July 18, 2009

Amsterdam more affordable, except for parking

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 9:23 am

Amsterdam slid from 25th most expensive city in the world to 29th, according to a recent Mercer study, as Dutch News reports. The one cost with which Amsterdam tops every other major city in the world is parking.

Other Dutch cities did not even make it into the top 50, with Berlin being a ‘cheap’ European capital at 49—is East Berlin dragging that number down? The top three of the Cost of Living list this year are Tokyo, Osaka and Moscow, in that order.

Car owning visitors to Amsterdam* are out of luck though. According to Parool (Dutch), quoting a study by Colliers International, Amsterdam proudly leads the list of most expensive cities in the world when it comes to parking, with a daily rate of 70 USD. The second city on that list, London, only charges around 55 USD a day.

(more…)

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July 17, 2009

Pitching to women? Make whatever it is pink

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:32 am

“Women create their own glass ceiling”

This advert has been around for a while and was published in a Dutch feminist magazine (Opzij), back when Hillary Clinton was running for President of the US, but the negative responses to it from men and women told me I had to run with it.

The glass ceiling is that invisible barrier some women encounter in the workplace when climbing the corporate ladder and not getting that promotion because they are female. In Canada and the US, this issue is pretty much a thing of the past, but in the Netherlands, set the clock back about 15-20 years. The top women in business here are often foreigners.

I polled my women entrepreneurs’ group and they generally did not like the cheap joke, although they could imagine that the marketing guys (men probably made this ad, statiscally) thought it was amusing, as did one woman. She also pointed out this ad was voted “most emancipatory ad” in Opzij magazine.

The whole point of this ad was to convince women to go to Gamma (hardware store) and buy stuff. All the women I polled said that they did not need signs with rounded corners and childish pink things to go out and buy a power drill. We all found that insulting.

And then I asked Dutch marketing journalist Jeroen Mirck what he thought.

“Every marketer reads the same market research, which means that all hardware stores get the same advice about marketing aimed at women. Although Gamma is extending their interior decorating range, people usually go to IKEA for that. A woman who builds things also needs a hammer, some wood, a faucet or a drill. It’s all really nice to push extra things at the cash register (which women are very sensitive to, according to the same market research), but a hardware store should not forget who their main target audience is: men.”

Besides the pink for women disease that so many companies fall prey to — and no one knows why AND it looks a gay pride thing — I thought the ‘glass ceiling’ bit was painful because it’s quite true here. And then when I saw the Oval Office, I thought of the other Clinton, the man that had Monica Lewinksy ‘climbing up the corporate ladder from under the desk’, but that’s just me.

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July 16, 2009

Generic ad insult gays and Amsterdam fans

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:07 pm
gay

Here’s a scary portion of “maybe the good marketers were on vacation” over at the Dutch bureau for tourism.

I bet you couldn’t guess what this advert was for even if you wanted to. It could be whitening toothpaste. Or Prozac. And you’d be dead wrong.

This advert was designed to encourage American gay men (because they keep telling us lesbians have no money) to come to Amsterdam. Since gay also means happy, everybody is laughing, including a dog (!) and an underaged boy (!!). They threw in an Asian and an ‘African-American’ (chances are they aren’t) like they do in the US. None of these people look Dutch, either.

I asked gay Amsterdam resident and Ph.D. in Sociology Laurent Chambon what he thought of this advert.

“This campaign is idiotic for two reasons. First, it seems like they were afraid of the word ‘gay’ and are playing on the word to disguise what they really want to say, which hurts after spending decades trying to come out of the closet! American gays come to the Netherlands to be themselves and for marihuana, sex, culture, architecture, shopping, design, clubs, etc. That is what we should be selling them.

The second is that they are selling Amsterdam as if it they were selling yogurt, insurance or a family vacation. Amsterdam practically sells itself, but here they are using generic headshots from an image databank.”

(Link and image: volkskrant.nl)

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Bookcase stores books in the shelves

Filed under: Design,Gadgets,Technology by Branko Collin @ 11:26 am

Upon his promotion, product designer Ianus Keller’s friends gave him this bookcase where every person had created one shelf. One of the shelves contains 1 GB of memory, and Ianus writes in this Bright.nl thread (Dutch) that he uses this shelf both to store books on and in.

The original Bright story was about a design by Marlies Romberg, recently graduated from the HKU (the U stands for Utrecht), called Dear Diary 1.0 and shown below. I am not sure though whether this is an elaborate case mod or a table with a memory.

Update: Marlies Romberg replied to an e-mail I sent her, saying the table is a case mod. For those who don’t speak geek-speak, this means that this is a complete computer with a customized case.

Source photos: Ianus Keller and Marlies Romberg respectively.

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July 15, 2009

Lounge chairs in a park

Filed under: Architecture,Design by Branko Collin @ 9:30 am

lawnge

These metal and plastic grass lounge chairs in the Valkenbergpark in Breda were made by designer Lisette Spee and architect Tim van den Burg, who hope to be able to make more of them.

(Link: Designboom. Photo: Tim van den Burg.)

