November 23, 2010

Bra helps control cleavage wrinkles

Filed under: Design,Fashion,General by Orangemaster @ 8:31 am

Dutch inventor Rachel De Boer had wrinkels in her cleavage at an age when women don’t usually have them, and decided to come up with a way to get rid of them.

Her bra, called La Decollette (in Dutch, ‘cleavage’ is ‘decolleté’, from the French ‘décolleté’), is now being sold in about 100 lingerie shops in the Netherlands. It’s not a bra you wear during the day, it’s something you wear at night to keep your breasts apart, tightening the skin in between. It’s not sexy to go to bed with, granted, but if we can believe the results and the news item on telly, it makes a real difference.

I had heard of breast pillows that do the same thing, but this product obviously looks different and more confortable.

Necessity remains the mother of invention. I tend to just stay out of the sun like an 18th century European aristocrat.

(Links: telegraph.co.uk, Photo: decollette.nl)

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November 22, 2010

Black dog in almost every picture

Filed under: Animals,Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 11:11 am

The photo book series In Almost Every Picture by ad agency Kessels Kramer show pictures taken by amateurs that focus on the same element again and again.

In the ninth edition, a badly lit black dog is the subject of the camera’s attention. The product site doesn’t say who the photographer is.

Holly Moors says:

The series is very funny because the dog is black and the quality of the Polaroids is low, so most of the time you just get to see a black blob. Apart from producing picture puzzles, such as this one where the dog almost disappears in the shade, the series also produces a window on a time and a family.

A perhaps more famous episode of this series is the woman at the shooting gallery. This is the sort of photography that made Hans Aarsman quit photography altogether, because he realized that as a professional he could never attain this level of authenticity.

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November 21, 2010

Mash-up of war-time and modern photos

Filed under: History,Photography by Branko Collin @ 8:42 am

The Schutzstaffel did in fact once have an office in the middle of Amsterdam, on the Dam square to be precise, and historian Jo Teeuwisse has created a great set of photo mash-ups that bring home how the world fitted back then.

Her ‘photoshops’ consist of modern photos overlayed with war-time pictures she found at a flea market. This works particularly well because from an architectural point of view the city of Amsterdam doesn’t seem to have changed much in the past 50 years, if Teeuwisse’s photos are anything to go by. And so you see tourists wandering around areas where once the cobblestones were red with blood, oblivious of that fact:

The final two pictures are of Dam square on Monday, 7 May 1945, two days after the German surrender. Thousands of Dutch people were waiting for the liberators to arrive in the square. They had lived through five years of war and months of fear and hunger. In the “Big” Club, members of the Kriegsmarine watched as the crowd below their balcony grew and grew, people danced and cheered.

Then, for some reason, the Germans placed a machine gun on the balcony and started shooting into the crowds. It has always remained uncertain why it happened but the tragic outcome was that, at the brink of peace, 120 people were badly injured and 22 people died.

See also:

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November 20, 2010

Screaming for art and flashmobbing against budget cuts

Filed under: Art,Music by Orangemaster @ 12:39 pm

Today, 20 November 2010, is the day that ‘The Netherlands screams for culture’ (Nederland schreeuwt om cultuur), a movement among the general population to campaign against the huge budget cuts in culture subsidies throughout the Netherlands.

Big whoop? Why can’t all those venues and orchestras make their own money and stop sponging off the government? As a North American used to ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’ when it comes to culture, knowing that some venues (actual businesses) are subsidised up to 40% (!) is hard to fathom. And if you pull the plug on their grants, entire smaller cities will have no cultural institutions to speak of. But is that such a bad thing?

While there are all kinds of scandals involving cities pumping millions into local, bankrupt football clubs, the arts will not only suffer budget cuts, but the price of tickets for shows in 2011 will be taxed at the 19% VAT (valued added tax) instead of the current 6% rate. Theatre producers are going to the mat with the government, as the decision was made on a whim and will probably costs thousand of jobs. Interestingly enough, sports events will still be taxed at the 6% rate.

The idea behind this logic is politically motivated: One of the recently elected political parties pushing for this want to punish ‘left-wing, artsy-fartsy voters’ and coddle their ‘not as highly educated, right-wing, white, Dutch voters’, also referred to as ‘Henk and Ingrid’, The Smiths if you will, you know, regular Dutch people. Henk and Ingrid are much more inclined to go to a football game than catch Stravinsky’s Petrushka at the ballet.

On October 26, directed by Jules Buckley, an orchestra of some 150 musicians jammed out the Mambo from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. I can’t imagine Henk and Ingrid hate this so much they would want the government to pull the plug on all our major, award-wining orchestras, which is actually scheduled to happen.

Here are members of the Dutch Radio Orchestra and the Radio Choir staging a flashmob at The Hague central station against the Dutch government’s plans to scrap the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Center (MCO).

