November 30, 2009

Bear costume or sleeping bag?

Filed under: Animals,Design,General by Orangemaster @ 11:52 am
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Eiko Ishizawa, a Japanese designer living in Amsterdam designed this fun sleeping bag that doubles as a bear suit or maybe it’s the other way round, I can’t tell. If you do get attacked by a bear — surely not in the Netherlands — you can’t sue him, he explains. “Leave your bear sleeping bag in the tent and don’t turn the light on for the bear’s sake”.

I think someone’s been watching too many nature films, but inspiration is inspiration. I can see before me an entire cool collection of fun sleeping bag for kids if someone hasn’t picked up on this idea already.

(Link: idealize.nl, Photo: eikoishizawa.com)

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November 29, 2009

Get ready for Christmas

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 6:23 pm
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In the spirit of sharing happy Dutch news and combining that with Christmas music, I’ll be pressing on with the good stuff over at Christmas a gogo, where cool Dutch bloggers Guuzbourg, Wouter, and their mates from the UK, Denmark and elsewhere will be bringing you the best in holiday listening.

I enthusiastically kicked off the 2009 edition today — we only write around Christmas time — with the British-Dutch soul band Laura Vane & The Vipertones who are in the gift-giving spirit, offering you a free Christmas song. Back in September I threw up a great video by them.

Disclaimer: I know everybody I just wrote about and I really like what they all do.

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Cowboy John

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 11:10 am

Cowboy John is a comic strip that appears regularly in Zone 5300, and that now has its own, eponymous album. It is basically a continuation or spin-off of the Jan Jaap comic that writer and artist Jan Vriends published in the same magazine.

Cowboy John is a man with a past that has led him to drink and dress up as a cowboy. The comic strip switches back between single strip gags and longer, dramatic bits, and to fill out the album ‘bloopers,’ out-takes and Cowboy John strips that appeared in other magazines.

Do I like Zone 5300 sending me review copies? Yes. Would I buy the book? No. Cowboy John has a warm, safe home in the tri-monthly and motley collection of comics, reviews, short stories and curiosities that is Zone 5300, where its erratic style fits right in. But it’s not an album with which to snuggle up on the couch and forget the world for half an hour.

The Cowboy John book is the first in a new imprint named after the magazine, Collectie Zone 5300.

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November 28, 2009

Yab Yum the musical

Filed under: Shows by Branko Collin @ 2:37 pm

Gossip ‘journalist’ Henk van der Meyden and sex boss Theo Heuft have teamed up to produce a musical about the latter’s former brothel, Yab Yum.

Yab Yum, named after a Tantric position called ‘woman on top’ in the West, was the iconic brothel of the Netherlands until it was closed down last year by the city of Amsterdam using the dubious Bibob law, which allows local governments to refuse permits on the basis of rumours.

Speaking of which, it was rumoured that Yab Yum was the place where one brought business associates if deals needed to be closed.

According to Radio Netherlands, Heuft told the Telegraaf (Van der Meyden’s employer):

It’s an honour that there’s going to be a musical about my life’s work. That’s what Yab Yum was. I mounted prostitution in a golden frame.

[The musical will allow us] to enter a world of beautiful young women, of glamour and glitter.

(Photo by Chana de Wolf, some rights reserved.)

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November 27, 2009

Some pigs are more equal than others

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 12:32 pm
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After giving birth to a total of 170 piglets, breeding sow ‘Fokzeug 1281’ (‘fok’ means ‘breed’ in Dutch before anyone asks) is getting a proper retirement instead of being turned into pork roast. Pig breeder Edwin Snoek from Heerhugowaard has decided that 1281 gets to spend the rest of its days at Het Beloofde Varkensland (The Promised Pigland) in Amstelveen with its last piglet, 170.

The picture here is of Caesar, a pig who had its own webcam at Promised Pigland.

(Link: vleesmagazine.nl, Photo: varkensgeluk)

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November 26, 2009

Jazz pianist Pia Beck dies at age 84

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 2:18 pm

Dutch jazz virtuoso Pia Beck has died of a hear attack at her home in Torremolinos, Spain. RIP. She was self-taught, couldn’t read sheet music and just, well, jammed it: boogie-woogie, jazz, rock ’n roll, blues, you name it.

