May 15, 2014

Junk food workers on strike? Not in the Netherlands

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 2:31 pm
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Today in over 30 countries around the world, from New Zealand to the United States, fast food chain employees are striking to demand better wages because their full-time jobs don’t pay the bills, which has been the case for ages. “On May 15, we will be taking action together around the world to demand that McDonald’s—the second largest private sector employer in the world — respect its employees’ work.”

However, the Netherlands cannot be bothered. Just last week the Dutch FNV union claimed that fast food workers were the worst paid in the country, two euro an hour less than cleaning personnel who strike often and have been on strike for a while as I write this. The biggest difference is probably that the cleaners, due to their age and experience, know when they are being screwed by The Man, while the youth thinks it’s normal.

For starters, mostly people under 25 work at fast food chains, many of which still live at home, which is very different than in other countries where they are trying to make ends meet. The wages the Dutch make is more pocket money or tuition money than rent money.

Second, fast food jobs in the Netherlands are deemed temporary jobs for students or young people, while in the United States and elsewhere, you’ll see people over 50 working at a chain. Since the Netherlands openly practices ageism and not same pay for same work, every age group, from 18 to 25 gets a different salary, and someone above 50 would be way too expensive.

(Links: www.nrcq.nl, www.at5)

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May 14, 2014

Arnhem will lay you down flat

Filed under: Fashion by Orangemaster @ 3:42 pm

Arnhem-plat

Arnhem has just launched a new city marketing campaign that revolves around its role as a fashion city, entitled ‘Arnhem krijgt jou plat’, which translates to an amusing risqué joke.

‘Getting someone flat’, if you were to translate it literally in Dutch implies ‘laying someone’, as in ‘getting them laid’, and now you can see where I’m going with this. On the one hand, shopping in Arnhem for fashion will tire you out, sort of ‘shop till you drop’ thing, but on the other, if Arnhem can ‘get you vertical’, then their city marketing has done its job well.

The idea is that you can study fashion in Arnhem at ArtEZ, there’s the fashion quarter in Klarendal featuring many shops by up and coming designers, there’s the Fashion Festival Arnhem in the summer, and more. World famous Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf both met and studied in Arnhem.

(Link: www.adformatie.nl, Photo by Amsterdam copywriter Remco Janssen)

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May 13, 2014

Another world cup, another women’s fashion controversy

Filed under: Fashion,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 8:15 am

Back in 2010 Bavaria beer was caught up in controversy during the World Cup in South Africa because of its Dutch orange dresses. The dresses were seen as advertising another beer brand than the main sponsor and some good looking, thin blondes wearing the dresses got arrested, which turned out to be a great marketing stunt if ever there was one.

And now, some shop in Noord-Brabant that sells clothes for bigger women has managed to secure its own bit of free marketing by claiming that this year’s ‘HolánDress’ (cost:12,99 euro), which comes in sizes 34-40 (XS, X, M and L), excludes bigger women when such a garment should be bringing us all together. Apparently, the average Dutch woman weighs 80 kilos and wears size 42, which still means that a whole lot of women and girls will fit into that dress.

The dress is a marketing stunt, a knick-knack. They’ll be more of them as well in the future and they won’t get bigger unless someone makes it a stunt of making one for ‘big gals’. Then there might be whining about being singled out as a fat person from some shop somewhere, mark my words.

How’s about taking the bullshit by the horns and wear a nice orange dress or top (or even a blue, red and white ensemble) that suits you instead? How low on self-esteem does one have to be to want to follow a beer brewer’s fashion statement? Get proactive and shut up. Nobody gives a rat’s ass what you’re wearing in front of the telly. And you can always get off the couch and lose some weight if your life’s ambition is fitting into cheap stunt dresses.

(Link: www.elsevier.nl)

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May 12, 2014

Bearded women calendar from 1997

Filed under: Art,Photography by Branko Collin @ 1:18 pm

women-with-beards-jetty-verhoeff

Women with Beards (note: occasional nudity) was an art project that ran from 1997 to 1998 in which every month a photo and biography of a bearded ‘babe’ was added to a website. Ine Poppe and Jetty Verhoeff ran the project and the beards were applied by make-up artist Ellen Wenniger.

The artists write: “In former days women with beards were exposed as an aberration at fairs. In the 21st century female facial hair will be the ultimate of sexual seductiveness.” And elsewhere they add: “Several articles have by now appeared about our project: they raise questions about our playing with gender. We don’t have a cut-and-dried answer to these: we just want to amuse and entertain. Like Jetty said to a Dutch journalist: ‘In my imagination our calendar is pinned to the wall with scotch tape in a garage in Australia.'”

In 2008 the project was part of the Kiki on Steroids! exhibit (again, NSFW) which explored “the world of transgenderism and self-representation on the Internet”. In this exhibit photos of “hairy babes of the month” were displayed almost life sized over toilets and urinals.

