performances.
+And this is like a bit like music boxes or crocs.
+You know, the crocs with chime in a certain musical pan.
+But basically you've got some instruments that are like ping, ping, ping.
+Some instruments that blow, have a bellows and blow through an organ.
+And you have some instruments that have like moving animation,
+like a bird flapping its wings, that sort of thing.
+The most impressive one that we all, me and Elsberg saw,
+was an old and large, as big as a room out and style musical pan.
+That was actually wide up to a midi controller.
+So we're playing modern tunes for an instrument that's at least 100 years old,
+which is pretty damn cool.
+So I've been to that museum a few times myself.
+Both the kids were as nice.
+But you might also have seen it on, if you follow Wintergarden on the YouTube's,
+he was inspired to do the music Marvel Machine by a business to that museum.
+And for a period of time, the Marvel Machine was on loan to that museum.
+So it's well worth the visit.
+It was absolutely fascinating.
+Think of all the, if your female, think of all the little boxes that you would have had
+with the little ballerinas that twirl around.
+I think that as well.
+What's up?
+I think it was girls.
+Everybody in it.
+So they're absolutely fascinating.
+There's like hundreds to explore.
+And just the mechanics, like they talk about starting with the bells,
+like the earliest music machines were done with bells, which is basically,
+you have a little metal tong type thing that hits the bell,
+that does it in order, and it makes the music.
+But then they switch to like these wooden flutes that the air,
+they use bellows to blow in and change the tones.
+And you could have longer notes because of the wooden flutes that the air blows through.
+It was just absolutely fascinating.
+And the whole history of the telecork machines,
+and leisurely went to punch card systems.
+And those punch card systems were used by Lady Ada.
+Not Lady Ada, but Lady Ada.
+I do not like Lady Ada Lovelace.
+Thank you.
+And it was the first female computer programmer just a young girl.
+And that was a direct line from that sort of stuff to programming for punch cards.
+The first programmable machines, which were weaved in the textile industry.
+And from that, of course, we have the modern industrial computer revolution.
+So, what about the digital?
+It was a music brought to you what you're doing today.
+Yes, that's in capitalism.
+Music in capitalism, there you go.
+Well, that museum is absolutely fantastic.
+There was quite often, at events still,
+at the original organ-paying machines,
+that they'll wheel around the shops and the streets and the go up and down the streets.
+But they're invariably ruined by somebody with a can attaining that's shaking it.
+Okay, the rain has gotten the better of us, so we're now in the car.
+The central part of the city is really still very nice.
+And then next to us is where they gather like anti-tank.
+Did I ever release that shop?
+Anti-tank, something about anti-tank.
+I remember one, I have recorded this, an episode where I walk around the heat and stuff,
+talk about the anti-tank bunkers for World War II,
+which didn't work.
+It kind of rings a bell.
+I don't know if I ever released that show or not.
+And then recently they found that they did a lidar,
+there was a Dutch contingent that went over to fight with Napoleon in Moscow.
+That didn't involve.
+Apparently one of my great grandfather of my father-in-law survived that.
+And then it's way back.
+Which could have been totally not published, but you never know.
+He went to Russia.
+Yeah, he went to the Russian army.
+No, no.
+In the French army.
+And for the Russians.
+And then it's survived.
+But yeah, recently there was an evening tour there.
+They did a lidar scan of the area.
+And they found what was a, you know, like a dugout position.
+And they had no previous example of it before.
+So they had seen the documented books.
+But they had no example of it, because it's by default just made out of it.
+You know, it's a whole of the ground.
+But this one was particularly well preserved.
+When we were taking the canal, the boat ride.
+They were showing us where there were some medieval fortresses.
+Like the remnants of a medieval fortress from the Roman times.
+Yeah.
+Oh, that's, yeah, that's correct, yeah.
+Around Focht, where my sister, not Focht, was in Binnik.
+There was also a concentration camp.
+Where my, one of my family ended up, didn't turn out well.
+But anyway, they had a Roman fourth there as well.
+That was also part of the waterline.
+Did you come across the waterline as well in your...
+Yeah.
+...by Tof.
+So it's like that this defense system in the Netherlands
+where they would flood the folders.
+And in the places where they wouldn't flood, they put forts.
+So they had three different line waterlines.
+Three different levels of defense.
+And they've used it, I think four times.
+And two times it worked.
+And the other two times, not so much,
+she's helped the enemy.
+One time it froze over.
+And the enemy just walked on top of the water.
+Thank you for putting this perfectly straight road.
+So we were coming in there.
+This scene thing here, there's a big yellow sign.
+I presume we were recording.
+Yeah.
+Yellow sign pointed to see.
