March 24, 2009
In the category of news we could call “when life gives you lemons make some lemonade”, the city of Rotterdam has decided to hand out free house curtains to make run down houses in the neighbourhood of Charlois look nicer. Aaaah. A notorious rough area of the city, Charlois could use some visual freshening up. The makeover also includes painting houses and cleaning up gardens in some 12 streets.
(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo: berthi.web-log.nl)
March 23, 2009
Ashleigh Elson of Radio Netherlands tells about the stuff that is dredged out of Amsterdam’s canals. In the film, Gijs van Thiel, Senior Supervisior of Waternet gives us gory details.
“There are over 2,600 houseboats in the centre of Amsterdam, only 20% of the houseboats are connected to the sewer system.”
(Link: radionetherlands.nl)
Tags: Amsterdam, canals, houseboats
When the smoking ban for bars was introduced last year, it hit Groningen bar De Balk as hard as any other café. Owner Aethne McGhie, originally from Scotland, turned a storage room into a smoking room, but the result was that the bar area itself looked absolutely dead. Her remaining customers came up with an idea: why not turn things around, move the actual bar into the storage room, and the former bar area into the smoking area. And so it was done. The result is that people now have to walk to the former storage room to get their drinks, but, McGhie told Parool (Dutch), even the toughest customers soon learned how to play nice.
The professional busy bodies who have to enforce the ban on fun, the Voedsel en Warenautoriteit (VWA), grudgingly admitted to De Telegraaf (Dutch) that this ploy is actually legal. “But we wouldn’t necessarily call it a legal bar,” a spokesperson said. Turns out that they found a technicality with which they can still cause problems for De Balk. Apparently, the law that says that a room where drinks are served must have a minimal size hasn’t been adapted to take the new circumstances that the smoking ban created into account.
Another entity that won’t call De Balk “the first legal smoking bar” is perhaps not surprisingly Hiermaghetwel.nl (Dutch), the website that keeps track of all the bars in the Netherlands where you can legally smoke. They point out that Café Populair in Amsterdam was the first to come up with the idea of a small bar section and large smoking area, way back in September last year (AT5, Dutch).
Source photo: Google Street View, a Dutch version of which was introduced a couple of days ago.
Tags: bars, Groningen, Scotland, smoking, War on Fun
March 22, 2009
This is a gable decoration on the building of the Bloemenlust flower auction house on the Oosteinderweg in Aalsmeer just South of Amsterdam. I ran into it today while biking through the neighbourhood. It’s carved entirely out of brick. The text—abreviated here and there—reads Bloemenlust Coöperatieve Veilingsvereeniging (Bloemenlust co-operative auction association).
After a merger in 1968 with the Centrale Veiling and a subsequent move to a new location, the 1922 building became a restaurant. The new auction would go on the become the largest in the world for flowers, housed in the second largest building in terms of floor space.
March 21, 2009
The trade association of deurwaarders (bailiffs, court appointed debt collectors) has decided that its members should leave PCs, TVs and refrigerators untouched from now on when collecting debts because they are considered basic needs. The association, KBvG, which represents all 900 bailiffs in the Netherlands, has a list according to Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch) of basic necessities that a bailiff should not repossess, but the list stems from the nineteenth century and only contains items such as beds, books and food.
KBvG chairman John Wisseborn pointed out that people need a PC nowadays to apply for jobs and fill out tax forms.
Sociaal Raadslieden (municipal advisers) is happy about the change. According to them bailiffs can use their own discretion on what to take and what to leave behind, and have apparently figured out that just the threat of taking the PC can be a powerful means of putting pressure on the debtor.
Tags: computers, debts, law, possessions
March 20, 2009
The now infamous Vijzelgracht, a street in downtown Amsterdam where entire houses are sinking into the ground due to a series of major screw-ups in digging the new North-South metro line, was a sorry sight. Families were evacuated and their houses boarded up and declared ‘unfit to live in’.
Across the street, local artist Peter Doeswijk who lives and works on the Vijzelgracht came up with a cultural solution to poster up the boarded houses and hide the inevitable graffiti: by using famous artworks of Dutch Masters (Frans Hals, Vermeer and the likes). He has had other poster exhibitions on the Vijzelgracht during the actual construction and without his efforts, the street, which boasts famous manors such as the one of the Maison Descartes (French institute) would look even worse than it sounds.
When I went by to take pictures around 6 pm last Monday, about 50% of everyone walking by stopped for at least 10 minutes to admire all the artworks and take pictures. Here are mine below. The last one is of the stairs of one of the houses, just to show you how bad the situation is. It reminds me of the stairs in the Mousetrap game.
I also met Peter Doeswijk some 12 years ago when he sold his painted phones before we all had mobiles ones, as his niece was a roommate of mine back in Montréal.
Tags: Frans Hals, Peter Doeswijk, Vijzelgracht
March 19, 2009
Students of the Delft University of Technology launched their Stratos rocket in the North of Sweden which reached a height of 12 kilometres and 551 metres, breaking the old European record of 10,7 kilometres set by British students.
“We’re really happy with this win,” Jasper de Reus, a student of Project Stratos told Elsevier.nl from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. “It was our first record attempt.”
The British had their motor built by other people whereas the Dutch did it themselves. The Dutch designed a unique rocket motor made from carbon, which “in theory is strong enough to launch a small car.” They did, however, except the rocket to fly 15 kilometres, which it did not.
If you want to see what happens when BBC programme Top Gear try to launch a Robin Reliant into space, then watch this video with a cup of tea.
(Link: elsevier.nl)
The Keukenhof flower exhibition, what Wikipedia calls “the world’s largest flower garden,” turns 60 this year. Last Wednesday Queen Beatrix opened this sixtieth edition, according to Blik op Nieuws (Dutch), which is themed ‘USA, New Amsterdam – New York, 400’ in honour of the claiming of the region by Henry Hudson in 1609, followed 15 years later by the foundation of New Amsterdam, which is now called New York.
Part of the exhibition is a giant flowerbed depicting the Statue of Liberty, which is not in bloom yet.
Photo by Nguyen Dai, some rights reserved.
Tags: anniversaries, bulbs, flowers, New York, public relations, Queen Beatrix, tulips
March 18, 2009
The two fat guys in the picture are both me at a client’s where the photographer,
Michele Boccamazzo, is working as a Web 2.0 guru. He has started a Flickr pool where all can play, so please don’t let me hold the world hostage for One Million Dollars all by myself!. [Insert obligatory “Muhahaha!” here.]
Tags: Internet
My very talented friend Frances, part of the organisation of the Concours de la Chanson de l’Alliance Française (French Song Contest of the Alliance Française) here in the Netherlands was at the hairdresser’s this week and grabbed a tabloid while she was waiting.
Claude Francis, a Belgian singer who apparently sings international musical numbers in French, claims that he’ll win the above-mentioned song contest because he’s better than all the silly Dutch folk who know squat about French music. It may not read this way word for word in Dutch, but the repeated phone calls Frances received from this man pleading to be entered into the contest in order to win it kinda point that way.
What’s the big deal? It’s a Dutch contest and so you have to live in the Netherlands to enter it. He claims to have a girlfriend in a Dutch town and so he’s often in Netherlands, and he thinks that’s good enough.
Already claming to win a contest you can’t enter is just stupid — unless he was misquoted. Time to get a manager who can communicate, methinks.
(Photo: Privé, 11 March 2009)
Tags: Alliance Française, French, Netherlands, song contest
