November 30, 2010
North Holland radio sation WildFM felt like giving a prize away that was not the usual fare: a chihuahua, a type of dog that became increasingly popular once American socialite Paris Hilton was seen with one. Other unusal prizes the radio station has given away in the past include a breast enlargement (how very man friendly) and a dream wedding worth 50,000 euro.
(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)
November 29, 2010
A reporter from Surinam daily De Ware Tijd has discovered that the document in which former Queen Juliana recognised the independence of Surinam in 1975 has been lost.
Home Affairs Minister Soewarto Moestadja, has started a search and is focussing on three leads. The document that signifies the birth of a nation may be in the vault of the national bank, it may be in the national archive, or it may have been lost to the flames of the fire that destroyed the Ministry of General Affairs during the 1980s.
The Netherlands still has its own copy of the deed of recognition, somewhere.
In 1667 the Netherlands ‘traded’ New York (then New Amsterdam) for Surinam in a treaty that concluded the Second Anglo-Dutch War. In reality both colonies had already been conquered by respectively the English and the Dutch, and the treaty merely cemented the status quo. The independence 318 years later was accompanied by the same lack of dramatics, as Surinam asked for independence in 1973 and received it two years later.
(Link: Waterkant.net, Photo by Ian Mackenzie, some rights reserved)
Tags: New Amsterdam, New York, Queen Juliana, Surinam
November 28, 2010
Says the Trend Report Computer and Internet Usage 2010 of the University of Twente (PDF, p. 54):
The differences [in the amount of Internet use] are the most noticeable where education and social position are taken into account. On average people with a lesser education use the Internet more per day than people with a higher education— some 3.1 as compared to 2.6 hours. The unemployed and people unfit for work use the Internet on average 4.0 and 4.1 hours respectively per day, whereas working people average 2.6 hours. This suggests that the available time is an important factor. […] In the past 20 to 25 years it was the better educated who were the pioneers of Internet access.
The report unfortunately does not define ‘better educated’ and ‘lesser educated’ (in fact, it measures along three education levels, but does not define any of them).
Also notable is that the higher educated use the Internet far more to educate themselves further than the lesser educated do. (p. 41)
(Link: Blik op Nieuws. Photo by Woolie Monster, some rights reserved.)
Tags: education, Internet, statistics, University of Twente
November 27, 2010
Sculptor Ton Mooy has revealed to Omroep Brabant that he is a working on a statue of an angel with a cell phone. (Photo and video)
The angel is to replace a worn out statue in the cathedral of Den Bosch. The cell phone will have just one button: for a straight line with God.
According to Mooy, he also wanted to give the angel jet engines, and a skirt instead of pants, but those ideas went too far for the church’s art committee, NOS Headlines reports.
Tags: angels, cathedrals, cell phones, churches, Den Bosch, sculpting, statues, telephony
November 26, 2010
Boffins over at the sleep research centre of the Canisius-Wilhelmina hospital in Nijmegen have concluded that learning how to play the Australian musical instrument didgeridoo helps reduce snoring. The specific training of the mouth and throat muscles to play this instrument apparently help reduce sleep apnea, which causing snoring.
Some 50 people were given a didgeridoo training for four months, which was not easy as one third quit, claiming they were not able to sustain the necessary circular breathing, never mind the time committment. No definite conclusions were drawn with such a small bit of research, but the boffins could be on to something. The Dutch were inspired by the Swiss who did something similar and obtained similar results.
To wipe away the associations some of us have of digireedoo players being Caucasian dreadlock-wearing backpackers who play on the street as they need cash while on vacation in major cities during the summer, have a look at the cool, modern sounding didgeridoo player jamming with South African rapper Jack Parow live at De Nieuwe Nor in Heerlen a few weeks back.
(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)
Tags: digireedoo, Heerlen, Jack Parow, Nieuwe Nor, Nijmegen, research
November 25, 2010
The rocket (raket), the Dutch lolly invented in 1962 that never crash landed, is apparently way too pricy for the Dutch at amusement park Kabouter Plop in Coevorden, Drenthe, a Belgian ‘invention’.
