March 5, 2008

Catholic church says gravestone size matters

Filed under: Religion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:58 am
gravestone.jpg

You’d think it was tough enough burying a loved one in a country where after a certain amount of years you have to dig them up again and shove them somewhere else to make room for more. The Catholic church had a problem with a gravestone that is 10 cm too wide and 6 cm too high, so they say, and confiscated it. In fact, if you look at the uncommon gravestone which depicts a Barcardi rum bat (isn’t this copyright infringement?), there could be many reasons other than the obvious but unspoken ‘it’s not very Catholic’. And I thought all of God’s creatures are supposed to be beautiful. According to the friend of the deceased woman who put back the gravestone by hand, he says many other gravestones are the wrong size, in a conflict that has been dragging on for almost a year.

It’s funny how the author of the article left out the Barcardi bit.

(Link: ad.nl)

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March 4, 2008

Dutchman bikes to Beijing for the Olympics

Filed under: Bicycles,Sports by Orangemaster @ 11:03 am
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From the small town of Empel, Brabant all the way to Bejing, China some 12,000 kilometres down the road, 40-year-old Leo Janssen plans to bike his way to the Olympic Games in five months. His travels will take him through Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and China. A huge fan of the Olympics, in 1992, Leo walked to the Olympics from Empel to Barcelona. In 1996, he simply flew to Atlanta (perfectly understandible), although in 2000 he tried to reach Sydney by bike. In 2004, he took it “one step further” by using a step bicycle to make it to Athenes and this year he’s using a recumbent bicycle.

(Video link: depers.nl)

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March 3, 2008

Camouflaged people disappearing against indoor backdrop

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:25 pm

Two series of photos by artist Desiree Palmen from Rotterdam show people dressed in camouflage clothes that make them disappear against an urban, often indoor backdrop.

Camouflage I (1999)

Camouflage II (2004)

Via BoingBoing.

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March 2, 2008

Buy a bankrupt theme park’s attractions online

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:11 pm

Photo by Tuppus, some rights reserved.

Fairy tale theme park Land van Ooit (Land of Someday) has gone bankrupt, and its attractions will be sold during an online auction on Monday. Located in Noord-Brabant near Drunen, Land van Ooit pretended to be a country where visiting children were considered to be knights and knightesses. The park originally employed a lot of actors to make the theme come alive, but in later days when visitor numbers dwindled it resorted to fast rides to attract customers.

Online auction house Troostwijk will start receiving bids on Monday. The auction closes March 10. Troostwijk fear that a lot of people will use the viewing days (March 8 and 9) for a day out to a theme park. “Children will only be allowed in under supervision, and the rides may not be used,” according to Troostwijk’s Karel van Schoonevelt in DagjeWeg (Dutch). “There is a lot of interest in this auction,” he added. “It rarely happens that a theme park goes bankrupt.” The company will also charge an entrance fee of 2.50 euro.

Among the artefacts being auctioned are giants, giant furniture, dolls, the electronics to make it all come alive, lots of actual furniture, and so on.

Auction 1: Playground and catering equipment
Auction 2: Costumes and clothing accessories
Auction 3: Amusement park various

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Light reading light

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:22 pm

Ad agency Studio Meiboom in Harderwijk came up with this lamp in the shape of a book.

“The Enlightenment is made of white acrylic glass. It is 24 centimeter high, 17 centimeter wide and 8 centimeter deep, and is supplied with a 9 watt compact fluorescent lamp.”

“The purchase price is 89 euro. Ten percent of this goes to charity.”

Via Osocio.

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March 1, 2008

Symbols as furniture in high school

Filed under: Architecture,Design by Branko Collin @ 8:17 am

The frog once sang: it’s not easy being green. This ultra-cool reception area that Tjep designers came up with for a high school in Apeldoorn raises the question how easy it is being in green. Students get to sit on buttons of an old fashioned calculator, get to hang in “key” areas, and get to have meetings in a tiny see-through factory, all executed in bright green. The floor plan looks like a wonderful circuit board, with symbols from the realm of economics replacing plain old conductive pathways. The reception area is in the new economics building of ROC Apeldoorn, that’s why.

The design was nominated for a 2007 Dutch Design Award in the category interior design, where it was beaten by the reception area for chemicals company DSM — the ceiling-wide mirror of which just screams “illicit office sex” to me. But perhaps that’s just me. I’ll shut up now. Go watch the pretty pictures.

Source image: Dezeen Magazine.

