October 28, 2011

World-class gymnast and convicted criminal gets into porn

Filed under: Online,Sports by Orangemaster @ 3:06 pm

Top Dutch gymnast Verona van de Leur, now retired, is a well-decorated athlete who has earned her placed in Dutch gymnastics history.

Unfortunately, she has made the news several times this year for much less glamourous deeds. First, she was accused and found guilty of blackmail. Last year she snapped pics of a couple that was having an affair and then asked them for 2,000 euro to keep quiet. To make things worse, the cops found child pornography on her computer, but for whatever reason, that went away. Her past is full of family stories that include embezzling and threats as well.

Van de Leur started a company that deals with sex pictures and is about to embark into the world of porn as a webcam girl. Her argument for anyone who wants to point fingers at her, at least for the porn part, is that ex-athletes are looked down upon when they go south while it’s OK for actresses to pose nude in magazines.

As if people didn’t already picture gymnasts naked when watching television…

(Link: welingelichtekringen.nl, Photo of Gymnastics hall by battlecreekcvb, some rights reserved)

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October 27, 2011

Hardcore brown rats run amok in posh Amsterdam

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 4:42 pm

Amsterdam and surely many other Dutch cities have lots of rats, what with these damp, age-old canals and all. And no, not the cute little grey mice that could adorn some Anton Pieck painting, but the bigguns that a posh neighbourhood like Amsterdam South is not expected to have running around.

According to newspaper De Telegraaf, the Marie Heinekenplein is “swarming” with them. The square has many outdoor cafés as well as a supermarket where a woman claimed to have seen about 30 of them in one go. As usual, businesses and locals have complained about the situation, but are being ignored by the city. Although everyone is responsible for making sure there’s no food left around, the city apparently does not pick up the trash often enough, which doesn’t help. Amsterdam’s innercity garbage collection is mostly done by stacking it someone twice and week as if it were the suburbs, which is not something other big European cities do.

And poisoning them is an option, but apparently about 39% of these rats can take it. “Research done by Wageningen University shows a large number of rats in the Netherlands have a genetic make-up which allows them to develop resistance more quickly.”

(Links: telegraaf.nl, www.dutchnews.nl, Photo of Brown rat by Jean-Jacques Boujot, some rights reserved)

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October 26, 2011

Reddit postings scrolled for your reading enjoyment

Filed under: IT,Online by Orangemaster @ 1:15 pm

Popular news site Reddit has users who post thousands of links and pictures every day, so that other users can vote and comment on them. Dutch programmer Jonathan Bouman made himself a mashup called Scrolldit.com (Scroll Reddit, although the Dutch enclined may have also read ‘Scroll dit’, which means ‘scroll this’ in Dutch), making the barrage of posts easier to read by automatically filling your screen up with stuff to read using key words. You can scroll to your heart’s content and you can even check the NSFW (Not Suitable For Work) button when you’re at the office.

Bright.nl tells is that making the app was very inexpensive for Bouman, which is good because ScrollDit.com went viral yesterday and in just 9 hours had already had 500,000 visitors.

(Link: www.bright.nl)

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October 25, 2011

Dutch have fastest Internet connections in Europe

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 9:48 am

The Register writes:

The Netherlands have the fastest Internet connections in Europe according to a State of the Internet report by Akamai, with more than 68 per cent of Dutch broadband lines clocking in at 5Mbit/s or more.

[…]

The fastest Internet in the world is found in Japan, with 59 Japanese cities filling out the Akamai list of the 100 cities with the fastest broadband. Brno in the Czech Republic has the fastest connection speeds of any city in Europe at an average of 8.3Mbit/s. No UK cities make the top 100.

Global average connection speed grew 43% in the last year. The Netherlands is also the country with the highest level of broadband adoption in the world, with 68% of the households having a fast connection.

In case you’ve never heard of them, Akamai are the people who used to host large files for large companies until Amazon shouldered its way into the market. (I am sure they’re still doing fine.) In other words, they know a thing or two about connectivity.

See also: Gigabit internet connection to the houseboat

(Photo by Joe Frisino, some rights reserved)

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October 24, 2011

‘Leave Napoleon and his white horse alone’

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 4:33 pm

The Amsterdam Museum has managed to raise 12,500 euro for the restoration of the huge painting ‘The Entry of Napoleon in Amsterdam’ (pic), representing the submission of Amsterdam by the French 200 years ago. They need 30,000 euro to complete the restoration and the money so far has come from crowd funding.

The ‘battered’ painting can currently be seen for free at the museum’s Schuttersgalerij (Civic Guards Gallery), along with a collection of portraits of prominent Amsterdam people, something to do if you’re downtown Amsterdam and you need a break from the tourists and your shopping.

“Each year, the citizens involved in the Civic Guard would pay a high price to have their portraits painted. Only the wealthy could afford such a luxury and so developed this portrait collection of wealthy Amsterdam citizens. Many of the famous artists from the 17th century were commissioned to paint these artworks, including Rembrandt.”

The general view seems to be ‘leave the painting alone’. The cracks and wear are part of the painting’s history and the faded colours have their charm. If anyone wants to see the painting in its current state, visit the museum before the end of the year.

