January 11, 2009

Thaw to set in

Filed under: General,Sports by Branko Collin @ 2:29 pm

No Elfstedentocht for now. National weather institute KNMI predicts that Monday a period of thaw will set in, with wind coming from the South and from the South West. That also means that the country will not have had an official cold wave, which in the Netherlands is defined as at least five consecutive days of frost of which three dip below -10 degrees.

Somebody who won’t be skating for a while anyway is Eimer van Middelkoop: the defense minister broke his wrist during a 30 kilometer skating tour between Bleiswijk and Zevenhuizen, according to Nu.nl (Dutch).

Skating madness held the country in its grip the past weeks, but with the temperature dipping the lowest in the South, the madness spilled over to Belgium. The spokesperson for Vereniging De Friesche Elf Steden, the organizer of the Elfstedentocht, told BN/De Stem (Dutch) that most foreign journalistic attention stems from our Southern neighbours. One fanatic Belgian skater and past participant in the Elfstedentocht, Henri Jaecques, argues in Het Nieuwsblad (Dutch) that Flanders should have its own mythical skate race. “From Sluis to Ieper, 200 kilometer, and perfectly skateable.” The first part of that trajectory, a 16 kilometer strip from Sluis to Brugge, was declared officially open to skaters this weekend, according to De Telegraaf (Dutch).

Photo top: a chair in IJburg, Amsterdam awaiting the next novice skater or an ever grimmer fate.

Photo bottom: a frozen Noorderamsterkanaal.

Link: Weer.nl (Dutch).

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January 10, 2009

Fake scrapwood furniture by Studio Ditte

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 11:48 am

In 1990 Piet Hein Eek made his first cupboard from reclaimed scrapwood and the rest, as they say, is history. Soon you couldn’t step into a somewhat upmarket furniture store without stumbling into one or two scrapwood items. The only problem with these, and one that’s persisted ever since, is despite that they’re made out of garbage they’re so damned expensive.

Studio Ditte came up with a solution in the form of scrapwood print. They basically sell the print in the shape of wallpaper (black, white and green), which at a price of 200 euro per roll is still pretty expensive to my taste. Their next step though was to take second hand furniture and refurbish it with their scrapwood wallpaper. “For that extra-lived in feeling,” they say. At the time of writing their tiny Recycle Recycle range is almost sold out, but this small cupboard can still be had for 120 euro, and there’s also a small table left for 60 euro.

Via Bright (Dutch). See also this article at Apartment Therapy. Photo: Studio Ditte.

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January 9, 2009

Elfsteden update: 25,000 litres of pea soup and 80,000 smoked sausages

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:07 am

Soup and sausage manufacturer Unox are busy producing 25,000 litres of pea soup and 80,000 smoked sausages in time for a possible Elfstedentocht, reports Zibb.nl. The company wants to have 25 stands with volunteers from among its own ranks during the classic 200-kilometer skating race. Should the race take place, the volunteers will hand out the soup, sausages and hats.

Jort Kelder, the country’s most famous documenter of the rich, and side-kick Harry Veenendaal don’t like Unox and its plans very much. In NRC they urge culture minister Plasterk to hurry and apply for a Unesco Intangible Heritage status for the Elfstedentocht (Dutch) to protect the race from commercial interests. Kelder and Veenendaal point to the New Year’s Dive (Dutch), where the sausage giant apparently even got the riot police to keep out the riff-raff that wasn’t going to pay 2 euro to enter a public beach and participate in a traditional event.

Are we going to have an Elfstedentocht? Many Frisians are fuming at the local waterboard (AD, Dutch) which decided to open the sluices in order to drain excess water, resulting in a partial destruction of the ice layer on the brooks, canals and rivers along the Elfsteden route. The waterboard defended its decision by pointing out that moving ice could damage quays and banks.

According to Dutchnews, it should freeze minus 10 degrees or better for at least two weeks before the ice is strong enough to support the 16,000 lucky skaters of the Elfstedentocht—which, by the way, rhymes with Van Gogh. Although it’s been freezing now for over a week, the frost has mainly stuck to the Southern half of the country, with Friesland even experiencing some thaw earlier this week.

Photo of the 1997 Elfstedentocht by Tjeerd van der Werk, used under the conditions of the GNU Free Documentation License, version 1.2.

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January 8, 2009

Dutch advert about washing one’s vagina

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:14 pm

I thought I had seen everything: adverts with female frontal nudity (very normal occurrence here) and some naked male DJ with his not very impressive kit facing the camera at 9 am in the morning, but this advert just made me stop everything I was doing and post. It’s pushing (no pun intended) a vagina wash product and it is filmed from the between a woman’s legs point of view. Ickeepoo squared.

Besides the obvious OMG (Oh My God!) response I just had, as a woman I am sick and tired of any product advertising that seeks to generate even more useless insecurity in women and their bodies, especially in teenage girls, just to sell a product. Ickeepoo some more.

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Town outlaws use of metal detectors in ‘war forest’

Filed under: General,History by Branko Collin @ 8:05 am

The municipality of Haren in Groningen is considering outlawing the use of metal detectors, Groninger Internet Courant reports (Dutch). The town council wants to prevent people from digging up corpses and ammunition in the Appelbergen forest, where the Nazis buried 34 people they shot in retribution. Fifteen of those victims were never found.