(Illustration: cropped screenshot of the Women with Beards website)

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May 11, 2014

Netherlands has second best beer-to-income ratio

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 4:39 pm

beer-income-reddit-adiluReddit user Adilu made this fun map of Europe which shows how many beers the legal monthly minimum wage buys you in Europe.

It turns out the well-paying beer-loving countries are the Germanic ones—no surprises there. The minimum wage of a Belgian buys you 1028 pints of beer, whereas the Dutch can purchase at least 761 pints with their monthly salary. Germany comes in third with only 521 beers.

Adilu based their pint prices on a crowd-sourced database aptly called pintprice.com, according to PolicyMic, which has a thing or two to say about purchasing power and minimum wage if you’re interested.

(Illustration: Reddit user Adilu)

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May 9, 2014

Guy fined for showing his junk at junk food chain

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

A 25-year-old guy was dared by his friends to show his cock and balls to the girls of the local rowing club while eating at the same junk food chain. The act is not only vulgar and asocial, misogynistic even, but it’s forcing children and others to see something they didn’t ask for, which is why it’s illegal.

Poor bastard, an off duty cop was dining there and hauled him down to the police station, where he was eventually slapped with a 350 euro fine for exhibitionism.

(www.waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of burger by huppypie, some rights reserved)

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May 8, 2014

A bit like football: UK afraid of the Netherlands

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 12:41 pm

First the Dutch media spat on it, then others like me joined in the chorus. But once ‘Calm before the storm’ sung by duet The Common Linnets made it through to the Eurovision Song Contest finals last Tuesday, the Dutch press fashioned reasons to like the song, one of which makes sense: the most economic use of guitar chords for the biggest amount of win. Newspaper Metro UK says, “The song is perhaps the most simple ever seen at the Eurovision Song Contest. It has just three chords and the first half of the song is shown in a single camera take.”

Maybe austerity will finally hit Eurovision. Then again, maybe this is just the ‘pride before the fall’.

UPDATE: Hey, the Dutch won second place.

(Dutch country music to hit song festival, Photo of Microphone by visual dichotomy, some rights reserved)

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May 7, 2014

New satellite images of the Netherlands

Filed under: Photography,Science by Orangemaster @ 3:10 pm

imagesentine

This image over the coast line of the Netherlands is one of the early radar scans taken by the Sentinel-1A satellite, launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) on 3 April, which is said to be able to provide imagery under any weather conditions, day or night.

You can see Amsterdam on the centre-right side of the image, and in the lower part there’s Rotterdam, with its huge port extending to the left. As well, “Sentinel-1’s radar will also be used for monitoring changes in agricultural land cover – important information for areas with intensive agriculture like the Netherlands”.

(Link: phys.org, Photo: ESA)

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May 6, 2014

Dutch cartoon illustrates creative writing book

Filed under: Comics,Literature by Orangemaster @ 9:48 pm

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Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte provided drawings for “Thrice Told Tales: Three Mice Full of Writing Advice,” by Catherine Lewis, a creative writing professor, publish in August 2013 and aimed at young readers. Lewis set out to explain literary elements through variations on the classic nursery rhyme, “Three blind mice ran after the farmer’s wife. She cut off their tails with a carving knife.” Yes, good nursery rhymes have always been pretty rough.

What’s the farmer’s wife doing with heals on? Here’s what Swarte had to say:

“How do I make her a farmer’s wife? Well, I drew a farm, so the man holding a pitchfork is a farmer and the woman his wife. I gave her farmer’s overalls, but I had to put her in high heels to make her a lady—otherwise you’d have seen a long-haired guy.”

Look closely: one of the mice is female.

We’ve also told you about Joost Swarte designing a pair of glasses.

(Link and image: www.newyorker.com)

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May 5, 2014

Rise and fall of a Netherlands theme park in Japan

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:36 pm

huis-ten-bosch-japan-veroyama

Michael Palin once said (as quoted by Spike Japan): “There is something almost transcendentally surreal about seeing a woman dressed in a large white bonnet, dirndl, black stockings and clogs riding a bicycle and at the same time playing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on a trombone.”

Huis ten Bosch (Hausu Ten Bosu) is a theme park near Nagasaki “more than three times the size of Tokyo Disneyland and still bigger than Tokyo Disneyland and DisneySea combined”. Its theme is The Netherlands – all of it. Many of the famous buildings of the Netherlands have 1:1 replicas there that function as hotels and betting houses.

The park was built during an economic boom and consequently opened during a crisis. It has struggled ever since. Spike Japan visited it in 2010 and wrote an engaging, meandering and well illustrated three part ‘long read’ that will keep you entertained for an hour or so.

Softened by the passage of time and the accumulation of research, Huis ten Bosch is now in retrospect my most beloved example of a favorite kind of place, one like Seagaia that clings tenaciously by its fingertips to the cliff of life, against all odds. Of one thing we can be certain, though: until Huis ten Bosch, the greatest artifact by far of those crazy eighties years, finally fails or flourishes, the boil of the Bubble will not have been lanced from the body of Japan for good.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

(Link: Metafilter/MartinWisse; photo by Veroyama, some rights reserved)

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