+I always thought that was one of the coolest things about the way the Netherlands works,
+is if there's a detour instead of saying detour or follow blood,
+you're left on your own.
+Yeah.
+To say detour or follow four Amsterdam follow C,
+or usually it's a country for Amsterdam.
+If it's...
+If it's detour, they'll say you or something.
+It's the way you're going.
+So they follow the signs and then eventually you come up to a place where the last sign is.
+And there's an extra sign.
+And from there, you're back to where you would have been.
+Actually, we were...
+U.S. cycling back.
+I was walking back from Maan to the resort yesterday.
+There were like ambulances and police cars.
+Yeah.
+Did you see what that was?
+We didn't know what it was.
+We were just trying to be respectful.
+It just happened.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+I figured it was a road crash.
+More than anything else.
+Yeah.
+I was trying out the road.
+But the sirens in Netherlands are like proper lean or lean or type sirens.
+In the...
+In the...
+Like certainly in London they're like...
+You know, like police...
+And right next to police stations, they get them all the time.
+And the...
+The fire...
+The police and the fire department...
+And the hospital ambulances are different.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+The two sirens, yeah.
+Which I was told was a bit weird.
+Like, why do I actually need to know...
+What emergency services?
+Yeah.
+I suppose it's so you know whether you're expecting a huge fire truck to come around the corner
+or a speedy police car.
+I think the thing is, get out of the way.
+Yeah.
+I might go the right way.
+Apparently I don't know how to drive.
+It's 50.
+We're going 42 am using...
+Android.
+Or some Android.
+Which has really improved recently.
+The UI has gotten a lot better.
+We had a lot of shows in the past.
+By Popeye.
+Popeye.
+We did a lot of shows in that that he got me into it in the first place.
+But they have this really cool thing, right?
+You know where you go with...
+You go from here to somewhere.
+And it's reasonably straightforward.
+But then coming back, if you're in the middle of the sticks,
+there can be 14 different ways that you come back
+and they send you a completely different route.
+So with this, you can go one of the options
+that take the previous route back.
+So it'll just go...
+If you come down to A1 and A2,
+it'll send you back first to A2 and then A1.
+No, not really.
+It's cool.
+It's useful.
+So what's nice is when you're driving to...
+to Morn from Leutrex.
+You're going along the motorway.
+And on your left is the train.
+You can see this same train line going along.
+And when you're on the train, you can see the motorway.
+And what's cool is when you're on the train,
+you can usually...
+You go faster...
+Yeah, you go faster than your cars.
+Yeah.
+So we will be heading off.
+I'm going to need you here somehow.
+You know, my wife drives a...
+These are all special arts.
+And I normally go on the train.
+What do you see?
+We'll get there eventually.
+The Netherlands is not that big.
+Turn back if people start to leave in Germany.
+Yeah.
+Oh, I know in German it's like in C8.
+Yeah?
+I need to get a little bit there.
+I don't know even y'all.
+I ve heard it there.
+Well, I keep saying danker,
+rather than danker,
+because I can't think of anything.
+So I know each day we need each day we need each hour.
+I used to try and make it a habit of learning how to say hello to five.
+Thank you and we're so happy with this many languages that are possible.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+I tried to learn two beers, please,
+and with many languages that I don't know possibly can.
+It's fine, babe.
+I learned what the word for chicken is,
+because you're...
+after that time where it was,
+tricked into eating frogs' legs and snails.
+Oh, all right.
+It was fine.
+I mean, I've been to France like I was chitling,
+so I had no idea what chitling is.
+They're the private part of the chicken.
+Yeah.
+If you're hungry enough, you do anything.
+Yeah.
+The American South chitlins are...
+just the inner zone.
+Oh, the inner zone.
+Right.
+Yeah.
+So it's...
+A delicacy at some places, is it?
+It's definitely a cultural thing.
+Yeah.
+Well...
+Not something I love.
+Yeah, no.
+Everyone is a fan of Haggiss in Scotland.
+Yeah.
+Which...
+I didn't mind that.
+Oh, Scotch.
+Whiskers.
+Haggiss, I had no problem with this bug that I got.
+If I didn't know what it was, I probably
+wouldn't have a problem with it.
+It's...
+But if somebody said this is Haggiss, try it.
+My internal brain would probably be like,
+I know what's in there.
+I don't know if I would have tried it.
+I'd still try it any time.
+So is this going to be an episode?
+Um, yeah, after trying...
+Trying to...
+Yeah, trying to get some continuity out of it.
+Good look at that.
+It doesn't have to be continuity.
+It can be a stream of thoughts.
+Well, um, was there anything?
+What's weird is, yeah.
