February 7, 2009

Mayor from government party smokes at the office

Filed under: Design,General by Branko Collin @ 3:15 pm

The War on Fun is all nice and dandy, but apparently it shouldn’t impede on the little pleasures that its proponents enjoy. Mayor Ruud Vreeman of Tilburg, member of the PvdA (Labour) party that’s in the fun-hating government coalition that banned smoking in bars last year, lights up a cigar now and then in his office. According to Brabants Dagblad (Dutch), the mayor was found out because the stench of his cigars was noticed by a visitor.

A city spokesperson told Revu (Dutch): “‘Vreeman knows it’s not allowed. He will stop immediately. He regrets smoking in the building and will never do it again.”

Well, until next time.

Photo by Jan Lapère, used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2. Via Jong Nieuws (Dutch), which has been writing way too little about Tilburg lately.

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February 6, 2009

Sexist advert denigrates Dutch women and men

Filed under: General,Literature,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:15 pm

FD

This just in! It features a woman doing an invisible pole dance and reads “Manipulate your manager” and then, roughly “Serious about moving up in your career? Register for the FD career challenge ’09!”

Women are complete idiots and have to use their bodies to climb up the ladder of success and all managers are of course all men (and straight!) and have no brains. Ouch. Looking forward to finding out who came up with this one.

The FD is the Netherlands’ top financial paper, which basically is stooping pretty low with this one. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the press is going to say. I’d also like to say that I am surprised social networking site LinkedIn agrees with this.

You’ll hear more from us on this.

I clicked the online version away somewhere today when I was working (the girl dances!), but after seeing this photo from a shocked Dutch girlfriend on Twitter, I put lunch on hold and had to write this up.

(Tip and photo: Jacqueline)

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Gold hat trick for Dutch wines in Germany

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 10:43 am
De Linie wine

Three Dutch wines, interestingly enough from the North, South and the East, have all won gold medals in Berlin at the Berlinale Wein Trophy, according to one of the winners, Marius van Stokkom of vineyard De Linie in Brabant.

Van Stokkom from the town of Made won for his extra dry white wine De Linie (2007), Rudolf and Yvon Jonker from Venhuizen of vineyard Westfriesland in De Swanenplaats were crowned for their dry white wine Auxerrois (2007) and Frederik Verhoeven from Groesbeek of vineyard De Colonjes won for his dry white wine Cabernet Blanc 2007.

And yes, there are tons of vineyards in the Netherlands, but the wine that is produced is either too expensive (we’re used to acceptable table wine for 5 euro, paying 30 euro is not going to happen), only available very locally (a tour around the vineyard is fun for the whole family, methinks) and let’s face it, not that great… yet.

One of the most famous Dutch winemakers is Ilya Gort of vineyard La Tulipe in France whom I saw give a presentation last fall in Amsterdam. Of all the blowing your own horn and drinking he did on stage – his wine is the perfect table wine for 5 euro so to speak – he made some excellent points that changed my attitude towards everyday wine drinking:

– Look at the wine.
Take a few seconds to actually look at the colour of what you’re drinking. Someone worked very hard to get it that way.

– Smell the wine.
You smell your food before you eat it, give your wine the same courtesy.

– Respect the wine and use a proper glass.
I almost can’t drink from my tumbler glasses anymore, it doesn’t taste the same.

Yes, drink the cheap stuff this way too and you will see the difference when you drink a better bottle.

And I can’t resist posting this film with Ilya Gort (in English with some French, subtitled)

(Link: missethoreca.nl, Photo: De Linie)

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February 5, 2009

Underground Dutch videoblog pulls the plug

Filed under: Art,Fashion,Film,Music by Orangemaster @ 12:58 pm
ondergrondtv

Another well-known Dutch site about all things underground in and around Amsterdam ondergrond.tv unfortunately decided to call it quits yesterday. It seems that keeping a videoblog online took a toll on the 10 people working at it and who knows what else (time, money, etc.). Ondergrond.tv was popular among the 18 to 30 segment and was part of independent Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool.

