I’ve made a sampler of the Dutch texts that were published at Project Gutenberg in August and September. In a month I want to attend the Communia workshops in Amsterdam on how to establish the public domain status of works, and my plan is to print a couple of these booklets and distribute them there. However, I figured other people might want to sample Project Gutenberg too, so I uploaded my Nederlandse Project Gutenberg Reader to The Internet Archive for all to read. It contains fragments from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Jules Verne’s Cesar Cascabel, C. Joh. Kieviet’s Gouden Daden (history), Herman Robbers’ De Vreemde Plant, J.J. Cremers’ Betuwsche Novellen, C.S. Adama van Scheltema’s Mei-Droom (drama), and a short piece by W.-F. Rondou on how to recognize counterfeit honey. You can download it in PDF and ODT (OpenOffice.org) formats.
I can make these pretty easily, so should there be any interest for such samplers, just let me know and I’ll produce one every two months or so. The sampler is set up as an actual booklet. OpenOffice.org Writer let me set wide inner margins, and Acrobat Reader 9 will let me print it.
September 21, 2008
Dutch literature at Project Gutenberg
Tags: Kieviet, Project Gutenberg, public domain
September 20, 2008
NRC as English language daily
Last Tuesday Dutch evening paper NRC Handelsblad launched an online, English language version of itself. The paper will publish a “selection of news items, background pieces, reports and opinion pieces.” Located at http://nrc.nl/international/, the online English NRC partners with amongst others German magazine Der Spiegel, which has had its own English online section for a while now, and Robin Pascoe’s Dutchnews.nl. The Dutchnews.nl staff will take care of the copy editing and journalistic translation, according to NRC’s press release (Dutch).
NRC International is aimed at “foreigners who cannot read Dutch, and who are interested in quality Dutch reporting.”
See also: a short history of NRC at Wikipedia.
Tags: English, NRC newspaper
September 19, 2008
Recently discovered Jewish interior will not be wrecked for now
A uniquely preserved WWII Jewish living room in Amsterdam will stay intact a little bit longer. The room which we wrote about last week, was discovered last year by a student at that time Alexander Westra (currently of the University of Amsterdam). AT5 reports that Lebo, the company that now owns the house, has stopped the wrecking works of the property.
The house used to belong to banker Korijn who died in 1942, after which his entire family was deported to the concentration camps where they died at the hands of the Nazis. One source called the room “more authentic than the Anne Frank House.” After the war, the house at the J.J. Viottastraat in Amsterdam came into the hands of Catholic theology students who barely touched the room, although Westra apparently did uncover some traces of parties.
In the next month and a half the owner will look at possibilities to preserve the room which is built in the Amsterdamse School style. One possibility is to turn the luxurious room into a museum.
According to a spokesperson for Het Schip, the museum for the Amsterdamse School, focus for this architectural movement usually lies on exteriors. To answer a question asked earlier by one our readers, Jay Vos, the spokesperson did not know of any books that focussed solely on Amsterdamse School interiors, although the museum is currently working on a book that will also document these interiors.
The students who lived there recorded a corny video invitation to their new year’s bash in the living room last year, which 24 Oranges discovered at that wonder-wasteland of archeology, YouTube.
Photo: Alexander Westra, republished with permission. Westra sent us several photos, a selection of which we showed in our earlier article.
Tags: Amsterdam, Amsterdamse School, holocaust, interior design, Korijn
Dutch graffiti artist looking at jail time
Authorities in New York City have indicted a resident of the Netherlands who came there a ‘graffiti tourist’. According to the International Herald Tribune, US justice officials have issued an arrest warrant for Dutch resident Robbert Boxem, 23, from Zwolle who allegedly went to New York for the international graffiti event Meeting of Styles. He has been indicted on charges of spray painting a subway car and leading police on a dangerous chase, which occurred down the subway tracks! Boxem (aka KRAE) now faces charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment. The paper says the 23-year-old from Zwolle could get up to four years in prison if convicted. The warrant was issued on Thursday after he failed to turn up in court.
That’s one way to draw attention to yourself. Terribly insightful comments made on the gothamist site (here below) include, “Dutch art has really taken a dive since the days of Van Gogh, Vermeer and Rembrandt” and “He must have gotten tired of running around in wooden shoes and sticking his finger in dykes.”
(Links: gothamist.com, dutchnews.nl, Photo: duncancumming)
Tags: arrest, graffiti, New York City, Zwolle
September 18, 2008
Urinal lift on a terrace kills business
City hotel Queens in Amersfoort has a serious problem that is basically killing their business. The city council decided to place a urinal, albeit a nifty one that rises above ground at 10 pm, right on their terrace. Can you picture taking a leak while people are having a drink on a terrace watching you? Would you want to be watching while having your drink? Ickeepoo. Well, other people don’t want to either, and so the hotel owner is pissed (pun intended).
After having spent hundreds of thousands buying and renovating an old building on the popular Groenenmarkt, the city council chose her outdoor terrace as the place for the urinal. And according to the owner, Paula Brouwer, the day before she was to receive the terrace permit, there was talk of a urinal, and her permit has been tied up in red tape ever since.