(Links: www.nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl, cityscouter)

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Piet Hein Eek designs furniture for mail order company

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:04 am

The guy behind the scrapwood craze of the nineties, Piet Hein Eek, has collaborated with mail order company Wehkamp on a wooden furniture line.

The line contains three oak tables and two oak chairs, Bright reports. The cheapest item, the chair shown here, costs 200 euro.

Piet Hein Eek is known for exclusive and pricey products, whereas Wehkamp (€ 488 million turnover in 2010) is known as relatively cheap. Eek wanted a change of pace, as did Viktor & Rolf (H&M) and Hella Jongerius (IKEA) before him.

Update 2 November 2017: removed a broken link.

(Photo: Wehkamp)

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October 22, 2011

Phone companies may not let thugs force teenagers to buy subscriptions

Filed under: General,Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:03 pm

A type of crime that I had not heard of before is that Dutch teenagers are being forced by peers to buy them expensive mobile phone subscriptions. Back in February consumer watchdog show Kassa reported that this sort of thing happens on a large scale.

Stores that sell these subscriptions tend to close their eyes to this problem. Arnoud Engelfriet reported two weeks ago that in a surprising verdict, a judge said that even though they are not a party to the crime, telecom companies can still not hold the victims to these crimes to the contracts they entered into.

An eighteen year old girl from Rotterdam was forced under threat of violence to enter into several contracts with KPN subsidiary Telfort. Dutch law says that if you entered a contract under threat, you can rescind the contract. The court also weighed heavily that forcing teenagers to buy cellphones and mobile subscriptions is a common enough practice that Telfort should have been suspicious, especially now the victim bought five subscriptions at five different stores in a single day, which is uncommon.

(Photo by Macinate, some rights reserved)

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October 20, 2011

Director Sluizer to finish film with River Phoenix

Filed under: Film by Orangemaster @ 11:33 am

Eighteen years after American actor River Phoenix died of an overdose related heart attack in Hollywood on Halloween night, Dutch film director George Sluizer, 79, has decided to finish shooting the movie ‘Dark Blood’ that had Phoenix in it at the time.

George Sluizer is known for his film ‘Spoorloos’ (1988) aka ‘The Vanishing’ (1992), starring Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. He is Dutch even though he was born in Paris (the Dutch wikipedia page is wrong, saying he’s French) and had shelved the film so that it wouldn’t get lost. Sluizer has now re-edited the material and believes with a few adjustments, he will probably have the film released next year. One of these ‘adjustments’ includes having brother Joaquin Phoenix do some voice-over work, as he apparently sounds like River.

(Link: www.hollywoodreporter.com, Photo of film cans by tallfoot, some rights reserved)

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October 19, 2011

American writer Bukowski told Dutch library how it is

Filed under: Literature by Orangemaster @ 2:30 pm

In 1985, following a complaint from a local reader, staff at the Public Library in Nijmegen decided to remove Charles Bukowski’s book, Tales of Ordinary Madness, from their shelves whilst declaring it “very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against certain groups (including homosexuals).” In the following weeks, a local journalist by the name of Hans van den Broek wrote to Bukowski and asked for his opinion. It soon arrived.

Look at a picture and read the entire poetic response here.

“If I write badly about blacks, homosexuals and women it is because of these who I met were that. There are many “bads”–bad dogs, bad censorship; there are even “bad” white males. Only when you write about “bad” white males they don’t complain about it. And need I say that there are “good” blacks, “good” homosexuals and “good” women?”

I think that whoever complained just couldn’t read English or between the lines properly.

(Link: lettersofnote.com, via @ejpfauth on Twitter)

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October 18, 2011

Vincent van Gogh did not shoot himself, biographers claim

Filed under: Art,History by Branko Collin @ 9:31 am

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith just published a new biography of Vincent van Gogh in which they claim that the Dutch 19th century painter did not shoot himself, as is generally believed.

BBC writes:

[The authors] say that, contrary to popular belief, it was more likely he was shot accidentally by two boys he knew who had “a malfunctioning gun”.

The authors came to their conclusion after 10 years of study with more than 20 translators and researchers.

[…] [Stephen Naifeh] said that renowned art historian John Rewald had recorded that version of events when he visited Auvers in the 1930s and other details were found that corroborated the theory.

They include the assertion that the bullet entered Van Gogh’s upper abdomen from an oblique angle – not straight on as might be expected from a suicide.

Last Monday the Van Gogh Museum launched a biographical app on the life of the painter that presumably does not include this fresh light on his life and death. Museum manager Frank van den Eijnden nevertheless sees the book’s publication as a positive development according to De Pers: “Because of the news, the app is more current than ever.”

Earlier today the museum’s conservator, Leo Jansen, called the new theory about Van Gogh’s death insufficiently supported by the evidence: “Many questions remain unanswered.” Nevertheless he feels the authors—for which he reviewed a first draft—did a good job: “They looked at everything that was already known, and came up with many new insights and connections.”

(Illustration: the Van Gogh that was ‘discovered’ last year)

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