Wessel van Offeren seems to think shopping is war. His shopping cart with caterpillar tracks was spotted at the Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven by Trendbeheer.
(Photo: Trendbeheer / E.Rosie, some rights reserved)
October 23, 2009
October 22, 2009
“You’ve got my vote” popular with populist voters
Supporters of populist politicians use the phrase “You’ve got my vote” far more often than anyone else.
The phrases “You’ve got my vote, Rita” (Verdonk) and “You’ve got my vote, Geert” (Wilders) are linked to 20,200 and 5,620 times by Google, according to Krapuul.nl, a site critical of extremist politician Geert Wilders. Most given names of other national politicians did not even get into double digits.
The absolute hero of the populist crowd seems to be a guy named Pim though, with 47,400 link-sized portions of Google love going his way.
Link: Geen Commentaar.
Scheringa museum half empty and free to visit
Back in May, we told you about the Scheringa Museum getting robbed at gunpoint. That’s right, the museum named after Dirk Scheringa, art collector and owner of the museum as well as director of the very recently bankrupted Dutch DSB bank.
Not only did the museum reopen its doors on 21 October, but you no longer have to pay the 7 euro to get in: it’s free, since it’s only half full. Although the robbery only deprived the museum of a priceless Dali and a Lempicka, the Dutch ABN Amro bank has confiscated Scheringa’s entire collection, resulting in a half empty museum. In some halls on the nails that held up many a painting notes have been placed by staff asking visitors to leave their comments about the ‘situation’.
(Link: trouw, Photo: postdam.blogspot.com)
Tags: Dirk Scheringa, DSB Bank, Scheringa Museum
October 21, 2009
Funk band Gotcha! back together
Funk band Gotcha! was doing well in the early 1990s, and then suddenly dropped from view. Turns out they broke up due to unspecified differences of opinions.
I went to one of their concerts in 1992, and really enjoyed it, so it is good to hear that they patched up those differences and got back together again, and are due to embark on a tour of ten concerts. Beef founders Pieter Both and Koen Lommerse even took a sabbatical to be able to play in Gotcha! again.
Check the band’s website for all the tracks of their second, 1993 album Gotcha! Gotcha!
(Link: LiveXS. Source illustration: Gotcha!)
October 20, 2009
Industry lobbyist exaggerates legal download market
NVPI, an organisation representing the ‘Dutch’ entertainment industry*, recently called for harsher measures against legal copying in the Netherlands, pointing out that there is a ‘sufficient’ supply of stores offering really legal downloads**. However, as Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet points out, they are stretching the truth a bit.
There are indeed 19 online stores selling legal video downloads to the Dutch, but as Engelfriet’s research shows, hardly any of them sell the movies people want to buy. The article is in Dutch, but the accompanying table speaks volumes. Engelfriet compared the 100 videos currently most popular at Bol.com to what NVPI’s champions were offering.
*) Amongst which such familiar ‘Dutch’ giants as Disney, EMI, and Nintendo.
**) I realize this must be confusing. Basically, NVPI wants to outlaw what is known as file sharing, which is currently legal in the Netherlands for some types of creative works.
(Illustration: Arnoud Engelfriet.)
Tags: copyright, file sharing
October 19, 2009
Football cup that any team can win
The Helmond Cup is an unofficial football championship grafted onto official competitions. The team that beats the last champion in an official match becomes the new champion, so that you get a chain of champions across many unrelated competitions.
It was founded by the Huisman family from Hillegom, avid fans of Helmond Sport, a club that has yet to get out of the Dutch second division. Since it was founded in 2008, the Helmond Cup was won and held shortly by teams from the Netherlands, France, Ukraine and Spain. You can it follow its travels at the Ajaxtalk forums.
A similar cup is the Unofficial Football World Championships, founded by Scotland fans when Scotland beat archnemesis England, who were then the real world champions. Currently, the Netherlands hold that trophy, although we might lose it next month when playing Italy in a friendly match.
(Photo by Wikimedia user Carolus Ludovicus, some rights reserved.)
Tags: Helmond
October 18, 2009
Van Gogh’s letters and Max Havelaar in English
English translations of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo have been released in a 6 volume boxed set by the Van Gogh Museum in a 15-year-long cooperation with the Huygens Instituut. The original letters in French and Dutch have also been reproduced.
The entire set contains all the pictures referenced in the letters, that is, all 4,300 of them, The Guardian reports.
If you don’t feel like shelling out the 325 UKP that the set is undoubtedly worth, you can also read the letters and their translations at vangoghletters.org. The Huygens Instituut is part of the Dutch academy for sciences.
Story via Eamelje.net (Dutch), who in a totally unrelated story also points out that another Dutch giant of the 19th century, writer Multatuli, published his masterpiece Max Havelaar 150 years ago last Tuesday. The Havelaar has been in translation for a long time, and a public domain English version can be found at Google Books.
If you do not like PDF or EPUB, you might be able to extract the HTML version from the EPUB file (which is just a ZIP archive under a different name).
Tags: copyright, Eduard Douwes Dekker, Max Havelaar, Multatuli, public domain, Vincent van Gogh
October 17, 2009
Pillars supporting Amsterdam are slowly crumbling
As you may know, Amsterdam was basically built in what can perhaps best be described as a swamp, and as it happens peat is not the best conceivable supporter for brick. Early Amsterdam residents got around this problem by driving huge wooden poles into the bog until it hit firmer ground and then building their houses on top of this wooden foundation.
It turns out, Parool says, that a changing climate is leading to longer droughts, which in turn lowers the water level and causes the poles to dry out and crumble.
It is mostly privately owned houses that are in danger of collapsing, as housing corporations have already replaced their pillars.
The Parool article quotes alderman Maarten van Poelgeest and a spokesperson of Waternet who both say that the situation is serious without going into much detail, although the latter says that “there is no need to panic, this won’t be an issue before 2040.”
(Photo by Wikipedia user Dohduhdah)
October 16, 2009
Hacker students score pizza for pennies
If students and pizza (and probably beer) is not the perfect combination, then imagine students and pizza for next to no money and the money to buy beer.
For months, hundreds of students from cities such as Groningen, Breukelen and Utrecht had been getting pizza from Dutch website Justeat.nl for EUR 0.01 or 0.05 after hacking into the payment system. Just before paying for the pizza through an online banking system, a page was added somewhere to be able to change the final price to a few cents. In other words, the payment system wasn’t installed properly and certainly not secure.
The manager of the website is going to try and get the students to pay for the pizzas after all, as he’s out EUR 30,000. I think he should kick the IT incompetents he hired to install the payment system on his site really hard and claim damages (we don’t run out and sue here). It’s not like he’s the first ever online restaurant using the highly praised and easy-to-use Ideal payment system. Going after the smart students is easier, but lame, and they have no money.
(Link: nu.nl, Photo of Pizza pie by Adam Kuban, some rights reserved)
October 15, 2009
The Dutch doctor is in via Twitter
Family doctors Erik Jansen and Bart Brandenburg from Nijmegen have taken their pratice online and become the Netherlands’ first Twitter doctors. By following @tweetspreekuur you can ask questions about your health. They provide as much advice as they can, and will tell you to consult your own doctor or to call an emergency number if they think something is really wrong.
Of course, you can also get some privacy by getting a login at tweet.webspreekuur.nl (type it in your search engine).
And I’m very happy the working stethoscope I bought for EUR 0,20 on Queen’s Day from a nurse this year was put to good use.
(Link: componence)