December 19, 2011

Zone 5300, Dahl meets Wilde

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 8:17 am

Issue 96 of Zone 5300, the ‘magazine for comics, culture and curiosa’, starts with a rather disappointing retelling of Roald Dahl’s Skin* by experienced cartoonists Pieter van Oudheusden en Erik Wielaert. If you are studying a master, you should perhaps pay attention to how he does things. Where Dahl creates tension by leaving the ending up to the reader’s imagination, Van Oudheusden and Wielaert barge into the story and fill in all the blanks by tacking on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

In a way I feel sorry for the authors because using Dahl’s ending would have been difficult to translate into comic form, so they had to come up with something. And their choice of using an attractive young woman instead of an old hobo as the living artwork may seem obvious considering the medium, but is inspired in my opinion. The layer of eroticism that is automatically added by the introduction of the protagonist is left entirely undealt with, and just sits there as a month-old scab on a healthy skin.

If the old guard disappoints, this issue also introduces up-and-coming artists that I would like to see more from in the future. Although Wouter Eizenga and André Bols have been around for a while, their Bliksembezoek (Flash Visit) is their first published comic. (Illustration middle)

The panel below is from a comic Belgian Maarten de Saeger wrote and drew for his girlfriend called Everything You Should Know About Me. “I hide my dirty dishes when I have visitors over. One day later… why am I so terribly lazy?” I like his apartment!

*) In both stories an art collector buys a tattooed painting with the owner of the skin still attached to it. Roald Dahl tells the story from the creation of the tattoo up to its sale, whereas Wielaert and Van Oudheusden take the sale as a starting point.

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December 18, 2011

The teenage watchmaker

Filed under: Design,Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 3:48 pm

In a way Mick Mooren is a typical teenager. He has a got a typical teenager’s room at his parents’ house with the highsleeper bed and the posters adorning the wall.

But the posters hint that there is more to Mick. They are posters of watches, and Mick is a 19-year-old watchmaker from Venray in the North of Limburg. And this year he became a watch manufacturer as well.

The first watch that Mooren is producing himself is the New Vintage and is available in black/orange and white/orange. It will set you back a cool 840 euro.

Mick’s back story is worth reading in itself. His watchmaking career was propelled earlier this year when he took on the restoration of a classic 1973 Zenith El Primero chronograph, a watch that doubles as a stopwatch. He wrote about the restoration process in detail over at Watchuseek.com. Although the son of a goldsmith and nephew of a watchmaker, Mick did not take up watchmaking until two years ago.

(Via BNR. Photo: moorenwatch.com)

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December 17, 2011

Ruud van Nistelrooy most efficient striker of the decade

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 2:18 pm

Football player Ruud van Nistelrooy was recently declared the most efficient striker in the world for the first decade of this century by the International Federation of Football History & Statistics (IFFHS).

The player from Noord Brabant finished just ahead of Thierry Henry of France and Didier Drogba of the Ivory Coast, Volkskrant reports. The IFFHS looked only at goals scored in international competitions to arrive at its ranking. In his career Van Nistelrooy has done relatively poorly when playing for the Dutch national team, not helped by injuries and a lack of confidence by successive national managers. His strike rate in the most prestigious club tournament of the world, the UEFA Champions League, is exemplary though. With 56 goals he occupies the second place on the all-time top scorers list.

Van Nistelrooy’s last name was originally spelled Van Nistelrooij, but the player had it changed according to Wikipedia so that it would become easier to read and pronounce by foreign fans. The name means ‘from Nistelrode’, and refers to a place in Noord Brabant just South of Van Nistelrooy’s birth town of Oss.

Although popular all over the planet—Ruud scored a whopping 150 goals during his five year stay at Manchester United, itself a favourite of international football fans—the Dutch have traditionally been wary of Van Nistelrooy’s contribution to the world of football. The government sponsored tourist board Holland.com rates former Ajax strikers Van Basten and Bergkamp higher, even though their goal tallies do not even come near that of the player from Brabant. Van Nistelrooy may not have helped his cause by almost single handedly humiliating press darling Ajax during several matches.

