September 12, 2011

Zone 5300: Fool’s Gold special

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 8:23 am

Woot! Fool’s Gold gets six pages in the autumn edition of Zone 5300, instead of its usual two. Like.

Frits Jonker and Milan Hulsing are assisted this time by Erik van der Heijden who waxes lyrically (and analytically) about his collection of golden age advertising key fobs. The golden age of advertising key fobs, that is, i.e. the late sixties.

There’s also a long interview with the comics intendant of the Fonds BKVB (the state sponsored Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture), Gert-Jan Pos, who got to give a lot of cash to comics makers in the Netherlands in the past two and a half years, and whose office is about to end.

Until September 21 the foundation is organising an exhibition of up and coming comics artists, among which Artez Zwolle graduate Jasper Rietman (illustration) who hopes to be published abroad in the near future.

Marcel RuijtersThere are a bunch of long(ish) stories by Marcel Ruijters (illustration, about the chess games of Teresa of Avila), Rob van Barneveld (invisible guinea pigs), and Maaike Hartjes (weddings in Hong Kong).

Another long comic is a story from Pieter van Oudheusden and Jeroen Janssen’s upcoming album (as yet nameless) loosely based on the all too short life of “perhaps the Brian Wilson of the nineteenth century” (as Van Oudheusden puts it), Franz Schubert. The short story Der Tod und das Mädchen (illustration) focuses on how Schubert got syphilis.

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September 11, 2011

Bettie Serveert reunites with drummer for band’s twentieth birthday

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 3:21 pm

Twenty years ago Bettie Serveert was the sort of indie rock band that made producers everywhere pay attention, but they never managed to surpass the success of their debut album Palomine.

Yesterday the band reunited with former drummer Berend Dubbe for a special birthday gig on which they played the entire Palomine album at Paradiso in Amsterdam. According to 24 Oranges reader Jeroen Mirck, who was there, “Bettie Serveert played songs like Tomboy, Balentine, Kid’s Allright and Brain-Tag with as much urgency and as dynamically as in the early nineties, as if the songs had been written yesterday.”

The name “Bettie Serveert” means “Betty to serve” and is a reference to Betty Stöve, a Dutch player who managed to reach the Wimbledon tennis finals in 1977.

Listen to title track Palomine here.

(Photo: bettieserveert.com)

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September 10, 2011

Laura Dekker in Australia

Filed under: General,Sports by Branko Collin @ 11:23 am

Two weeks ago ‘sailor girl’ Laura Dekker reached the shores of the Northern Territory of Australia, and not a moment too soon.

Her boat Guppy was in desperate need of repairs as both the genoa and the rudder had broken down. In Darwin she re-united with her father who had flown in to celebrate her sixteenth birthday (September 20). From that day on she has about a year and week to complete her global circumnavigation if she wants to become the unofficial record holder of being the youngest person solo sailing around the world.

In the past months Dekker sailed past the country of her birth, New Zealand (she has dual citizenship), even though she professed a desire to visit. Says stuff.co.nz:

Her manager, Australian Lyall Mercer, [said] today Dekker did not take her New Zealand nationality lightly and had especially embraced it since starting to feel “disconnected” from The Netherlands after courts there stopped her from embarking on her trip when she was 13.

“Yet she has failed to find any support from New Zealand, unable even to source a New Zealand flag that she wants to fly from her boat ‘Guppy’ for the duration of her trip,” Mercer said.

I wonder if there is not more to that story. In August 2009, Elsevier reported that the New Zealand authorities had threatened to seize Laura’s boat for reckless behaviour if she ever entered one of the country’s ports while sailing alone.

The best place to follow Dekker’s exploits is still her blog, which she keeps in both English and Dutch. Dekker spends her days playing the guitar, writing her book, and reading. Still no word on if she has ever touched her homework.

See also: more stories about Laura Dekker.