Here she is scatting along and singing in French.

(Link: shownu.nl)

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Hiring a hacker to check up on hubby’s online activities

Filed under: Online by Orangemaster @ 1:14 pm

I bet Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet gets all kinds of questions and this one I just had to share with you.

A woman asked if she could hire a hacker to find out what her husband does on the Internet. In other words, what he does online at home using their shared computer. Surprise, surprise, she thinks he’s mailing (nice euphemism) another woman and wants some confirmation.

Engelfriet explains that in the Netherlands, installing spyware or hacking someone’s password to read their mail is technically ‘ruining their peaceful enjoyment’, which is illegal and cannot be done directly or indirectly.

However, within a (obviously not very healthy) marriage, a computer is common property, unless otherwise specified in a pre-nuptial agreement (not very popular here). Then it’s not a crime to hack your own system, like it’s not a crime to hire someone to break one of your locks.

Of course, it could be considered an invasion of the husband’s privacy. And then Engelfriet gets cocky: “Even in a marriage people have privacy, although not much at all, if you ask me. After all, you got married to share everything with one another.”

My advice to the woman, putting aside the mess of advice to be given about the obvious trust issues, is why not check his mobile phone? Follow him under another name on Twitter, MSN or Facebook. And get some professional help, collectively or otherwise.

(Link: security.nl)

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November 25, 2009

Low fat mayonnaise with full fat taste

Filed under: Food & Drink,Health,Science by Orangemaster @ 12:10 pm
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Thanks to a new production process, Koen van Dijke of the University of Wageningen has come up with a way of making mayonnaise using less oil, but with the same taste as full on fat mayonnaise. When you make mayonnaise, you need egg yolks or lemon as an emulsifier to stabilise the mixture. To do this right, you need to use a lot of oil, which makes mayonnaise fattening.

Van Dijke developed a microscale system that adds very little oil to a lot of water, producing a stable emulsion. Then this mix is added to more water, producing a new emulsion that is mostly water, but that retains the same taste.

(Links: rtl.nl, evmi.nl)

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November 24, 2009

A canal of whores at the London Gallery

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 6:16 pm

The Hoerengracht (literally ‘whore canal’) is the clever name of an exhibition by Americans Ed and Nancy Kienholz currently at the National Gallery in London featuring ‘an artistic re-creation of Amsterdam’s red light district’.

Althought the play on words is excellent, this sentence, however, is rubbish: “The Herengracht, or Gentlemen’s Canal, is home to Amsterdam’s prostitutes, who famously sit in windows to ply their trade.”

The Herengracht has beautiful houses, lawyers, offices, a few nice restaurants, but no whores. The nearest girls are on the Spui, roughly two streets down. So much for fact checking.

Someone on television said this exhibition would come to Amsterdam, and I wonder why anyone would bother looking at some artsy-farty rendering of the real thing when we can go, see and even experience the real thing. I could be missing the point, who knows.

(Link: independent.co.uk, Photo is Red Light District of The Hague)

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Students sell Ritalin to make some cash

Filed under: Health by Orangemaster @ 12:12 pm
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Oh dear, students are selling their Ritalin online! Six boxes of pills for 150 euro, saving you a trip to the doctor’s with someone’s annoyingly hyperactive child. No wait, they actually prescribe Ritalin to students so they can concentrate better on their exams. And then there’s this famous American telly programme where a mom with four children took her eldest son’s Ritalin to be able to get the household chores done and be the perfect wife and mother. Scary.

Apparently, the party people get off on the similar effect it has to speed or cocaine. I talked to someone younger recently who tried it and said it did help him concentrate better than too much coffee or drinking litres of water, which would explain why students are into Ritalin. Other friends from way back used to just do cocaine with their teachers at university. It was ‘the only way’ to get so many projects done without sleeping.

Healthcare inspectors aim their crackdown efforts on professional sellers of the drug, not students trying to make some extra cash, which they say is a huge problem. I’m saving my last codeine-laced ibuprofen pill for a worthy headache.

The link (pic) shown here has been removed, but the Internet has a good memory.

(Link: ad.nl)

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