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November 19, 2010

Folding an envelope into a chair

Filed under: Design,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 1:13 pm

If you like innovative Dutch design that saves space and looks cool, you have to check out the Flux Chair. Imagine stacking 77 chairs in no more than a one metre space, with one chair taking 10 seconds to unfold. The Flux Chair has just hit the market, comes in a variety of nice colours and has been throuroughly tested for up to 160 kg. Graduates from the Delft University of Technology, designers Douwe Jacobs and Tom Schouten have won awards for their innovative design.

Watch the trendy video on how they do the unfolding and folding it back.

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November 18, 2010

Solomon Burke sings De Dijk songs

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 2:22 pm

You may have heard that soul legend Solomon Burke (Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, Got to Get You Off My Mind) died in the Netherlands last month. What you may not know is that shortly before he had recorded a CD with songs written (and performed) by Dutch rock band De Dijk (lit. The Dike).

Now I have always considered De Dijk a decent band, but nothing special. Funny how swapping out the singers can make such a difference to my ears, even though Huub van der Lubbe is no slouch.

The CD De Dijk recorded with Solomon Burke is called Hold on Tight.

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November 17, 2010

Copyright collection agency to charge for embedding after all

Filed under: Film,General,Music,Online by Orangemaster @ 7:57 pm
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In December 2009, after a wave of criticism from the media and beyond, Dutch copyright collection agency Buma/Stemra (B/S) decided to back off on its plans to make people pay for embedded music streams. However, today they announced that they will go ahead with their plans after all. According to B/S logic, embedding music is another form of ‘rebroadcasting’, which require licences. Buma/Stemra will start charging for music streams and video streams like YouTube, all of which will be confirmed soon. According to Tweakers, last year the projected rates for embedding videos with music were lower than embedding music streams — why, nobody knows.

They also say they won’t bug private persons, just companies. We’ll see.

In other copright news, a court in The Hague has ruled that downloading copyrighted material without permission of the rights holder is permitted as long as it’s a copy for home use. There was some doubt as to how copyright law should be interpreted on this issue, but not anymore. Read more about it in Dutch from our friendly neighbourhood Internet legal expert, Arnoud Engelfriet.

(Link: tweakers)

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November 16, 2010

Dutch comedian declares war on customer service desks

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 11:08 am

(“My fingers are itching… death to all customer service departments and impenetrable multinationals. Time for a fun revolution… I’m up for it.”)

Customer service here is so bad that Dutch comedian and columnist Youp van ‘t Hek decided to dedicate his column in NRC newspaper (Dutch) to exposing bad customer service after his own son battled a mobile phone provider for months to no avail. His own experience seems to be that these corporations only respond to public humiliation by celebreties and the fear of being exposed rather than actually provide ‘customer service’.

In late October Van ‘t Hek twittered about his son’s broken mobile phone woes and went on a talk show the same day to tell his tale. After appearing on TV and naming and shaming the mobile phone provider logo and all, the problem was taken care of faster than the speed of light. In other words, if you’re famous and bitch on Twitter to your 45,000 followers and then on TV, you’ll get ‘service’, a word that is used in English in Dutch as there is no equivalent.

Any customer service that involves ringing up a call centre usually costs you money per minute (it should be free!), takes a long time and makes people angry because they get promised things which don’t happen (like receiving a modem for your cable Internet) and having to call back and repeat your story again to someone else who’ll tell you you’ve already received it. Many a foreigner nicknames this type of situation ‘it’s not possible’, (‘dat kan niet’) or in proper English, ‘we can’t do that for you’.

Another example of service gone mad in Van ‘t Hek’s column involved a man getting fined repeatedly for paying his cable Internet bill late while not being a customer of the company in question. He keeps calling to explain he’s not a customer and never was, they keep saying they’ll stop the bills and the bills keep coming — it’s been months. Basically, he’s not in the system, but obviously he is because he keeps getting letters. The call centre employees keep asking for his customer number to be able to track the situation, but he doesn’t have one.

If you read Dutch, read the original newspaper column of Van ‘t Hek and his son’s problem.

(Links: weblogs.nrc.nl, nrcnext.nl, christophevanbael.com)

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November 15, 2010

New monthly comics magazine Por Dios

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 1:29 pm

Eppo publisher Rob van Bavel has added a new comics mag to his stable, called Por Dios.

It will contain the same sort of comic strips that adorn his other publication, with a twist: the comics in Por Dios have been published before. Every issue of the monthly will contain one complete long story. The upshot is that Van Bavel can now publish stories by authors that are dead (Don Lawrence, De Smet) or retired, and that new generations can be introduced to the classics.

The name comes from the tag line of Eppo precursor Pep: “Por dios, what a magazine!” The price per issue is 5 euro, while a 12 issue subscription can be had for 50 euro.

(more…)

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November 14, 2010

Saint Nicholas parade Amsterdam 2010

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:05 pm

Today I went to the arrival parade for Saint Nicholas in Amsterdam. Yesterday the Saint entered the country at Harderwijk, and today he visited various towns. Black Petes handed out tons of candy to the children lining the streets.

Here is a short video of the event.

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