October 30, 2018

Dutch championship escape room scheduled for 2019

Filed under: Dutch first,Event,Gaming,General by Orangemaster @ 1:56 pm

On 7 January 2019, the first ever national championship escape room will take place in Erp, North Brabant and will involve ‘an escaped psychopath from Germany’. The goal is to find out what he’s planning, find his bombs, and thwart his plans.

According to organiser Joris van den Bergh from Erp, they’ll be three preliminary rounds before having a shot at being the winning team. In other words, it won’t be a walk in the park. There is room for 22 teams (sign up here until this Thursday), each of which should consist of four or five people. Sign-up costs 200 euro per team.

Since more than 1000 people will be participating, some 32 escape rooms will be used. The best 75 teams will go for the final in an actual castle, the location of which is still under wraps.

One of the last times we mentioned an escape room, it was one based on Anne Frank’s life, which raised a lot of eyebrows.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl, Photo by Aapo Haapanen, some rights reserved)

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October 29, 2018

Why people hate pianos at Dutch train stations

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 10:26 am

A few days ago, a picture of the piano at Amsterdam Central Station was doing the rounds on Instagram, as it was overturned. A friend of mine reposted an article about the unfortunate piano on Facebook, saying “My mood today”.

The man who did it will have to go to court, but having sat down after his ‘crime’, he waited for the police and didn’t seem to care. A new piano was put in its place rather quickly after the incident. The piano has had faeces, acid and other things poured onto it, so yeah, fresh piano it is.

The first reason people hate train station pianos is that listening to a piano is meant to attract attention and evoke emotions, which is for many people the complete opposite of what a train station is supposed to do, which is get people from A to B as easy as possible. In other words, the piano detracts from the goal of getting to their train without being distracted.

The second reason is the fake feeling of ‘life is hard, but doesn’t this small bit of happiness bring us all a little bit closer’, apparently a feeling that is just as irritating as giving out free hugs or anything else that forces people to feel woolly. It’s one thing to encourage togetherness, but it is another when it is done as part of Dutch Rail’s marketing strategy when all they do is up the prices of tickets every year and offer the exact same service year in year out.

Reason number three is that piano playing gives narcissists a stage. Nobody wants to wait around for some amateur noodling of whatever the favourite film ditty of the year is. Playing for people is something that shows empathy, but in fact is a totally narcissistic gesture, according to the people interviewed. At lease a street musician does it for money.

I happen to like public space pianos, but that’s usually because I don’t use the train to commute and have time to find my train and I tend to hear decent piano players, not parents letting their children muck about because they have to.

(Links: vice.com and nos.nl; Photo of piano keyboard by Adam Henning, some rights reserved)

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October 24, 2018

Bats stop Doutzen Kroes for renovating her villa

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 1:18 pm

kroes1.jpg

World renown Dutch model Doutzen Kroes has to put her plans for renovating her 1920s villa worth two million euro on hold because a colony of bats has decided to move in. In the Netherlands, bats are a protected species and can’t be chased out of their homes.

Renovations were apparently set to cost one million euro and be finished by the summer of 2019, so that Kroes and her family could move in. The bats have thwarted any renovation plans for the near future, as the city of Huizen, North Holland were the villa is located, has put a stop to any works. Some sort of ‘humane’ traps have been placed in nearby trees to get the bats out, but nobody can predict how that’s going to pan out.

However, this does sounds like a fantastic Halloween house.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl)

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October 23, 2018

Fire brigade called up for burning hot sauce

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:57 am

Last weekend a fire broke out in Rotterdam after a resident said they smelled something odd and found it difficult to breathe.

An ambulance showed up on the scene, but it wasn’t clear to them where the fire was. As well, the fire brigade couldn’t find a gas leak.

Eventually a hazardous materials expert was dispatched to the scene, and after searching, they figured out that the odour came from a flat where someone was cooking with very hot sambal, aka hot sauce.

And yes, this does sounds like the plot for a fantastic 1970s hot sauce commercial. There’s a lot of sambal in food here, especially if you order or cook Indonesian or Surinamese food.

(Link: rijnmond.nl)

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October 19, 2018

Dutch issue first ever gender neutral passport

Filed under: Dutch first,General,History by Orangemaster @ 3:25 pm

Today, the first ever gender neutral passport has been issued to the 57-year-old Leonne Zeegers of Breda, Noord-Brabant. Instead of having a ‘v’ (‘vrouw’ = woman) or ‘m’ (‘man’, same as in English) in their passport, they have an ‘x’, making them the first Dutch person to have such a passport.

The issuing of this passport comes after a court decision earlier this year in Roermond, Limburg, claiming that gender was a question of gender identity and not of sex characteristics. When Leonne was born, the doctors were not able to determine with any certainty if they were a boy or a girl, and as such was an intergender person back when the term was not used as it is today. Back in the day, the parents had to pick a gender, so they went with male ‘because it was easier’. Later in life, Leonne realised they didn’t feel like a man, and switched their gender to female, but that didn’t help because they really felt like neither, a choice that didn’t exist back then.

Hopefully the move will also encourage many other Dutch instances to scrap registering gender for no actual reason than force of habit. According to Dutch interest groups, some 4 percent of the Dutch feel like Leonne does.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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October 18, 2018

Spijkenisse unveils Silly Walks pedestrian crossing

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:50 pm

Spijkenisse, South Holland, the city of the fake euro bridges, has officially unveiled a special pedestrian crossing sign at city hall today, featuring none other than a nod to John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks in the famous Monty Python sketch of 1970. The sign depicts a man wearing a bowler hat and carrying a briefcase who is about to take a funny step to cross the street.