The city council came up with a deal: we’ll give you the permit, but you have to close your terrace at 10 pm. All the other terraces are allowed to stay open until 1 am, so imagine how much business she’d be losing. She has refused and has lawyered up. Why does this have a maffia feel to it? It’s also proof positive the city screwed up.
Tags: Amersfoort, entrepeneurs, hotels, urinal
September 17, 2008
Amphibious bicycle: GBO’s Di-Cycle
Dicycles are nothing new, and if you count styrofoam treadmills neither are floating dicycles. But I have yet to see something like GBO’s bike path hogging concept, amazingly called Di-Cycle, which can do both.
This true amphibuous bike won Helmond’s GBO the Brabantse Spelen design competition in 2005. Unfortunately, the design has never left the conceptual phase, but fortunately you can still go gawk at it at the Fiets exhibition that runs until October 5.
See also: Bike your house around.
Photo by Designhuis / Patrick Meis. Via PSFK and a long string of other design blogs.
September 16, 2008
Gigabit internet connection to the houseboat
A quick technology lesson for the easily intimidated: an Internet connection speed of 1 gigabit per second translates to a single high definition movie off the internet onto your PC in a minute. In theory.
A recent study shows that the Netherlands is the country with third best broadband Internet connection, after Japan and Sweden.
Jealous cries were heard from across the globe, bemoaning the lack of local governments’ willingness to innovate, but the position of the Netherlands has probably less to do with the innovative nature of its citizens and more with the way the country urbanised during the industrial revolution. Many railroads not just connecting cities but cutting through right to the city centres makes it easy to lay cables, especially if this network of rails is already owned by the government.
Meanwhile, a company called Draka has developed fibernet connectors for houseboat owners, so that they too may be connected to the Citynet initiative which aims to hook up almost all of Amsterdam to a 1 gigabyte per second fiber optics network before 2010. Shown here is Olivier Ax in front of his houseboat. So what do these owners of the first fiber optic connections do with all that speed? Whispers around the Internet say they first throttle it to 20 megabit per second, because the faster subscriptions are too expensive.
Photo: Draka. Also via Toby Sterling.
Tags: broadband, cable, fiber, fiber optics, house boats, houseboats, Internet
September 15, 2008
Bunny insurance is merrily hopping along
First, it was cats and dogs, and now it’s rabbits. Insurance, that is. You can now get health insurance for your bunnies. The Petplan company is claming that as of today it is the first insurance company in the Netherlands to offer health insurance for rabbits.
According to the insuror, rabbits are increasingly popular as pets. In the Netherlands there are about 750,000 of them hopping around. To many families, bunnies are just as important as dogs or cats. They also make their way around the house and are house trained. (And they are really quiet!)
The insurance market for pets is growing by 10 to 20% a year. Out of the almost 6 million dogs, cats and rabbits, only about 2% are insured.
If you think pet insurance is an odd way to find new clients, there is also the emergency car help for the highly educated.
(Link: depers.nl)
September 14, 2008
Spectacular theatre group Dogtroep to close shop
Dogtroep = wild theatre, outdoors, stunts, “live locations”, pyrotechnics, using the scenery, spectacle, and none of these for much longer. Citing reduced subsidies, the life-blood of their expensive type of theatre, the “troupe” will give one more series of shows called To Be To Not To be, and then quit. Their last show runs from September 15 to October 5.
Says Curving Normality in a farewell review:
Combining abstract narrative with the outstanding locations of their performances, the absurd visual compositions and daring stunts made their performances unsurpassed. I’ve seen them flood a ships-dock with a million liters of water (yes, some in the audience had some seriously wet feet), paraglide inside theater Carré (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), but also perform more tender scenes using small light after sunset in their out-door locations.
As always, the location the Dogtroep selected for yesterday’s performance was closely tied to their narrative. Using the outdoor location provided by the remains of the old steel factory ‘Montan’, the actors literally dug to find the unknown history of this forlorn place. Will they, the Dogtroep, become such a place themselves, or is there another message to be seen in this? As they say for themselves, the basis for this performance “at the edge of existence” are the plans, personages, and dreams that emerge from the crater they dig themselves.
Via BN/De Stem (Dutch).
September 13, 2008
Copyright judges: “copying unnecessarily is always bad”
Copyright law professor Dirk Visser interviewed 17 judges of so-called “intellectual property” cases (copyrights, patents, trademarks) and found some remarkable similarities:
- Cases are mostly decided in the first instance (usually of a Kort Geding, the fast track for law suits that demand speedy attention),
- Judges feel that creating confusion or misleading is always wrong,
- Judges feel that copying in itself is not bad, but copying unnecessarily is.
Unfortunately the article with the results is behind a pay wall, so I have to rely on this summary by Boek 9 (Dutch). The suggestion though seems to be that cases are decided on moral, rather than sound legal or economic grounds.
According to Boek 9, public research and expert opinion barely influence the judges—their experience being that such studies and statements are almost always imprecise, manipulated, one-sided or contradictory.
Tags: copyright, judges, law, patents, trademarks