+What I always found interesting when I moved here 20 years ago,
+that all the signs are the same.
+So...
+And in country in the world, all the street signs are the same.
+And I thought that was an amazing stroke of...
+of coordination from the world.
+Yeah, they're the world.
+Actually, the signs from here to the UK are so similar,
+but from here or the UK to America is quite a difference.
+That's what I was thinking.
+Why?
+If you go to Mexico, that's the same thing.
+There are the same signs.
+All South America, even Soviet Russia, right?
+Yeah.
+Not Soviet Russia, but yeah, at the time.
+Yeah.
+Why was America not using international signs?
+And it turns out that...
+Exactly.
+So much so, the UK were the ones who came up with the signs in the first place.
+Yeah.
+It was...
+And the attempt by the Americans to internationalize the signs
+that cause all the road signs to be the same.
+Except...
+It did work.
+It wasn't adopted in America.
+It's still decided not to do it adopted.
+Oh, yeah.
+We had to have our own unique...
+Hurrah, Americana.
+Nah, we won't go into that, but it's just an interesting observation.
+It's something I noticed coming back from the US as a teenager
+is just how drastically different everything was.
+And also quite similar things.
+Here we have in the UK and Ireland, we have 10-10 large triangles
+written on the roads, but here they have smaller ones.
+They're about a quarter or 60 centimeters triangles painted.
+And they call them shark teeth.
+So you're not allowed to cross over those or you have to yield right away.
+And all of these...
+We're sitting at a junction here where there's traffic lights.
+And the traffic lights are numbered in groups of 5.1 and 5.4.
+So all the fives are the same circuit from what I can gather.
+And as we're crossing over, the pin markings obviously on the road
+are such that if the traffic lights go out,
+the normal rules still apply.
+And in some places out in the boonies, they'll turn off the traffic lights at night
+and they'll just let you follow the normal rules of the road.
+That's actually fine.
+It is indeed.
+And you know why they have the...
+All alerts are triangles so that if you're driving in the snow,
+even if they're covered up, you know that the shape of a triangle is a warning.
+Whereas they...
+I don't know what you call that.
+They stop signs with the hexagons.
+I don't know is it hexagons?
+Anyway, whatever it is, let's say hexagons are warning stop signs.
+You absolutely must do that.
+And the weird thing here is if something is forbidden,
+it's the picture of the forbidden thing with a red circle around it.
+And in Ireland, it's a red circle with a red stripe through it.
+So...
+By the way, all listeners are expecting now to be able to drive in any country in the world
+from this direction.
+Yes, absolutely.
+Any faith is to do so.
+It's your own fault.
+We have described it perfectly.
+It just never been added at the end of this episode.
+If you do not accept results, but if you've already lost a lifetime,
+you're losing a private role risk.
+And we're going straight here.
+I think it took a wrong turn.
+But what was that?
+It's a wrong turn.
+The most important word you can learn when you come to the Netherlands is gazelle,
+which means nice, cozy, how was the theater?
+It was gazelle.
+How was it with your granny?
+It was gazelle.
+How was the football match?
+It was gazelle.
+Yeah.
+How was the gazelle?
+Yeah.
+Like the gazelle.
+What about the K-A?
+The gazelle.
+The gazelle.
+The gazelle.
+And the other one is the Catholic spirit, which I can never say.
+And that's congratulations.
+A birthday, which is the main social events here.
+If you want a social circle, you go to other people's birthdays
+and you invite them to yours.
+That's how you grow your social circle.
+Not that I do that, because I don't like your reminder of my age.
+But there you go.
+gazelle.
+And I've facilitated.
+But for some reason, that's absolutely fine.
+gazelle is fine.
+It is gorgeous here.
+It's my, I love this time here.
+It's coming into autumn or fall, as you call it.
+Even though he's pacing down the road on the right.
+We have quick complaining.
+The sun.
+The sun.
+The sun.
+The sun.
+The sun is shining from the west, and it's beautiful.
+This year, right, is a nature bridge, right?
+Yeah.
+Okay.
+So the idea is that when you put in a road, it divides the main system.
+Yeah.
+So they spend billions of putting those bridges in.
+So that's awesome.
+It is awesome, except for the fact that it doesn't work.
+And on that side, stay on that side.
+And animals on that side.
+They don't like the bridge.
+They don't like the road and then input across the bridge.
+Yeah.
+So they're now studying to see if they can approve the last problem.
+It's a big hit.
+Yeah.
+I mean, it's a disappointment for a lot of people.
+The main, the main remaining ecosystem joiner is railway tracks in urban areas like London.
+The railway tracks have got a continuous stretches of green, all the way down them.
+So the wildlife could migrate up and down that way.