The 495 videos made by Ondergrond.tv will remain online on their YouTube channel. We at 24oranges wish them all the best of luck in the future.

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February 4, 2009

Eppo comics magazine revived

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 10:05 am

After WWII, Europe was treated to full-colour comic magazines, notably Robbedoes (Spirou) and Kuifje (Tintin), both from Belgium. The Netherlands had Pep en Sjors, which later merged into Eppo, which then became Sjosji, which went tits up in 1999 because kids don’t read comics anymore. A bunch of middle-aged men then got together and declared they refused to live in the present.

Instead, they revived Eppo magazine (Dutch), the first issue of which is now in the stores. A hefty 99 euro will get you 25 issues, a year’s worth. The first issue is surprisingly light on advertisements, 2.3 out of 36 pages. I hope that’s not a bad sign. Eppo is first and foremost an exercise in nostalgia; the editors even brought back De Partners, one of the worst comics ever allowed to roll off a printing press. And the mag opens with space opera Storm, just like it used to. (Now we just have to wait for the letter pages to be filled again with debates between Storm haters and Storm lovers.)

I am not sure whether I should cheer on the re-introduction of a regular, mainstream comics magazine in the Netherlands—not counting Donald Duck magazine which is a phenomenon hors categorie. Reading the mag feels a bit like choosing a coffin—surely I am not yet that old? On the other hand, the big guns of yesteryear have lost nothing of their story telling genius. The new Franka reads like Largo Winch (friendship, betrayal, high finance, Ludlum in comic form really), Martin Lodewijk gets ever better at mixing the old-fashioned and the corny with current events in his hilarious spy parody Agent 327, and there’s even a comic version of Havank’s The Shadow by none other than Daan Jippes.

What the heck: cheer! What magazines like Eppo did was create an advertising platform for comic artists (Dutch), as I am sure this new incarnation will also do. That can only be a good thing.

Illustration: 3 panels from Franka story De witte godin (The White Goddess).

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February 3, 2009

Amsterdam gets its first food bank for animals

Filed under: Animals,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 4:46 pm
Cat food

The very idea that people have to go to the food bank in the Netherlands, considering all the money and resources the poor have at their disposal, is shameful and embarrassing for many Dutch people. Not necessarily for the people who depend on the food banks, but the general view is that food banks should not exist and are painful to talk about.

But there’s a crisis on, and according to Animal Rescue Nederland, the first thing poor people skimp on is pet food. Animal Rescue Nederland is currently talking to several pet food manufacturers about putting together food parcels for people’s pets.

Will a food bank for animals be less of a taboo than for humans or will people comment about poor people owning pets they can’t afford in the first place? I wonder.

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Dutch film theatre to cater to autistic audience

Filed under: Dutch first,Film by Orangemaster @ 9:44 am
reels1.jpg

Amsterdam film theatre De Uitkijk is planning to develop special screenings for autistic people, as a way of reaching a new film-going audience.

What’s the difference? Less stimuli, which, if I may, would be less ups and downs in the film as regards the volume and the bass will be toned down to avoid vibrations, which frankly they should do in every film theatre. And getting rid of subtitles, which are distracting and plentiful since many films are in English or another European language, are an issue. Warning people about the amount of advertising and trailers is also an idea. Sounds to me like the average person could enjoy this too, not just an autistic audience.

De Uitkijk is working together with the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Dutch Association for autism. The UK already has autism friendly screenings, and so for De Uitkijk this would be a Dutch first. The first test screening for children will be on 23 February. I wonder if they also plan to have screening for adults.

(Link: nrc.nl)

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February 2, 2009

Shine on you like a deer in headlights

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 9:30 pm

I never used to care about the Eurovision Song Contest because it’s just sugary pop music with too much flash and slutty outfits (not really in a good way). But ever since 2006 when a fully costumed Finnish hard rock band won, and in 2007 the second place went to a campy Ukranian crossdresser singing in a Russian-pseudo German mishmash language stole the show, I keep abreast of the finals hoping something outrageous will happen again.