Van Nistelrooy (35) is currently plying his trade for Málaga in the Spanish competition (La Liga), though he is struggling to find the form of his younger years.

(Photo by Florian K., some rights reserved)

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December 16, 2011

Lorrainville, an album that started with a game on Facebook

Filed under: Dutch first,Music,Online by Orangemaster @ 11:05 am

You had to pick a random article from Wikipedia, a random quote off the Internet and a random picture from Flickr and turn it into an album cover. Here’s the one that literally struck a chord with Dutch producer from Zwolle, Guido Aalbers. He got a whole group of musicians together to write songs and perform live, including singer Anneke van Giersbergen and guitarist Erik Neimeijer just for this one-off project. Last night they played their one and only sold out gig at the Hedon in Zwolle, which I was lucky enough to attend. The room was so full that the doors of the concert hall were left open and the audience spilled into the bar area! The whole show was streamed live on Facebook as well.

Listen to Lorrainville – You may never know what happiness is. (This link may not be up for too long, so go and listen now).

All the songs are in English and have a touch of Americana. English-language coach to the Dutch stars Buffi Duberman asked me if I could help her get some sort of letter of recognition from the wee village of Lorrainville (pop. 560) in Québec and we managed to get the Québec Delegation in Brussels to write up a formal letter in Dutch to recognize this unique album, which was given to Guido Aalbers during the show.

If you Google Lorrainville today, you’ll get the album before the actual village! Read all about Lorrainville.

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December 15, 2011

The ‘naive and clumsy’ Dutch film industry

Filed under: Film,IT by Orangemaster @ 1:29 pm

According to a column in Webwereld, the Dutch film industry is asking the government to help them combat illegal downloading, but in fact doing nothing to solve their problem. Let’s have a look at their arguments.

The people who are currently petitioning the government to do something about downloading are movie theatre owners, represented by an ex Minister of Justice. Movie theatres have seen their profit increase by 30 percent in 2010. What’s all the fuss about then? It’s the video shops that are closing, not movie theatres. Record shops are closing left and right, but somehow that’s regarded as normal.

Another argument is that the government should ban downloading and make it illegal. How are they going to enforce it? There are enough measures already many experts will tell you. And they don’t really work.

There is no legal alternative to downloading movies in the Netherlands. If there is, please tell us. Seems like there’s a nice gap in the market, so why is nothing being done? Let me guess, the legislation is messed up and nobody wants to wait six months like a second-class citizen to watch the latest movies anymore.

Yes, people should be paid for their wares, yes downloading hurts many industries, but technology is just going to evolve further, so the time to get creative with solutions is now.

The report was labelled ‘strictly confidential’ and yet it winded up on the Internet for all to see. Either the document wasn’t ‘strictly confidential’ or the people working on this report are not the brightest of lightbulbs.

(Link: webwereld.nl, Photo of film cans by tallfoot, some rights reserved)

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December 14, 2011

Shop in heavenly peace using a web app

Filed under: General,IT by Orangemaster @ 1:22 pm

Avoid the Shopping Crowds is a very simple web app to avoid the madding crowds during holiday shopping in Amsterdam. However, it only takes into account the main shopping areas: downtown, the ‘9 straatjes’ area, South, and the Arena shopping mall.

Downtown is always kind of busy, as it is also full of tourists all year round, while the ‘9 straatjes’ is full of locals trying to avoid downtown. South is quite spread out, but has its busy moments, and the Arena shopping mall, somewhat out of town, should be avoided at all costs when there’s a football match going on.

“Most people don’t have the luxury to go shopping when nobody else does,” app builders THEY (that’s their name) claim.

I disagree: there are enough part-time working women (75% of all working Dutch women!), stay-at-home parents (mostly moms), unemployed, students with free periods, pensioners, tourists and self-employed to make me stress out during the day as well, never mind anyone in these categories coming from outside the city. In fact, it often feels like nobody works and everybody has busloads of disposable income.