For a Dutch treat that is often handed out for free around the country, the Dutch have complained that they just couldn’t get themselves to pay EUR 2,50 for it. The same themed amusement park also exists in Belgium where the price of the rocket is not an issue.
There have been so many complaints from the Dutch that not only it is news, but the solution has been to pull the product from the Dutch amusement park. Dutch kids will have to wait until they get home to have a rocket and stick to whatever other overpriced junk food the amusement park has to offer.
(Link: zibb.nl)
Tags: amusement parks, Drenthe, rocket
November 24, 2010
We saw this huge on-street playground under construction at the Potgieterstraat in Amsterdam yesterday. It is basically taking over the space where the road was.
This used to be a one-way street for cars, with a two-way bike path and a smaller playground. The neighbourhood wanted more room for children to play and so the decision was made (PDF) to ban cars from this part of the Potgieterstraat altogether. You can still bike through it though.
I did some Googling. Play streets have been a feature of Belgian cities since the 1970s, and have also been introduced to London and New York. In all those cases the play streets aren’t permanent fixtures, and cars are never completely banned from the street.
In a way this Amsterdam variant isn’t that much different. Bicycle streets are fairly common here, something I only really started to appreciate when Google Streetview came around, and I noticed that I could not get views for many streets in Amsterdam simply because the Streetview car wasn’t allowed to go there. Bicycles are kept separate from the playground though.
Illustration: the old situation, as seen from the other side.
Furthermore: Orangemaster points out to me that the De Genestetstraat has been a play street for two years. It took a prolonged legal battle for the borough to push this one through—perhaps that is why the Google Streetview car was able to take pictures there.
(Source second photo: Google Streetview)
Tags: bike paths, playgrounds
According to NRC newspaper, the Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world where marriage takes place in a standard way under community property (joint ownership) rather than separate property. Drawing up a prenuptial agreement (the Dutch have surely heard that in American television series) costs money and sharing all your stuff is still considered the right thing to do here, someone please tell me why. A prenuptial agreement not only provides in case of divorce, but also protects property during the marriage in case of a bankruptcy or the likes. Don’t give me that it’s all about trust argument because most of the time in heterosexual marriages women get more than they brought in stuff-wise, a reason some women marry in the first place.
Putting aside gay marriage for a moment, women were traditionally dependent on men, and so community property made sense. The politicians who submitted this proposal to parliament to have the rules changes feel married people should have more say in their own marriages like the rest of the Western world, and parliament agrees.
(Link: nrc.nl, Photo of Wedding cake by philipyk, some rights reserved)
Tags: marriage
November 23, 2010
Dutch inventor Rachel De Boer had wrinkels in her cleavage at an age when women don’t usually have them, and decided to come up with a way to get rid of them.
Her bra, called La Decollette (in Dutch, ‘cleavage’ is ‘decolleté’, from the French ‘décolleté’), is now being sold in about 100 lingerie shops in the Netherlands. It’s not a bra you wear during the day, it’s something you wear at night to keep your breasts apart, tightening the skin in between. It’s not sexy to go to bed with, granted, but if we can believe the results and the news item on telly, it makes a real difference.
I had heard of breast pillows that do the same thing, but this product obviously looks different and more confortable.
Necessity remains the mother of invention. I tend to just stay out of the sun like an 18th century European aristocrat.
(Links: telegraph.co.uk, Photo: decollette.nl)
November 22, 2010
The photo book series In Almost Every Picture by ad agency Kessels Kramer show pictures taken by amateurs that focus on the same element again and again.
In the ninth edition, a badly lit black dog is the subject of the camera’s attention. The product site doesn’t say who the photographer is.
The series is very funny because the dog is black and the quality of the Polaroids is low, so most of the time you just get to see a black blob. Apart from producing picture puzzles, such as this one where the dog almost disappears in the shade, the series also produces a window on a time and a family.
A perhaps more famous episode of this series is the woman at the shooting gallery. This is the sort of photography that made Hans Aarsman quit photography altogether, because he realized that as a professional he could never attain this level of authenticity.
Tags: Kesselskramer
