Filed under: Music,Shows by Orangemaster @ 12:04 pm
And he we go with yet another edition of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (’Find the Dutch person’), albeit a very entertaining one, with music and a happy ending. Sixteen-year-old Simeon Mulder who lives in Orlando, Florida made it to the next round of America’s Got Talent, which will be held in Las Vegas sometime this year.
He has the playfulness of a Glenn Gould trying to play like a young Mozart (maybe not the technical skills, it’s telly after all), the wardrobe qualities of actor Tom Hulce who played Mozart in the 1984 film ‘Amadeus’, some serious piano skills and some nice, dry Dutch humour.
There is a lot of cheese adverts in the Netherlands, but this cheese brand usually has beautiful Caucasian/Dutch people frolicking in the fields, with glimpses of breasts.
Here’s how this advert goes:
“In an ideal world, the Netherlands would be one big village.”
– ‘Morning!
– ‘Morning!
Then it goes on to say what farmers and farm girls would look like, emphasising they’d of course be young and have hair, not be old and balding. And eat said cheese brand.
Then we see farm girls, then we name the girls (typical farm region names), then Fatima. The narrator says “Fatima? Ooh, that’s good too!” implying that because she’s pretty, it’s OK. A giggle ensues.
In a time of political backlash against anything not perceived as being traditionally Dutch or Frisian with blond hair and blue eyes, this brand does a good job of throwing in ‘Fatima’ for good measure. The problem is, since the Dutch stereotype is highly exaggerated, throwing in a normal looking, non-exaggerated Fatima just doesn’t work and makes her an anomaly.
In many other Western countries, it’s downright normal for people of different cultures to be lumped in to the identity of a country. I’ve seen Spanish adverts with blonds, Italian ads with redheads and Asian-looking people in adverts of all kinds . They all belong there, but in this case, Fatima just doesn’t.
The message here is that Fatima was put there ‘as a joke’ and doesn’t belong there. Had they exaggerated her, it might have worked. Fatima is an oddball that unfortunately reinforces the Dutch stereotype of what is Dutch and what is not. Remember: 20% of the 16.5 million people in this country just voted for a right-wing, racist and anti-Muslim party in the last national elections.
In my ideal Netherlands, everybody counts, young or old, cheese or not, Fatima or not.
Not only does Hogeschool Rotterdam test its students, it is also planning to ‘test’ its teachers. After having received many complaints from students about having to wait too long to get their test scores, the school will now evaluate its teachers based on the turnaround time for grading exams, according to De Telegraaf.
If a teacher takes longer than 20 working days to come up with a grade for any given test, they will be denied a raise at the end of the year, writes Algemeen Dagblad.
Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 2:50 pm
Smack in the middle of China on the Yangtze Kiang river lies the huge capital of Hubei province, Wuhan. Nicknamed one of the ‘four furnaces’ of China because of its oppressive humid heat in the summer, the city will become home to this lily shaped tower, shaped so that it can stand in its own shade.
Soeters Van Eldonk architects designed the building in collaboration with Grontmij engineering for Wuhan University, and it will house the New Energy Centre. Since it is to become an environment for studying new energy technologies, Soeters van Eldonk hope to have the tower both emit zero carbon and use zero energy. The huge roof consists of solar panels and a solar chimney for cooling.
At the end of its 15th anniversary celebrations, glossy underground mag Zone 5300 decided to publish a humour special. Comic strips, what a concept! Dutch comic giant Peter de Wit accepted a guest editorship, and included the first long story of his flagship gag strip Sigmund in the magazine.
Lots of space is devoted to what De Wit likes and how De Wit thinks. (“Mocking the diminutive psychiatrist and his patients day in day out doesn’t work. I stopped doing that after six months because it became too predictable. Now I let the jokes do the heavy lifting.”) De Wit also visits the Heinz Museum in Amsterdam, all about the local cartoon cat, and talks an interesting five pages long about his favourite cartoonists (1).