Here’s what the Haarlemmerdijk (slightly out of downtown) looked like in 2008 during Christmas. The clincher is the traffic trying to get by the delivery trucks and all blocking the road. And it is a great shopping street.

(Link: www.amsterdamadblog.com)

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December 13, 2011

Man promotes push-up bra

Filed under: Fashion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:07 am

An inexpensive push-up bra from Dutch favourite brand Hema that gives you 2 extra cups sizes sounds like a good deal. And it works so well that even a man, world-famous model Andrej Pejic who poses both as a man and a woman, looks like he has breasts.

For the record, he doesn’t have breasts, he is an unaltered androgynous man, which makes him the perfect model: a good looking, young, flat chested person with no hips. Remember that most major designers are gay and that their ideal model is a man, not a woman. This goes a long way in explaining why many female models stay super thin and have no curves: to look like a young boy. Yes, it’s confusing.

(Link: at5, Photo of Bras by Jill Motts, some rights reserved)

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December 12, 2011

Brabant accent the sexiest

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:45 am

Members of dating website Parship have voted the Brabant accent the sexiest, the site reported last month.

The Southern accents (Noord-Brabant and Limburg) are both characterized by ‘soft’ gs (both voiced and unvoiced) that are produced by pronouncing the g more forward in the mouth.

The accents from Limburg and Amsterdam ended second and third in the poll, with men preferring the former and women the latter. The Amsterdam accent is characterized amongst other by a tongue tip r and the devoicing of initial consonants: “de zon in the zee zien zakken” (to see the sun sink into the sea) becomes “de son in de see sien sakke”.

A sample of both the soft and the hard g can be heard in the suddenly prescient and salacious 2010 carnival hit song by Jos van Oss (Oss being a place in Brabant) Ik heb een zachte G, maar ook een harde L (I have a soft G, but also a hard D), in which the male singer sports a Southern G and the female singers have a hard G.

(Photo by Ali Nishan, some rights reserved)

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December 11, 2011

Battery pack disguised as classic Dutch bicycle repair kit

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 1:04 pm

Leiden-based American blogger Alicia likes long bike trips (50+ km), and the batteries of her smart phone tend to run out on these day-long rides, so her boyfriend made her a battery pack that can charge her phone twice. For the casing he used the box of a Simson cycling patch repair kit. These kits have been around as long as I can remember.

Simson was a brand of glue founded in 1881 in Groningen by Jehuda Levi Wijnberg (Wikipedia dixit). In 1989 the company was sold to German competitor Stahlgruber. Simson repair kits are sold almost exclusively in the Netherlands.

(Photos by Alicia, used with permission. Disclaimer: although I still have a Simson box, I refill it with the contents of the competing Hema kit. Orangemaster is a Brompton folding bike rider, and its anybody’s guess really how these people fix their flat tires.)

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December 10, 2011

Prime minister Rutte misleads Wall Street Journal about Dutch debt problems

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:30 pm

Debt to income ratio (%) for households in 2010. Source data: Eurostat.

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an excellent article by Matthew Dalton titled Mortgage Burden Looms Over Dutch. Us Dutch have an average debt of 2.5 times our yearly income, which makes us the heaviest lenders of Europe.

We got into this position because of the way we structure our mortgages. We borrow heavily, then let that debt stand for decades. Interest is deductible from our income tax.

Asked of Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD party) whether this is a problem he told Wall Street Journal:

“It’s not a big issue…if you look at the whole picture,” he said, noting that the Dutch have saved as much in their pension funds as they have in mortgage debt—”and we have huge private savings.”

Financial news website Z24 sorta-kinda calls Rutte out on that. “Staat genoteerd”, (duly noted) writes Jeroen de Boer, i.e. “whatever“. What the Wall Street Journal doesn’t know, and what somebody who is such a great fan of “the whole picture” should have told them, is that mortgage interest deductions are one of the core political wedge issues in the Netherlands. Both Rutte’s party VVD and their coalition partner CDA have told their constituencies time and again that they will never abandon the tax deduction.
(more…)

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