December 31, 2008
Give it to me straight: Bad taste? Stupid? Clever? Sexist? No way she could have had those identical triplets? This advert was on the front page of December’s Dutch IT newspaper Automatisering Gids. It reads “Need additional temporary hardware?”
Off to New Year’s celebrations now. Happy New Year to all our readers!
Tags: advertising, Happy New Year
December 30, 2008
Volkskrant science reporter Hans van Maanen came up with a list of the 10 biggest blunders of 2008 in both science and reporting or talking about science (Dutch).
#5, on the news that drinking coffee is not bad for you:
Of the healthy men who drank more than five cups a day, 20% less died than of the healthy men who never drank coffee.
Twenty percent! But healthy men—the phrase gives it away—rarely die, and 20% of nothing is still nothing.
Link:Eamelje.net (Dutch). Photo by Madeleine Price Ball, some rights reserved.
Tags: blunders, popular science, science writing
December 29, 2008
A short selection of my favourite stories of 2008, some of them funny, some sad, some just weird:
So, which 24 Oranges story of 2008 would top your list?
Tags: 24oranges
December 28, 2008
First, a very simple yet stressful film of how a cute little shopping street (Haarlemmerdijk) in Amsterdam can turn into a holiday nightmare for trucks, cars (big Volvo station wagons), bikes and pedestrians. Hook yourself up to a stress machine, and I am sure you will score higher that usual. And remember that everybody always does their last food Christmas shopping at the last minute, which this film captures.
Second, to avoid all that stress and having been invited to an exclusive birthday party, I ran off to Munich where 24orange’s third lesser known blogger lives, beautifully situated across from the Olympic stadium of 1972. The morning has so far been spent fixing a washing machine because a small, plastic “sombrero” broke off.
The German machine, which was bought in the Netherlands and moved to Germany, broke down in Germany. The part could not be ordered in Germany (!) and was ordered in the Netherlands. The part was picked up in the Netherlands, on holiday from Germany. Hopefully, it can be fixed today.
UPDATEThe washing machine was fixed the next day.
Tomorow get ready for Branko’s annual picks of fav 24o postings. Prosit!
(Link: amsterdamcentraal.nl)
December 27, 2008
On December 22 Centraal Boekhuis, the distributor for most books in the Netherlands opened up its ISBN register, “after consultation with several stakeholders in the book business.” Let me paraphrase that for them: “people started suing us.”
Centraal Boekhuis has a curious monopoly. It distributes books for the publishers to the stores. But since shelf space is expensive, it regularly pretends the backlist doesn’t exists, says Eamelje. A Stichting Auteursdomein sued them for abusing their monopoly position. The foundation lost on the curious grounds that since it’s pioneering a business model in the Netherlands, its situation is so unique that damages are hard to determine. Stichting Auteursdomein is an on-demand publisher for books from established authors where those books have disappeared from the shelves. The goal of the lawsuit was to have Centraal Boekhuis open up their ISBN database, and that’s what happened in the end.
Via Eamelje (Dutch).
Tags: authors, books, law, monopolies, publishing
December 26, 2008
Last Tuesday the mayor of Deurne in Noord Brabant was questioned by the city council about his smoking in a public bar. Since July of this year smoking has been banned in bars in the Netherlands. The ban has met with a lot of resistance, and many smokers openly defy the law. As far as I am aware this is the first time that a public official was caught red-handed breaking the anti-smoking law. A salient detail is that mayor Gerard Daandels of Deurne is a member of CDA, the Christian party that is in the vanguard of the Jihad against fun: it was CDA minister Klink that proposed the smoking ban.
Daandels response: “You can hold me responsible for everything in matters of enforcement, but not for this unenforceable measure. […] I went to three bars where people were smoking. If a hundred people are smoking, you no longer give an example by not smoking.”
The Department of Public Health commented: “Even mayors are bound by the law.”
Link: Brabants Dagblad. Via Jong Nieuws. Depiction of the Deurne coat of arms by Wikipedia user Tibor, distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.
December 24, 2008
This protest video/Christmas song by Ampzing “Koude Kalkoen en rode wijn” (“Cold turkey and red wine” – nice pun!), a ‘cover’ of “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” is by no means brilliant, but the message definitely hits the mark with the Dutch: enough with all those English Christmas songs already! This could explain why many of my friends sneer at me when I say I’m looking forward to Christmas and the Christmas music. The songs at my place are mostly in French, often translations of the English versions as well as traditional French Canadian fiddle music, so no Wham or Mariah Carey. The Dutch radio is basically only cranking out English hits though, as I step into the shops to buy something. It doesn’t work for me at all.
I feel sorry for anyone who really digs the Christmas spirit, but is annoyed by the Americanised, Anglo-Saxon version of it. Remember one thing though: your fellow countrymen are the ones doing this to you and that’s the really scary part.
(Link: taalpost.nl)
Tags: Christmas, Christmas music
Utrecht based ad agency Spranq made a font environmentally friendly by making holes in the glyphs. The result is called Ecofont, and according to an article by NPR, this will save its users up to 15% in ink. The idea is that you set this font, a free download, as the standard font for printing drafts and e-mails and such. Ecofont is based on the liberally licensed Bitstream Vera font.
Tags: environment, fonts, GPL, ink, open source
December 23, 2008
The players of the SVU Volleyball Club in Amstelveen, a student club part of the VU University Amsterdam, broke the world record for volleyball by playing 60 hours in a row. They broke the old record of 55 hours and 3 minutes, landing them a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The last bit was apparently very tough. “It was barely volleyball. They could barely move anymore,” a spokesperson for the team said. The team started on Saturday 20 December at 8 am with 24 players. Two people had to leave the field: one player was exhausted, while the other one had a knee injury. The players could not be replaced.
(Link: rtl.nl)
Tags: Amstelveen, Amsterdam, volleyball, vu
December 22, 2008
Amsterdam’s rhythm & tunes band The Spinshots have just released a new video called “Désirs Mutuels”, a French version of their ballad “Mutual Desires”. I proudly attended the video release party not only to talk to some very cool musicians, but because they had asked me to translate and adapt the French lyrics, a labour of love that took me just three days. Oh and here’s a nice picture of the show they did to launch the video at the recently renovated Winston Kingdom in Amsterdam.
I also got to meet the woman who shot the video. She told me it was all done in one take and took a mere 1.5 hours to shoot. When budget is an issue, creativity is a must. That’s why I like this video. I also heard it was shot in a secret location. I can imagine that someone warning any authority about guys in turbans with equipment could be scary. Hats’ off to the Dutch singer who has a knack for languages and really does the French justice.
And the will to do something in French is part of an odd trend floating around the city whose main Dutch figure, good friend DJ Guuzbourg and his girl-ridden French compilations has something to do with. May this trend continue on in 2009.
Tags: DJ Guuzbourg, Spinshots, translation