(Photo of an entirely unrelated boat by the US Navy)

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September 9, 2011

Satnav on smartphone guided by music

Filed under: Music,Technology by Orangemaster @ 4:53 pm

Aspiring boffins at the Eindhoven University of Technology have developed a smartphone app for Android that helps cyclists navigate to their destination by using music. By using the phone’s satnav, a cyclist can listen to their favourite tunes the way they always do, but, for example, when they have to turn left, the music will be harder on the left, allowing the cyclist to focus on the road.

The application can be used around the world and can be downloaded as of next week for lucky Android users. iPhone users will have to wait, something that is often the other way round.

I’ve seen or heard nothing of this app, but I already have some issues with it. Using satnav (GPS function) on a smartphone sucks energy out of a battery like a vampire sucks blood (comes with a warning, too), so I cannot imagine using something like this for a real long bike ride that would require any serious directions. Is this something we really need? Will the app respond fast enough or even properly? Some of the best satnavs for cars have problems with certain countries and small roads. When do people need a map when they’re on a bike? That’s right, for a long ride. By then your phone will have died and you’ll have to sing the rest of the way. And I’m not even going to get into people who are hard of hearing or easily distracted.

If anyone uses this in the near future, please tell us about it.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

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September 8, 2011

100 years of Fokker airplanes and some beer

Filed under: Aviation,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 1:23 pm

Two weeks ago in Haarlem I popped into Dutch café in den Uiver, named after KLM’s Douglas DC-2 airplane, Uiver to have a beer and look around again at the cool Dutch airplane memorabilia on the walls. Lo and behold, that weekend besides Haarlem’s Jazz Fest, it was also the Centennial Festival of the Fokker Spin or ‘spider’, the flight of Anthony Fokker’s airplane ‘Spin’ that flew over St. Bavo Church 100 years ago, an aircraft he built and flew when he was just 20.

Although bankrupt in 1996, Fokker airplanes are still around today in KLM’s fleet and are an important part of Dutch aviation history. The Fokker Trimotor, as used by Richard Byrd to fly over the North Pole, is probably the best known of his planes.

For the occasion, Haarlem’s young beer brewery Jopen, of which I could go on about with many stories, brewed a Fokker Spin beer. In den Uiver had it on tap, and it had a proper bitter yet sharp after taste. But never ever drink and fly.

(Link: cloggie.org)

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September 7, 2011

A fire evacuation song for kids

Filed under: Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:36 pm

A Dutch site about children, pregnancy and the likes, peuteren.nl is offering the free download of a song children can sing when they leave a burning school building or during a fire drill.

According to the site, the story goes that someone somewhere wondered if there was a song the kids could sing to keep their focus on getting outside in a stressful situation. Here’s ‘Het Ontruimingslied’ (‘The Evacuation Song’), easy to sing for Dutch kids as young as two-years-old.

Someone who works with kids please tell me if this is a brilliant idea or just plain weird, I honestly don’t know.

An excerpt:

We moeten nu naar buiten
Stap voor stap in de rij
Iedereen verzamelen
De deur is al nabij

(roughly)
We have to go outside
Step by step in a file
Everybody gather together
The door is not too far

For the Dutch teens who do understand German, there’s always the punk rock classic by Extrabreit, Hurra hurra die Schule brennt (Hurrah Hurrah The School is Burning).

(Link: nieuws.nl)

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September 6, 2011

A big bike full of kids back from school

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 12:37 pm

De Cafe Racer has launched this 10-seater school bus which comes equipped with pedals for “most of its occupants.” I think this means some kids just sit there, but I don’t quite get that.

This eco-friendly vehicle is powered entirely by pedalling kids, although the driver can switch on an actual motor if they want to get going.

The company also makes bikes with a bar like the beer bikes we posted about. Then, there’s also cargo bikes for 8 kids, with an adult peddling along.

The cities and towns in the Netherlands have a very well divided space for cyclists and drivers. When I used to work as a bike courier, before bike paths in Montréal, Canada, you had to cycle on the right-hand side of the road and be very aware of fast traffic around you that may even hit you (happened at least three times, once even caught on film). Cars hit your handle bars and send you flying (BTW I wore a bike helmet). Or there’s that time someone opened a car door on a fellow bike courier roommate and the pointy end of the door ended up in his chest, sending him to the hospital.