Thank you for the tip, Laurent.

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February 29, 2008

DJing does not require two arms

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 8:57 am
Turntable

British DJ Carl Cox is known as the three deck wizard because he can handle three turntables using his two arms. Dutch DJ Sebastian Hoff aka DJ Promo will go one step further, albeit because he has to. This upcoming Saturday during his ‘Q Dance Presents Promo: Shadowbox’ in the Heineken Music Hall in Amsterdam, he will manage two turntables with one arm in a sling. Hoff broke his arm climbing over a fence to go fishing illegally and said that he doesn’t want to disappoint his fans.

Besides that people will wonder why the man’s arm is in a sling, I don’t see this as news or even as impressive. I can do you one better: Wicked Jazz Sounds’ regular DJ Missing Links only has one arm. Even his DJ name gives away which arm is missing. I saw him once during a Bossaboogie event in Amsterdam and he was great. I thought it was about the music!

NOTE: DJ Promo will be spinning hardcore (not that jumpstyle stuff) in front of 5,000 people, so in that case, respect and good luck!

(Link: dag.nl, Photo of Turntable by doviende, some rights reserved)

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February 28, 2008

Hiding child pornogaphy instead of stopping it

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am
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According to Dutch columnist and publicist Karin Spaink, the KLPD (National Police Services Agency) have a list of Dutch child pornography sites in their possession and are not really doing anything to shut these sites down. Instead, they point to Dutch ISPs saying that they should filter these sites. That still doesn’t sound like shutting the sites down.

Although the list was secret, Spaink managed to find out that four Dutch websites were on the list, with hosters in Utrecht and Haarlem. After looking at the sites, the KLPD agreed that at least two of the sites clearly hosted child pornography, while the other two are still being investigated. According to spokesman Ed Kraszewski of the KLPD, their list only had foreign sites – before Spaink got a hold of their list.

Here is a list, readily available online, taken from the Finnish police. You just need to scan to see all those Dutch sites.

England, the US and the Netherlands. What was the argument for filtering these sites again? “The sites can’t be shut down by the police because they are often in countries with no legislation for this kind of thing.” (Taken from Webwereld, 23 maart 2007). Since when is Haarlem and Utrecht somewhere in Russia or Eastern Europe?

Just filtering sites is not enough. And UPC, the only Dutch ISP that actually bothers to filter child pornography sites, has a filter that doesn’t work, if we can believe the many comments left by UPC clients on Spaink’s blog who found out first hand what kiddie porno really looks like.

(Link Karin Spaink’s blog)

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February 27, 2008

Dead deer eaten by prey YouTube hit

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

From the beautiful, rich yet small village of Ooij East of the Netherlands comes a website where you can watch how a deer gets eaten by other animals. Follow this link for at least 10 films.

In the first week of its existence, the www.dooddoetleven.nl website (roughly, ‘death comes alive’) was visited about 200,000 times. Watch 24oranges help with those figures! The films show buzzards, crows and magpies picking away at a dead deer. YouTubecurrently has these films in its Top 10.

(Link: ad.nl)

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February 26, 2008

Murder on the border

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:30 am

Photo copyright 2001, Jérôme. Distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

Imagine two detectives working on a murder case, each having to solve the same crime independently, with each only having access to half the clues: it sounds like a great recipe for a mystery novel. Unfortunately, the murder in the Noord-Brabant town of Baarle-Nassau last week was anything but fictional. Early last week a 26-year-old Belarusian woman was found dead in a former bank building straddling the border. Police detectives from the two countries each had to look for clues in their own half; they feared that if they literally overstepped their boundaries, any case they might have against a suspect could later be thrown out on a technicality.

Nevertheless, the Dutch Departement of Justice said last Friday that the cooperation with its Southern neighbours had been excellent, forgetting for a moment that the Belgians had let the main suspect escape, the victim’s 26-year-old husband. The Dutch DoJ then issued an international arrest warrant against the Dutch man who is still on the run with the couple’s four-year-old daughter. The case is now fully in Dutch hands because the body was found in the Dutch half of the building, and the main suspect is Dutch.

Although there are many more buildings in the world built across borders, the Baarle-Nassau case is special because half of the town, called Baarle-Hertog, is a Belgian enclave within the Netherlands. Wikipedia says that the municipality of Baarle consist of 22 Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands, and 5 Dutch ones in Belgium.

Via BN/De Stem (Dutch) and Brabants Dagblad (Dutch).

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