A spokesperson of the municipality told GIC.nl that “The police regularly discover treasure hunters who think its exciting to search the forest. Though the chance is small, we don’t want them to start digging and find human remains. There’s a much bigger possibility they will find ammunition, also because the forest is a practice area for the army. That could lead to dangerous situations.”

Photo of the Appelbergen war monument by Wikipedia user Lampje, some rights reserved.

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January 7, 2009

Winter fever Dutch style and time off

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 3:10 pm
elf-1.jpg

Winter seems to be here to stay this year in the Netherlands, which means that canals and ponds stay frozen with or without the presence of snow, birds need to be fed bread so I keep hearing from bird lovers, and the country has skating fever. A business colleague proudly told everyone on a mailing list that she had tailored her work schedule around skating until it lasts. It’s safe to assume that employees are calling in sick as well and are on some frozen pond somewhere getting it out of their system.

As for myself, I just drove through Amstelveen and Oude Kerk aan de Amstel and saw tons of kids skating, like some modern Dutch winter postcard and spotted a place to sharpen my figure skates, should I join the party this weekend.

Tomorrow, the entire Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs gets a half day off to go skating. I asked the approachable and twittering Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen on Twitter if he plans on going skating, but he keeps telling us about meetings in Paleis Noordeinde where the Queen works.

The not so nice side to this story is that school children in the South of the country where the temperatures are lower and the ice is safer cannot just take time off to go skating because then the schools cannot meet their obligatory 1,040 hours of teaching lessons. What about the kids in the North of the country I just saw?

However, if the Elfstedentocht (The Eleven-cities Tour) is a reality this year, then they will be given time off to go and watch. It only happens every ten year or so and if not, they’ll all call in sick too I bet.

And then half the country will be unavailable, out of the office, sick, and just plain busy.

Last year we talked about a man who brought a piece of his toe to his Elfstedentocht reunion.

(Link: elsevier.nl, Photo: tvglorie)

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January 6, 2009

Film theatre computer divulges personal data

Filed under: Film,General,Technology by Orangemaster @ 1:52 pm
Pathé de Munt

A ticket machine at the Pathé De Munt film theatre in Amsterdam offered access to a list of online reservations for 2008, including the names of people who had reserved tickets online. According to Bright.nl, Reinder Rustema discovered this during the holidays when he walked along the ticket machine in the Pathé De Munt film theatre and saw that the Windows trash can was displayed on screen. “Through the trash can I was able to browse and look through the entire system (…). Finally, I saw a file called presales.xls (…) that I could open in Wordpad and there they were: all of the online reservations of 2008.” Bright.nl is still waiting for a response from the film theatre.

And yes it’s a big deal because it’s a breach of privacy and most probably illegal. Someone will surely explain it to us all here.

(Link: bright.nl, Photo: film.ziggo.nl)

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Jules Verne for free in e-book form

Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 9:46 am

A couple of years ago a Project Gutenberg volunteer called Jeroen Hellingman managed to buy 25 public domain versions of Dutch translations of Jules Verne’s 54 “Voyages extraordinaires.” These books are working their way slowly through the Distributed Proofreaders digitization process and have started to appear at the other end, at gutenberg.org. The most recent Dutch Verne adventures posted there are:

  • Wonderlijke avonturen van een Chinees, followed by Muiterij aan boord der ‘Bounty’
  • De wonderstraal, followed by Tien uren op jacht
  • De Reis naar de Maan in 28 dagen en 12 uren

The last two titles have excerpts in my latest (third) Nederlandse Project Gutenberg Reader, which also contains snippets from the Dutch translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Couperus’ Reis-impressies en Jan en Florence, Cyriël Buysse’s De vrolijke tocht, Guido Gezelle’s Laatste Verzen and Johanna van Woude’s Een verlaten post.

If you want Verne in another language than Dutch, fret not. After all, the man is the third most translated author in the world (after Walt Disney and Agatha Christie), and Zvi Har’El’s Jules Verne Collection has a great number of public domain translations of his works.

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January 5, 2009

Annual Christmas tree bonfire in Amsterdam

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 9:36 am
Bonfire

Yesterday around 4 pm families on bikes and on foot dragged their Christmas trees to the Museumplein, the huge park in front of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where people can skate on the pond this winter. They piled trees as high as they could and at 5 pm they set the whole thing on fire while hundreds of people watched with friends and families. Not many events have this spontaneous community thing going for it, but this one did. I managed to join up with at least 10 people I know from Twitter (aka Tweeps) and their children for the event.

Just when I thought the security for the bonfire was exaggerated in a country that does not allow even the smallest of campfires at camping sites in the summer, the pile of trees set aside to feed the bonfire caught fire. A fire truck had to disperse the crowd while people just laughed and cheered on.

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January 4, 2009

Frits Jonker’s typefaces

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 2:15 pm

Fool’s Gold editor Frits Jonker is playing with typefaces, faces drawn using the letter shapes (only and all) of a person’s name. He’s got a longish Flickr photostream with just typefaces of what I assume are his friends, but the image above with Batman and Robin and Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie was taken from the latest Zone 5300.

Speaking of which, the winter issue of Zone 5300 has an exerpt from Nozzman’s “drawing book” (“not a sketch book, because even if I don’t study or research these drawings, they’re still mature”), part 1 of Mr. Mack’s very handy guide to trucker’s CB talk, Robert van Raffe’s look into dandyism, an interview with detective writer Philip Kerr, and much more.

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