March 25, 2013
You may have noticed a lack of postings the last few days. This is because I am too sick to think (a heavy cold) and Orangemaster is having technical problems. UPC says they will be solved somewhere today, but that’s UPC saying something.
As for when I will be better, I seem to be going forward slowly, but still in no state to think straight for more than a few minutes.
Our apologies for the inconvenience.
Tags: 24oranges
March 23, 2013
Ray Kluun has stopped blogging … for now.
The author of Love Life keeps being bombarded with ridiculously high copyright claims over images that he naïvely had been plucking off Google Images in the past to adorn his postings.
In a message that replaces his blog’s frontpage he explains:
Bloggers who borrowed from Google Images in the past have been declared outlawed. Unfortunately I (and many others with me) only found this out recently. All of this has cost me thousands of euros and lots of irritation. Of course I have stopped publishing photos [on this blog] for this reason.
It is however pretty much impossible to remove all photos that I have added to postings on kluun.nl since 2003. I would have to check thousands of articles and remove the photos one by one.
Basic legal tenets, such as the right to a fair trial and the right to a punishment proportional to the wrongdoing have been thrown out the window in the Netherlands in the past few years where it comes to intellectual property. There is an entire cottage industry of so-called copyright trolls who scour the web for infringements. If they find one, the send out bills ten times the price of the license or more. These companies even have their own go-to court, the one of The Hague, where especially judge Chris Hensen is a good friend of the copyright industry.
(Illustration: screenshot of Kluun’s website)
Tags: blogging, copyright, copyright trolls, judges, Ray Kluun, writers
March 22, 2013
Says 3FM: “3FM DJ Roosmarijn asked a Dutch choir to make an a cappella version of Bangarang by Skrillex. She got Dario Fo to sing it in her program 3VOOR12RADIO on Wednesday 20 June [2012].”
Skrillex’ own version never got higher than 59 in the Dutch Mega Single Top 100 according to Dutchcharts.nl.
The Theatre Choir of Dario Fo, as its full name is, has a ‘making of’ video on its website.
(Video: Youtube. Image: crop of a video still.)
March 21, 2013
After almost 21 years, someone is finally going to film a fictional story about Amsterdam’s world famous ‘Bijlmer disaster’ (‘Bijlmerramp’), where an Israeli cargo plane taking off from Schiphol Airport crashed into two blocks of flats and killed some 40 odd people, wounding many more. The ‘Bijlmer disaster’ is known as the worst aviation disaster in the history of the country.
The plot of the film entitled “Into Thin Air” by Dutch executive producer Maarten van der Ven will be a 50 minute film about a 50-year-old man living in one of the flats whose wife has died. One day a 13-year-old (we don’t know if it is a girl or boy) comes to live with him from Ghana, and just when his life gets better, the plane crashes into their flat.
On 13 April 1999 I came to live in the Netherlands in the flat right in front of this monument, unaware of the entire story. The next day on April 14 while I was unpacking my things with major jetlag, a local camera crew came to the door and asked me in Dutch what I thought of the report on the Bijlmer disaster, which had taken seven years to investigate. I didn’t speak Dutch back then so I just nodded and shooed them away. When my Dutch roommate got home, I told him about the camera crew and he took me to see this tree, the ‘tree that saw it all’, and explained to me what had happened.
(Link: www.rtvnh.nl, Photo of Bijlmer disaster memorial by harry_nl, some rights reserved)
Tags: Bijlmer disaster, Schiphol Airport
March 20, 2013
Much like the scary warnings on cigarette packs, this short film by Dutch director Louis van Zwol made for Mercy for Animals, an American non-profit animal rights organisation that promotes vegetarianism, probably won’t dissuade anyone from eating meat.
However, the idea of your junk food (they could have used a proper steak, no?) telling you their war stories is far fetched, but well made. In this case, a Dutch frikandel that apparently speaks British English and looks like they smoke two packs a day just doesn’t want to be eaten. To me it’s junk food nobody should eat anyways, not a decent cut of meat whose worthiness could be argued by an Argentinian. It would be like using fries to make a point, instead of a healthy salad.
I’ve recently started to eat less meat for sports reasons and the best way to get me to continue to do that is to give me nice recipes, restaurant tips and a tomato plant for my balcony this summer, not silly films aimed at waspy male students that can’t be bothered to feed themselves properly before going out binge drinking.
I challenge any filmmaker of these kinds of films to make a film without using gross and graphic pictures as a shock tactic. Would you dissuade girls from getting pregnant by using graphic footage of childbirth? I doubt it.
(Link: www.amsterdamadblog.com)
Tags: frikandel, meat, vegetarianism
March 19, 2013
A 10-metre-high statue of ‘our friend’ Lenin has been adorning downtown Assen since last November, as promotion for the exhibition The Soviet Myth currently featured at the Drents Museum.
Now that the future king Willem-Alexander will be visiting Assen in late May, the statue is in the way, as it blocks a big part of downtown used for big events like the famous TT motor race. And let’s face it, Lenin has surely killed the buzz of many a party in the past so he can surely make himself scarce again for some royals. (Someone please notice all the historical references crammed into that one sentence).
A huge statue that apparently weighs 17,000 kilos has not only become a royal eyesore, but its placement has been controversial from day one. Responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people if not more, a ‘Stalin light’ if you will, having a statue of Lenin around is seen by many as just plain gross, although I do get the fascination factor. I wonder if any Dutch museum would do the same if Stalin or even Hitler were featured.