A local bureaucrat heard about a similar sign in Haparanda, Sweden, and as a fan of British humour figured why not have such a sign in Spijkenisse as well. And since according to him weird things happen at city hall, having the sign next to his place of work was fitting. Crossing the street at one of the city’s busiest intersections with a smile is also a good idea. And regardless of how funny your walk is, traffic still needs to stop for you.

Back in 2016 we told you about hundreds of fans of British comedy legend John Cleese showing up for the opening of a Silly Walks tunnel in Eindhoven.

(Link and phote: nos.nl)

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October 16, 2018

Mayor of Heerlen to DJ a metal set

Filed under: Dutch first,Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:09 pm

Mayors in the Netherlands are appointed and not elected, and it’s not uncommon to see well-known national politicians, such as Ahmed Aboutaleb in Rotterdam (Labour Party), Ahmed Marcouch in Arnhem (Labour Party), Femke Halsema in Amsterdam (Green Party) or Emile Roemer in Heerlen (Socialist Party) step out of national politics to become mayors of a big Dutch city. In the case of Emile Roemer, he became the first ever mayor of the Socialist Party in March of this year, in a town that regularly votes for his party.

My sources tell me that Roemer enjoys being addressed informally and is a fan of heavy metal, the right kind of soundtrack to a city filled with empty buildings where the youth leave to find jobs and a more stable future. As for Heerlen, Limburg, a former mining town of some 87,000 residents, it is the rock and roll answer to the more conservative and tourist-savvy Maastricht some 30 minutes away.

And I don’t know if this is a first, but it’s most probably a first for Heerlen: on Sunday, 23 December, Roemer will be DJing a thrash metal and hard rock set at De Nieuwe Nor, the city’s only pop club. He’ll be opening for Amsterdam band Death Alley who apparently won’t be playing for a while after this.

And if Facebook is any indication, people will go because the whole idea is kind of amusing.

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October 15, 2018

Christien Meindertsma’s new view on recycled materials

Filed under: Animals,Art by Orangemaster @ 1:33 pm

Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, who got noticed in 2007 with her award-winning project PIG 05049 (shown above), featuring185 products made from a single pig, currently has an exhibition entitled ‘Beyond the Surface’ at the Vitra Design Museum in Basel, Switzerland, which examines her work with wool, flax, incinerator ash, and recycled wool.

Video and printed matter demonstrating her working process are displayed alongside products made from each material, to best demonstrate Meinderstma’s research-based practice. Rather than present the designer’s work chronologically, the museum decided to group the exhibition around the four materials.

“We realised that we would prefer a different format in order to give visitors a sense of the thoroughness that Christien applies to her work, which usually drives her to investigate a material or over long periods of time, producing a number of outcomes, not just a single product,” curator Viviane Stappmanns said.

The exhibition is the designer’s first outside her native country and is on display until 20 January 2019.

(Link: dezeen.com, Photo: Indexaward.dk)

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October 14, 2018

Musical street in Zaandam sounds ‘too gay’ for some

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 3:07 pm

The city of Zaandam, North Holland has a street that is getting a name change, from Piccolo to Hobo (Oboe), both of which are musical instruments. The Zaandam neighbourhood in question already has a street called Hobo and is now going to extend it. It also has streets called Cello, and then gets into musical-related terms such as Aubade, Prelude and Mazurka, to name a few.

The people who live on Piccolo street don’t want their street to become Hobo street. In Dutch, Hobo rhymes with ‘homo’, which is used as a derogatory word for homosexual, an issue brought up back in 2016 when the area was created. And I know what some of you are thinking, ‘Hobo’ doesn’t sounds great for anybody whose first language is North American English, as that refers to a vagrant, but that’s besides the point.

There are other Hobo streets throughout the country and apparently, that’s not a problem. I’d like to think that going from Piccolo to Oboe musically is a bit of an upgrade, because – and I held back on this – in that tooty-fluity neighbourhood, there’s also a street called Fagot, the Dutch name for a bassoon, which nobody seems to complain about.

In the Netherlands, you can always live on Fart Street, but then you could also live in on a street named after Lord of The Rings characters.

(Link: noordhollandsdagblad.nl)

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October 12, 2018

Baby invited to meet bureaucrats at town hall

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:21 pm

Baby-booties

The town of Schagen, North Holland sent a letter to one of their newest residents, inviting them to town hall in order to find out about what bureaucrats can do for them. At this point in time, the answer is so not much because the town sent a letter to a three-month-old baby girl whose diary is pretty much full up for the foreseeable future.

Yes, she is a new resident of Schagen, but why didn’t the town have a good look at the baby’s date of birth before sending this kind of useless correspondence? I’m quite sure that the rest of the country checks these kinds of details first.

In true bureaucratic form, and even though the baby’s parents and the town had a good laugh about the mishap, the bureaucrats managed to blame the newly implemented privacy law (possibly the General Data Protection Regulation – GDPR), saying they could not easily check a date of birth, which I call bullshit on. All newborn children as well as every single resident of the Netherlands must be registered with town hall, making it pretty clear when reading their date of birth who is a baby. The GDPR has enough articles about when to use personal data and when not to.

After the father posted the invitation for his daughter on Facebook, people commented that they too had received weird letters from their town: an eight-year-old boy was invited to come and talk about real estate law.

A few years back, the Dutch tax office, a very different breed of bureaucrats,
pestered a nine-year-old for not filing a return when of course they didn’t have to.

(Link: nhnieuws.nl, Photo of baby booties by Winam, some rights reserved)

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