+It maintains the ecosystems a bit.
+And yet another reason to be going by public transport.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+However, for some reason, these seem to be stuck in the movies.
+But it's a nice place where you are.
+The park is absolutely gorgeous.
+And it's quiet because there's not 10 people there.
+Funnacle cows get kind of cramps.
+Yeah.
+Okay.
+Yeah, we were saying earlier how, if you come to this country,
+you need to have cramps because they're like,
+we're the best ones in the best delicacy.
+You know, one of the best foods to have here.
+Me and Nelsberg have had some yesterday a Crete Palsy new trek.
+And that was just brilliant.
+Lecker.
+Lecker.
+Almost a chisella.
+The meckers.
+Yeah.
+Who else?
+For sure.
+Or as I say, Mad Max, they were absolutely mediocre.
+Have you seen that?
+They were better than me here.
+They were mediocre.
+Well, you know, Mad Max, mediocre is the superlative.
+Bullets.
+Ziced.
+Where have I heard ziced before?
+It was dryberg ziced.
+Was the station where you went to?
+Oh, yes.
+Yeah.
+Then I hide the cycles.
+Goodness knows where he's going to get them home.
+Goodness knows how he got them to us.
+How did he get to bicycles to us?
+He talked to someone until someone actually walked over here with him.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+He has that kind of vibe.
+He could get somebody to...
+Okay.
+It's like the hitchhike.
+The hitchhike is actually...
+Normally, it's a fairly normal thing for it to be able to start.
+I often cycle with another bike.
+Yeah.
+Okay.
+You know, I just have to start it as a bit of a problem, but then keep going.
+How he got someone to go all the way to the Eropark.
+Then he should be in sales.
+He really should be.
+And to me, I just know that that diamond.
+So it's like a wrecked square in a diamond form.
+So yellow with a white signer on it.
+And partly, it means that this road is the priority.
+Normally, all roads...
+If that wasn't there, then this boring here coming out on the right is a small road.
+They were the priority.
+I should give a way to traffic coming from the right.
+Including bikes.
+Interesting.
+Not, yes.
+And then this red one, there's a circle sign with a red outside.
+It's in full with blue with a cross.
+And that means no parking on all sides of the street.
+This is what you learn when your kid goes to drive in less than school.
+So that's what that means.
+I've been ignoring that for years.
+Yeah, we tried to hire a car in Rotterdam.
+And we almost got...
+We were clear that we could do under a U.S. license.
+And we're just up to the part of the deposit.
+And I would try to buy some money, but it was after 3 o'clock in the afternoon
+that my bank wouldn't honor that until the next day.
+So...
+And we decided it just wasn't worth it.
+Yeah.
+Normally in the Netherlands, you can get away with public transport.
+Or they have also with the public transport.
+They've got bikes that you can hire at the station.
+Oh, that's where are they?
+Are they doing yellow?
+Yeah.
+Yeah.
+So they're public transport.
+So the public transport bikes.
+And you get some cars that you can do with them.
+So you're...
+You know, you're normal card.
+You get the heart of them like for a euro for a day or something like that.
+But you're what it is.
+So when you get them, you can just...
+You can probably just drop them back at the station when you're in.
+So that's super handy.
+And they also in some places have over taxis as well.
+So not so much now with the Uber coming in.
+But before you could, if you were landing in the middle of the stick somewhere,
+then you'd hire an over taxi to come.
+And maybe four people would be waiting.
+And then you'd do a run to drop the first guy off of one place
+and then go from there to the next house.
+And if you were lucky, you were the first house.
+If you weren't...
+You were...
+You were waiting till I...
+Yeah, exactly.
+But if there was some stipulation that it should be no more than an hour
+or no more than a half hour extra on your journey.
+Right.
+Oh, really good.
+So I was reading whether you should...
+If you're walking down country lane, should you walk on the left or the right?
+And first, I figured the left because then you might be in it.
+You might be facing oncoming traffic.
+So that they could see you.
+But then I read that apparently it's wherever you're most visible.
+Yeah.
+It's not necessarily always on the left.
+Is that here in this one?
+Yeah, in Holland.
+Yeah.
+In Holland.
+Yeah.
+It's always on facing oncoming traffic.
+Yeah.
+I thought the rule was always facing oncoming traffic.
+But then again, I didn't know what an urban cheermer I saw.
+You should not be getting advice from me as to us to the rules of the rule.
+That would be a good episode though.
+What are the rules of the rule?
+Your jurisdiction.
+That would be a good one to prompt other people to recall.
+Okay.
+With that, we're back at the result.
+Thanks to Elspeth and Ken.
+Goodbye from the Netherlands.
+You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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