February 9, 2013

No fees for freedom of information requests says Dutch Supreme Court

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:05 pm

Municipalities can only charge fees for personal services and responding to a freedom of information request is not such a service because it serves a common good.

That is the conclusion the Dutch Supreme Court reached yesterday.

In the past years municipalities often charged considerable fees for dealing with freedom of information requests in order to derail the process. RTL Nieuws refused to pay these fees and was sued by several local governments in reponse. According to De Nieuwe Reporter the municipality of Landgraaf lost its case, but Leerdam won. The Supreme Court was asked to provide clarity.

Municipalities can still charge fees for the form in which it responds to a freedom of information request (WOB-verzoek in Dutch), i.e. for photocopies and such. The Supreme Court made a point of mentioning this even though nobody had contested the issue.

Reporter Brenno de Winter sees the verdict as a starting point to get his money back: “It took me hundreds of hours to get rid of these fees. This lost time represents a lot of money to a freelancer like me. I am going to ask back fees that I had already paid and charge the municipalities for the time I lost. […] I am also studying options to criminally charge four civil servants because they threatened me with costs [of up to 30,000 euro] if I were to persevere with my information requests.”

De Winter was declared Journalist of the Year 2011 by the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ because of his scoops concerning the bad security of both the OV transport card and government websites.

(Photo of journalist Brenno de Winter by Roy van Ingen, some rights reserved)

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February 8, 2013

‘Don’t Google the names of the other candidates’

Filed under: Online by Orangemaster @ 10:38 am

Decision-maker Clemens Cornielje has told candidates for the mayorship of Arnhem ‘not to Google the names of the other possible candidates’ during the application period. Cornielje believes that searching on the Internet using the names of candidates as search words will leave traces behind and comprise the confidential nature of the process.

Hello? First thing the candidates did was in fact google the lot apparently. Cornielje claims to be the only one with the right information, which is why googling is a bad idea [insert Dutch finger wagging image here].

Point of clarification: Dutch mayors are not elected, they are appointed by bright lights like this guy. While some politicians and citizens find appointing mayors backwards, most people don’t care and so it stays the undemocratic process that it is because when they did try elections a few times, it went sour.

First of all, telling people not to do something (Mr Cornielje, do you have children?) is a surefire way to get them to do it. Secondly, appealing to people’s moral sense when it comes to the Internet is the worst thing you could ever do. If we listened to people who preach morality to others, but often don’t follow it themselves, then porn, downloading music and the likes would all be magically gone. And unicorns with rainbow capes would run wild and free, throwing sweets that don’t damage teeth to cute, well-behaved children.

It’s embarrassing that ignorant people have the right to make important decisions. Good luck, Arnhem.

(Link: www.gelderlander.nl)

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February 7, 2013

Hotel chef finds pearl in oyster

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Dutch chef Jacco Beck who works at Hotel Sanadome in Nijmegen found a pearl in an oyster, 7.7 mm in diameter and worth an estimated 1000 euro. The good news is, he can keep it. According to a representative of the fishing authorities, the chance of finding a pearl is 1 out of 35,000. The five-year-old oyster came from the Grevelingen lake in Zeeland where a pearl of this diameter has never been found.

(Link: www.bnr.nl, Photo of pearl by Amboo who, some rights reserved)

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February 6, 2013

Dutch politicians’ English still good for a laugh

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 8:46 am

The English of Dutch politicians has always made for good laughing stock. In 2013 and in a globalised world, any politician needs to be able to speak decent English to be understood, and failing that, they should really have what they are going to say checked by someone who knows the language, as the media will be ready to pounce on them if they mess up.

Dunglish classics include former Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl saying ‘We are a nation of undertakers’ and former leader of the Dutch liberal party, Frits Bolkestein, calling economic prospects ‘golden showers’.

While in Congo yesterday Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation Lilianne Ploumen said ‘There is no such thing as a Dutch product in terms of quality’, although she meant to say ‘There is nothing like a Dutch product.’ It’s one thing to say something wrong, but it’s a real job to actually say the opposite. Language training, anyone?