(Link: www.parool.nl, Photo of Lenin in Ukraine by covilha, some rights reserved)
March 18, 2013
This video from 1953 shows an advertisement for an outdoors salt water wave pool called Bad Boekelo.
The film is called Zee op de Heide, ‘Sea on the moor’, which is ironic because Boekelo near Enschede is about as far away to the east of the North Sea as possible in the Netherlands. The video describes the wave pool from about 2 minutes in: “An ingenious construction with two mechanically moving doors creates a real surf.” The hotel was built to give the business people dealing with the nearby salt industry a place to stay, and filling the pool with the salt from nearby salterns must have been a nice gimmick.
The hotel still exists, but the wave pool (which was built around 1934) has been turned into a pond. The name of the salt company, then called Koninklijke Nederlandse Zoutindustrie, still survives in the KZ of Akzo Nobel.
Note that completely by accident this has become the third posting in a row where I describe the demise of a notable pool or resort in the Netherlands.
(Video: Youtube / Historisch Centrum Overijssel. Image: still from the video.)
Tags: advertisements, Boekelo, hotels, swimming pools, videos, wave pools
March 17, 2013
Public swimming pool Tropicana was built in 1988 on the Maasboulevard in the heart of Rotterdam and closed its doors again in 2010.
The Vers Beton blog asked photographer Frank Hanswijk to go and take a peek, which he did. He created a short photo report in which he documents the rapid deterioration of an abandoned public pool. In as short a time as three years the water has receded and most of the plants have died, and in their stead rust and dirt are conquering every inch.
In the 1980s tropical themed public pools became popular in the Netherlands—at least in my recollection. These pools focussed less on lap swimming and more on other types of recreation. They were typically equipped with water slides, whirl pools, wave pools and so on, and were nicknamed subtropische zwemparadijzen.
(Link: Trendbeheer, Photo: Frank Hanswijk)
Tags: Center Parcs, Frank Hanswijk, public pools, Rotterdam, Tropicana, wave pools
The Kurhaus Hotel in Scheveningen near The Hague is bankrupt, Omroep West writes.
The hotel is owned by seven anonymous private investors who bought it in 2004 for 46 million euro and is run by the German Steigenberger Hotel Group. At the time the purchase was supervised by Willem Endstra, who was accused of being banker to the underworld and who was murdered shortly after. Steigenberger has denied that there are financial problems and has declared that business will go on as usual, according to Misset Horeca.
Meanwhile the nearby pleasure pier, another icon of seaside resort Scheveningen, is also heading towards bankruptcy. The curator has decided to put the pier up for auction. It is currently owned by known tax evaders Van der Valk Hotels who bought it for 1 euro in 1991 of insurer Nationale Nederlanden who wanted to get rid of it because of the high maintenance costs, NRC writes.
The origin of Scheveningen is hidden in the mists of time, but towns with names ending in -inge originate from the 10th and 11th century according to Wikipedia. As the nearby The Hague turned from the hunting lodge of the counts of Holland to the seat of the government of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, the fishing community of Scheveningen grew. In 1665 the two towns were connected by a paved road and from 1800 onwards Scheveningen developed into a seaside resort with hotels and villas being built to the northeast of the harbour.
In 1884 the Kurhaus was built, a hotel which doubled as a spa. The Kurhaus was connected to the pier via a bridge. (In World War II the original pier burned down—a new pier was built a bit further up North in 1959.)
According to history blog Geschiedenismeisjes, Kurhaus was still an icon of tremendous luxury at the start of the 20th century. During World War I, in which the Netherlands managed to stay neutral, the hotel was the location of a culture clash between new and old money. A group of people who had gotten rich during the war, the so-called ‘oorlogswinstmakers’ (war profiteers) flaunted their wealth in Scheveningen. And in 1919 a labour law was passed that made leisure time for workers obligatory—the hours that a person should work per day were limited to 8 and the Sunday would be a day off. This brought spending time at the beach suddenly within the reach of the working classes.
(Photo by MichielJelijs, some rights reserved)
Tags: counts of Holland, Holland, Kurhaus, money, Pier, resorts, Scheveningen, seaside resorts, spas, The Hague, wealth
March 15, 2013
Four out of five teachers at schools witnessed sexual violence in 2012, which according to researchers, is not translating into preventive measures, so students have no idea what is OK and what is not. Some 12% of students have been a victim of sexual violence, which includes unwanted gestures or comments (harassment), being touched, groped, assaulted and raped. If I were a bad student, my boundaries would be what I can get away with without being caught. How can schools make a big deal out of teaching children about sexuality and even homosexuality, but not deal with preventing sexual violence? Or we’ve missed something.
Sexuality research institute Rutgers WPF has said that all secondary schools should draw up rules to make it clear that some forms of sexual behaviour are unacceptable. I am surprised this doesn’t already exist, and if it does, it should make the papers as well.
Forcibly putting one’s tongue into someone else’s mouth is now no longer be classified as rape, according to Dutch courts this week. Imagine, French kissing (in Dutch, ‘tongzoenen’, or ‘tongue kissing’) was considered rape, but all of the above is still taking place in school.
I remember a boy who was taller and more developed than the rest of us in my first year of secondary school had poked me very hard in the ‘breast’. I was wearing overalls and he basically pushed really hard on the button part several times. I waited until he walked off and kicked him in the balls from behind, forcing him to the ground. I was dead scared he would beat me up, but because his friends saw it, I was OK. Not defending myself would have made it worse, à la Freaks and Geeks.
(Links: Dutch News, www.nrc.nl)