Figure 2: “Dammit! Todd’s woman is hotter than mine! That is just wrong, Debs…”
Also: Pennsylvania-born Groninger Charles Guthrie’s De Sporters (The Jocks) follows the sadistic adventures of Luke Skywalker-lookalike Dick Quick and his blonde bombshell girlfriend and punching bag Debbie Doe. (2)
Figure 3.
Robert van Raffe’s four-page comic God’s Pupil uses a wide array of visual techniques in just a few frames, but the bland colours and pencilled background also give the strip an unfinished look. Two people on their backs in the grass, gazing at the moon, while one draws a lazy finger over its surface to outline a rabbit that he says is what the typical shape of the moon’s face stands for: this is the start of a succinct exploration of the nature of God. It is also a clear invitation to explore more of Van Raffe’s work. (3)
Filed under: Design,Sports by Orangemaster @ 10:19 am
In a game of ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (‘Find the Dutch person’) and a story we should have run a while back, Radio Netherlands informs us that a Dutch woman at Adidas is behind the design of the World Cup football ball, better known in Zulu as Jabulani.
Senior Designer Football Janneke van Oorschot who works in Germany for Adidas has been around the block when it comes to designing all kinds of high profile balls. Have a look at the Jo’bulani, a gold variant of the Jabulani that will be used in the finals in Johannesburg, also known as the City of Gold (and Jozi, Joburg, etc.)
As for the usual negative comments about every World Cup ball, the Jabulani got its share of criticism to which most people, including Van Oorschot, basically says ‘this too shall pass’.
Have a look at this video with your kids. It’s great to see how these balls are made.
Just when you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the craziest of bikes, a guy like Wouter van den Bosch, Dutch art student and former mechanical engineer from Arnhem comes up with a monster bike, made from a tractor tyre and some metal parts that took three months to build.
After axing American Snoop Dogg with the excuse that violence would ensue and after much protest about the homophobic lyrics of Jamaica’s Beenie Man, the bureaucrats who couldn’t make up their minds went with Ivory Coast’s Alpha Blondy as headlining act for The Hague’s Parkpop festival on Sunday 27 June.
That probably means festival visitors will get to hear some African French reggae.
Here’s Alpha Blondy perfoming ‘Ça me fait si mal’ (It hurts me so) about Africa and hardship
Contrary to many other European countries, the Netherlands has very few homeless people (or so it seems) and in general, very few beggars on the streets. I’ve been to Paris and Brussels recently, which reminded me again how few beggars a city like Amsterdam has, even in the tourist season.
Apparently, in the town of Amersfoort, where someone has counted 25 homeless people, they have their own bar. They get free beer and can get food, a shower and medical attention while they’re at it. And that’s not all: they get a client card, allowing them to drink a 500 ml beer every hour and a half, with a max of 10 a day. Lucky them, as Dutch beers are usually a wimpy 200-300 ml.
It seems very sad to get them to drink more in a way, but my money is on the getting them off the streets for the sake of the yuppies and nice families who live in Amersfoort.
A hashtag in Twitter is a word or phrase preceded by the pound sign (#). If it’s a sentence, like #whatsontelly, it is written without spaces. It gives a certain punch to tweets, as a tweet is only 140 characters long. It is also used for people to search for subjects like #obama #oilspill #tigerwoods and so on.
Our favourite Internet-savvy lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet explains how some Dutch folk have missed their mark.
First of all, the trademark claim for #weetjevandedag (roughly, this day in history or what happened on this day) was claimed on an image (a square, black-and-white, cartoon-like smiley face), not on the hashtag expression. If you don’t use the image, it’s not an infringement. Second, such an expression is general and does not differentiate the trademark in question from other things. Third, the trademark claims it already won a court case on someone using their trademark with no proof anywhere to be found to back it up. In English it’s called ‘hot air’, in Dutch it’s lovingly called ‘baked air’ (‘gebakken lucht’).