And yes, politicians from around the world surely screw up as well before y’all go off in the comments.

Here’s a funny Dunglish advert that shows you what Dunglish sounds like.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

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February 5, 2013

Lab-grown meat a success, cooking it up is on hold

Filed under: Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 2:04 pm

A year ago we told you about a lab in Maastricht that was growing synthetic meat, which was really expensive to make and should have been ready to grill in the fall of 2012.

The long-awaited lab-grown meat is now a reality, but researcher Mark Post wants to have at least two pieces of meat before he does any grilling, which again could take many more months. The goal is to have the two pieces of meat prepared by English chef Heston Blumenthal, owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck in the UK who is very much into molecular-level cooking.

(Link: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl)

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February 4, 2013

What the Dutch have against their queen and more royal news

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:31 am

After Queen Beatrix announced her abdication, the entire Dutch web was trying to find royal angles for their stories.

Phonology professor Marc van Oostendorp points out how un-Dutch the word for queen, koningin, is and how people subconsciously try to avoid pronouncing it the correct way, koa-ning-in. According to Van Oostendorp, the ng-sound is never followed by a stressed syllable in Dutch. Words like tango and bingo (borrowed from Spanish and American English respectively) are pronounced tang-go and bing-go.

That leaves the female form of koning in an awkward position. The word for a female role is often produced by taking the male or generic form and adding ‘-in’ to it—Van Oostendorp gives boerin (farmer) and bazin (boss) as examples. But with koning+in this leads to a problem, because the combination is un-Dutch. The result is that we, the rabble, sharpen our linguistic pitchforks and guillotines and cut the title of one of our most beloved figures to ribbons. The word becomes koa-ni-xin or even koa-ni-gin (x is like the ch in loch, but voiced).

Things could be worse. When Napoleon Bonaparte made his brother Louis king of a conquered Netherlands, the new king tried to speak Dutch, but he wasn’t (yet) very good at it. The story goes that he accidentally called himself Konijn van ‘olland, rabbit of Holland.

Did you know that when Willem-Alexander becomes king, he will not be crowned? This is because crowning symbolizes a divine right to rule, whereas in the Netherlands, the people confer that right, which makes sense because we built this land, not the gods. To be honest I did not know this either.

According to NRC, this tradition has religious roots. It was the Protestants that protested a coronation, as they considered it too Catholic. The article further lists the following titbits:

  • The abdication will take place at the Royal Palace in Amsterdam, the inauguration at the New Church (1600, next door).
  • Princess Máxima’s family will not be present (her father was a member of the Argentinian junta in the 1970s-1980s).
  • Titles: King Willem-Alexander, Queen Máxima, Princess of Orange Amalia Beatrix.
  • Fresh euro coins and stamps will have Willem-Alexander’s portrait on them (the old ones will still be valid). The names of naval vessels will be prefixed ZM instead of HM (Zijne Majesteit).
  • The King and Queen will move to one of palaces in The Hague, Huis ten Bosch. Currently Queen Beatrix lives there; she will move back to her old bachelor pad Castle Drakensteyn (‘dragonstone’) between Utrecht, Hilversum and Amersfoort—a house she bought when she was young.
  • The children of Princes Magriet and Prince Constantijn will no longer be members of the royal family after 30 April. The paper has a handy infographic explaining the line of succession.

Trendbeheer reports that Ad van Hassel has already made a state portrait of the future king. “Since Van Hassel did not have a suitable photo of the prince, he went to Madam Tussaud’s to use the wax statue of the prince as a model.” Filed under ‘the alternative circuit’.

Bright writes that there has been a rush on royal domain names. Last Monday twice as many domain names than usual were registered. Koningsdag2013.nl up to koningsdag2030.nl have all been registered. The RVD (Netherlands Government Information Service) can try and expropriate domain names through the courts if the names are likely to confuse visitors about who is behind a site.

(Photo by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

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February 3, 2013

Glass building printed with farm texture by MVRDV

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 12:08 pm

As the architect’s web page crudely puts it, after Operation Market Garden in World War II the Dutch town of Schijndel in North Brabant was left with an ‘oversized’ market place.