The Dutch have had no luck in ages. They were knocked out of the semi-finals in 2006, 2007 and 2008, their best score in recent years, and now instead of sending pretty young women who can sing, they are sending in the “big guns”: three ‘older’ men, namely singers Gordon, Rene Froger and Jeroen van der Boom who call themselves The Toppers.

They playbacked on television yesterday instead of actually singing, which caused a commotion in the press, the number they sang was possibly written by some woman and not Gordon although she can’t prove it, and many experts agree the song is not very good, which is Dutch for “it sucks.”

It’s one big string of clichés (in English) and it screams midlife crisis. The idea of sending experienced artists is good, but if they can’t sing live, they are dead in the water. Kudoz to their big and beautiful backup singers, which is a good bold move.

A quick tour of the contestants shows a young, blond Belgian-Turkish woman representing Turkey, Hadise (love that dual citizenship), while Slovenia has some elegant string quartet called Quartissimo with a young, blond female singer. Then, there is also the famous young enough and blond enough Patricia Kaas who will represent France and cannot possibly do worse than the Netherlands.

Am I the only one who thinks that singing the words “love will make us glow in the dark” in Moscow is really funny?

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Amsterdam tax shelter for big UK businesses

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 7:04 pm

There is something in the air, a certain je ne sais quoi that brings the UK and the Netherlands together in odd ways lately. British newspaper The Guardian is busy investigating and publishing information about big UK businesses that avoid taxes by setting up shop in Amsterdam.

One of these companies is Diageo, which owns brands like Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff. According to The Guardian, Diageo cut its tax bill by £ 100 mln (about 1,109,285.00 mln euro) by moving its profits to a subsidiary located near the Amsterdam Sloterdijk train station – at least on paper. The paper has announced that it will reveal information on another internationally renowned corporation that set up shop in Amsterdam to evade taxes. The investigated schemes are presumed to be legal. Apparently some 20,000 companies on paper are “located” in Amsterdam, and that this tax gap would equal the income taxes paid by 20,000 ordinary British households.

On the flip side, Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant talks about Dutch Princess Christina who lives in London and gladly makes use of the ‘Guernsey route’, which is perfectly legal, to ‘park’ her money. She has placed her assets on the British isle of Guernsey to avoid paying taxes, or as the Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst (the Royal family’s PR agency) poetically puts it, “because she is very careful about managing her fortune.”

Tit for tat?

(Links: nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl, De Volkskrant)

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Toy Smurfs bigger hit than football cards

Filed under: Comics,Gadgets,Sports by Branko Collin @ 10:10 am

Supermarket chain Albert Heijn has done it again. A collecting mania is sweeping the country and bringing tens of thousands of customers to “the biggest green grocer,” where every 10 euro spent earns you a package of football cards. However, last year’s action with Smurf figurines was perhaps more succesful, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The paper quotes market research agency GFK which says that on average Albert Heijn can count 37% of all households among its customers. With the football cards, that number has risen to 39,7%, while at the height of the Smurf craze, it was 40%.

Joop Holla of GFK thinks there are several possible reasons why the Smurfs would be more popular: the cartoon characters are popular with both boys and girls, whereas the football cards mostly attract boys. Also, a competing chain (Plus Markt) had a similar action with football cards last year.

Regardless of which hype is bigger, the football card promotion is drawing plenty of attention. Last Tuesday, the Albert Heijn on the Daalseweg in Nijmegen had to install crowd control barriers because hordes of young boys begging for football cards were apparently bothering the customers. Telegraaf says (Dutch) that at one point at least 50 children were asking for cards in sub zero weather.

It just goes to prove that kids are crazy. If I were standing in the cold on the Daalseweg, I’d make sure to either get to Café Jos or ‘t Haantje in a hurry, and the only thing cold near by would be the brewsky in front of me.

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