In the Netherlands you can bike without fear of cars on the bigger bike paths, although racing scooters are the new danger. However, it is relatively safe for these kinds of bigger bikes, even on busy streets since so many people cycle in general and cars are more aware of cyclists. And traffic is much slower, too.

(Link: thenextweb.com, Photo: De Cafe Racer)

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September 5, 2011

Apache Junction, Western comic strip album by Peter Nuyten

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

During my student days I helped publish a comics fanzine called Iris, and our ‘thing’ was that we enjoyed making mainstream European comics.

That is why it is doubly satisfying to be holding Peter Nuyten’s Western comic Apache Junction in my hands. Peter was a contributor to Iris back in the day, and Apache Junction is as traditionally European as it gets.

The Western takes place around 1875 and follows a US Army messenger, at a time when Apache tribes refuse to be locked up in reservations and engage the federal government in guerilla war fare. The messenger gets wounded in a knife fight and needs to seek refuge at a lonely farm.

Holly Moors has this to say about Apache Junction: “Nuyten seems to want to combine the exciting stories of Jean Giraud and the engaged, critical attitude of Hans Kresse. He is a bit too wordy in the first part of the album, and could use a good, tight script writer. That way he can focus on the art, where he doesn’t quite yet reach Giraud’s level, though he is getting there. […] Still, I have finished the album in one go, and will certainly read the second part, because this is definitely an artist to keep an eye on.”

Me, I felt the story got progressively better, and I cannot wait for the second part.

Apache Junction (part 1, 2011) is published by Silvester and cost 16,95 euro in hard cover format. More reviews (in Dutch) after the link.

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September 4, 2011

Fleeing from Nazis in a Chevy-powered boat

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 12:30 pm

During World War II about 1,900 people fled Dutch territory to unoccupied lands, sometimes to be safe, sometimes to help the allies fight the Nazis. These people were called Engelandvaarders (England-goers), regardless of whether they actually went to England.

The New York Times blog has a story about five of them, students, who fled the country in a DIY motor boat after the Nazis required all students to sign a loyalty oath.

Their engine, commonly known at the time of its manufacture as the cast-iron wonder, was introduced in 1929, giving Chevy customers “a six for the price of a four,” as the advertising slogan said. Displacing 194 cubic inches, it produced 46 horsepower at 2,600 r.p.m. Fuel consumption was 19 m.p.g.

The men bought the engine from a marina operator in western Holland, paying 700 Dutch guilders. Fitting it to their seven-meter launch required numerous modifications, including an underwater exhaust outlet to suppress noise. The driveline and propeller were clandestinely built.

The five made it to England safely—in the end they were picked up by the British navy.

One of the most famous Engelandvaarders was Leiden University student Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema who was portrayed by Rutger Hauer in the Paul Verhoeven film Soldier of Orange, after Hazelhoff Roelfzema’s autobiography.

(Source photo: a still from a video by Captain A.J. Hardy, now in the public domain)

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September 3, 2011

Pixelated red on a mug means blood

Filed under: Art,Design,Photography by Branko Collin @ 7:34 pm

If you thought the story about the asylum seeker game show was bad, you may not wish to read on.

The mugs that photographer Raoul de Lange makes may seem rather pedestrian—a couple of cheerfully coloured pixels being the only adornment—but the pixels are based on photos of people that were shot down during the Arab Spring, and that did not even get to enjoy some privacy from prying photographers.

These mugs were De Lange’s senior project (called Mug Shots) at the Royal Academy of Art. He was the only photographer of his year who did not use his own photos, Bright reports.

De Lange writes: “In [this project] I try to make the dead and wounded of the Arab Spring a part of our daily lives in an acceptable manner.”

(Source photo: Raouldelange.nl. Warning: bloody photos behind the link.)

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