MVRDV’s founder Winy Maas had been lobbying town hall to do something useful with all that space, and after his seventh attempt, he finally got his wish. On 17 January the building of the glass farm on the Markt in Schijndel was completed. The building is made to look like an oversized farm (scale 1.6:1) and is made entirely out of glass, on which a texture has been printed.

MVRDV writes:

The building with a total surface area of 1600 m2 contains shops, restaurants, offices and a wellness centre. The exterior is printed glass with a collage of typical local farms; a monument to the past but 1.6 times larger than life.

In collaboration with MVRDV, artist Frank van der Salm photographed all the remaining traditional farms, and from these an image of the ‘typical farm’ was composed. This image was printed using fritted procedure onto the 1800 m2 glass facade, resulting in an effect such as a stained glass window in a cathedral. The print is more or less translucent depending on the need for light and views.

The print lets in light from outside during the daytime and the building is illuminated from the inside during the night.

This is what the square looked like in October 2010 according to Google:

(Photo: MVRDV)

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February 2, 2013

Aerial photos of tulip fields by Normann Szkop

Filed under: Nature,Photography by Branko Collin @ 6:52 pm

Normann Szkop is a French photographer living in Brussels. Two years ago he convinced an Irish pilot living in the Netherlands, Claython Pender, to fly him over the tulip fields of Anna Paulowna (a place, not a person) near the tip of North Holland.

The colourful results can be admired at Szkop’s Flickr page. Szkop took almost 100 photos from the air and several from the ground.

Although Anna Paulowna is a town, it is named after a person, namely the wife of king Willem II and daughter of tsar Paul I of Russia, Анна Павловна.

(Link: The Verge. Photo: Normann Szkop)

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February 1, 2013

Maybe the Dutch king should have a beard

Filed under: History,Online by Orangemaster @ 1:31 pm

Yet another Dutch Facebook page has recently made its online entrance, and this time it’s roughly called ‘No king without a beard’ (‘Zonder baard, geen koning’).

Crown-Prince Willem-Alexander soon to be the country’s first king since 1890, will be the only one without a beard if he doesn’t grow one soon.

Besides the fact that beards were trendy for Dutch kings in the 19th century and the fact that beards are totally in at the moment, the photoshopped picture of Willem-Alexander with a beard is quite flattering as it slims down his pudgy face. At 100,000 likes, the page admins will present the RVD (Netherlands Government Information Service) with an official request for the future king to grow a beard.

Amusingly enough Tsar Peter I (aka Peter The Great) of Russia in an attempt to force Russian men to look more European imposed a beard tax in the late 17th, early 18th century: “Peter’s visits to the West (which included the Netherlands) impressed upon him the notion that European customs were often superior to Russian ones. He commanded courtiers and officials to cut off their long beards and wear European clothing. The men who sought to retain their beards were required to pay an annual beard tax of one hundred rubles.”

Mustaches were OK though and it seems that trends change from one century to the next.

UPDATE: Beard tokens, based on the one carried by beard tax payers, are in and you can buy them online (tip: TheBloodTheSweatTheBeards). The Russian inscription ‘деньги взяты’ literally means ‘money has been taken’, and the letter ‘я’, (‘ya’), the backwards ‘R’ but with an extra leg on this medallion was in fact turned into the backwards ‘R’ when Peter The Great reformed the alphabet in 1917-1918.

(Links: www.hpdetijd.nl, www.lindamagazine.nl, Photo of Willem-Alexander by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

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Amsterdam Dungeon ticket giveaway winners!

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 10:19 am

Thanks to everyone who entered our contest!

And the winner is: Justine Peeters!

The Amsterdam Dungeon will send you the tickets shortly, valid until January 2014.

The Amsterdam Dungeon is where Holland’s horrible history comes to life in a dark dungeon of the city centre, complete with actors and rides depicting death, torture, illness and all kinds of creepy things dwelling beneath Amsterdam’s pretty canals.

Find out more about The Amsterdam Dungeon visit www.the-dungeons.nl

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