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July 14, 2009

Lotte Klaver’s mesmerizing sketches

Filed under: Animals,Art by Branko Collin @ 10:16 am

Lotte Klaver has been posting sketches to her blog since she was yay high, or at least yay old, so that by now, what with her prolific output, her online portfolio is big enough for grown art lovers to get lost in. In fact, she started her blog before we started 24 Oranges, and I remember thinking back then: “this would be a good posting for a site about wonderful Dutch things.” After which I forgot. Apologies for the delay, good reader.

She also sells tees singing praise of the wonderful bond between humans and cephalopods, and you just know there are people who are into that sort of thing.

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Patching up broken bits of Amsterdam with LEGO

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 9:40 am
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If you can build things with LEGO, you can fix things with LEGO, right? Platform 21 Repair held a Dispatchwork session organised in Amsterdam with a little group of enthusiastic dispatchers and a big bag of colourful LEGO.

Platform 21 billed this event as “LEGO fix for distressed walls”, an art project by Jan Vormann, which fits into the Platform’s very clear manifesto of reparing things being creative, outliving fashion and, à  la Nietzsche, making you stronger.

(Link: janvormann.com, Photo: marc0047, some rights reserved)

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July 13, 2009

Filter catches up to 66% of particulates

Filed under: Science by Branko Collin @ 11:43 am

A filter can remove up to two thirds of all particulates claims its developer (Dutch), Bob Ursem of the Technical University of Delft. Particulates are tiny particles of anything floating in the air, be it sand, salt, sulfuric acids, nitric acids, and so on, and are considered a health hazard.

Ursem’s invention works by electrically charging the particles. A negatively charged mesh, or anything that is grounded, will then attract the particles. Something as simple as a plant could act as the mesh.

Unfortunately, Ursem has patented his invention, so even if it works (two thirds of how much air?), it may not be deployed widely for the next 15 years or so.

(Photo of a particulate polluted Shanghai sky by Wikimedia Commons user Saperaud, some rights reserved)

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July 12, 2009

Writer Simon Vinkenoog dies age 80

Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 11:17 am

A week before his 81st birthday, writer Simon Vinkenoog died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Amsterdam last night. Vinkenoog was a poet, a writer of novels, and a strong proponent of the legalization of soft drugs. In 2004, when poet laureate Gerrit Komrij prematurely handed in his resignation, Vinkenoog was elected to serve the interim, until Driek van Wissen could take over.

Here is my pathetic attempt at translating one of the poems Vinkenoog wrote while in office:

Pamphlet

Pamphlet or quick prayer,*
love poem or protest song,
provided it is experienced,
grows wings, becomes redemption.

Once doom makes room
— for courage,
everything you do
becomes a living greeting:

“All that moves
will stay in motion
Make or break
— there is no choice

Nothing remains,
everything will disappear
your life a fireworks
or not.”

*) Note from the translator: what, no word for schietgebed (emergency prayer) in the English language?!

(Photo: Martijn S., some rights reserved, photo ‘shopped by me.)

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July 11, 2009

Calvin’s 500th birthday luxuries sell briskly

Filed under: History,Religion by Branko Collin @ 11:27 am

The granddaddy of the War on Fun must surely be Jean Cauvin (1509 – 1564), the French protestant priest who is seen around these parts as more influential than Luther himself. The man was a big believer in hard work and no (earthly) reward, so it is perhaps odd that the trinkets that are being sold in honour of his 500th anniversary are selling like hot cakes.

Brabants Dagblad reports (Dutch) that a small lake of Calvijn jenever has already been sold (500+ bottles), and that the 25,000 print run of the Calvijn glossy has completely sold out. The exhibition about his life in Dordrecht has so far attracted more than 60,000 visitors. It is unknown if all these people gorged themselves on nectar and ambrosia right after, but there are ten restaurants in Dordrecht that offer special Calvin meals. Perhaps just a pea on a plate, who knows?

Novelist Maarten ‘t Hart points out delicately in NRC Handelsblad (Dutch) that some of the rules of sobriety of Calvin derive from Roman stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger, who did not like music and dancing (“[there is] a time to dance”, Ecc. 3:4) and other exuberances, such as wearing anything other than dark clothes (“Let thy garments be always white”, Ecc. 9:8).

Meanwhile, in the same paper (Dutch) liberal politician Boris van der Ham points out that the celebration of 500 years sobriety is also the celebration of 400 years resistance against the Calvinist philosophy. The States of Holland had a session in 1608 in which theologian Arminius pleaded for the free will of people: “And so I think that man tries to think well, want well and act well.” But Van der Ham also points out that the Dutch reputation as being straight-shooters to the point of being rude is firmly rooted in Calvinism. “In other countries ‘sins’ were often allowed in a don’t-ask,-don’t-tell way, here the curtains were drawn wide open. […] If other countries sometimes look with bewilderment at our freedoms, it’s not because of the freedoms themselves, but because we are so open and honest about them, in what is essentially a Calvinist way.”

(Photo: Calvijn Dordrecht.)

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