March 28, 2019

Dutchman wins Belgian seagull scream champs

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:23 pm

Black-backed

In the Belgian town of Adinkerke, a Flemish village close to the French border, 30 men and women did their best to imitate the scream of a seagull at a European Seagull Screaming Championship. We say men and women because there were two winners, one for the men and one for the women: a Belgian woman from Hasselt won her gold and the gold for the men’s was won by a Dutchman from Limburg.

Last year, 31 people participated in the Belgian Championship, and this year, it was time for a European version. The jury said that the level was ‘quite high’ and that part of the goal was to show appreciation for the seagull. I have friends on social media who cannot get enough of posting stories about seagull ripping food like fries out of people’s hand, but to each their own.

Our Limburger winner explains that he gives sport lessons outdoors and hears seagulls a lot, and was always impressed by the sound they make. He heard about the championship through friends and thought it would be fun to join in. “It was totally worth the 2.5 hour drive”, he added.

(Link: waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of Great black-backed gull by Robert Eliassen, some rights reserved)

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March 27, 2019

Dog tax: free to over a hundred euros in some places

Filed under: Animals,Comics by Orangemaster @ 2:42 pm

I first heard about a dog tax in a French comic book as a child. A family was playing a record on a turntable of the Skater’s Waltz by Frenchman Émile Waldteufel, sung by dogs, according to the drawings, of course. The family had earlier claimed they did not have a dog and at some point, the dog tax collector came back and gave them a fine for having a lot of dogs after hearing the record through the front door.

Like many things in the Netherlands that make little sense, municipalities often charge very different fees for things that shouldn’t be that different from one place to the next. A quick look at Noord-Brabant has Tilburg (107,86 euro) and Breda (104,55 euro) as the most expensive, followed by Veldhoven (84,18 euro), Den Bosch (83,64 euro) and Eindhoven (77,00 euro).

Municipalities that charge over 100 euro include The Hague and a few other places close to it that border the coast, Groningen way up north, Nijmegen next to Germany. Dog owners in 57 per cent of all municipalities still pay dog tax. One reason for a large amount of municipalities not to charge dog tax is that they need to have collectors and that’s expensive and not always very efficient.

Not only is dog tax apparently the oldest type of tax in the Netherlands, it’s also rarely used for cleaning up dog poop.

For anybody who cares about the situation in Noord-Brabant, feel free to sign a petition in order to get rid of dog tax.

Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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March 26, 2019

Dutch singer Tim Knol finds his doppelganger

Filed under: Music,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:53 pm

We’ve written about Dutch singer Tim Knol, a down to earth performer who was the victim of a bad radio prank a few years ago and who has now found his doppelganger.

Knol recently found Daniel Skoglund from Sweden virtually, and funny enough, Skoglund is also a singer with a guitar. Knol posted on Twitter that he had found his doppelganger (see pic).

Skoglund performs under the name Songs of Boda and was just as surprised as Knol about the discovery. Both of them made jokes about their parents possibly getting ‘their lines crossed’. As well, both men make the same kind of singer-songwriter music. Yes, I want a duet soon, too!

They are planning to meet in real life and like each other’s music.

Here’s Tom Knol signing in English:

And here’s Songs of Boda, with Daniel Skoglund:

(Link: nhnieuws.nl)

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March 25, 2019

Dutch horror film flop unexpected hit in China

Filed under: Film,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:54 pm

A horror film by Dick Maas from 2016 called Prey (‘Prooi’) has become an unexpected hit in China recently for reasons that nobody here really knows.

Dick Maas, known for films such as De Lift (‘The Lift’, 1983) and more recently Sint (‘Saint’, 2010), only found out his film was a hit in China because all of a sudden, he got a pile of orders for it from there, for which he only gets a flat fee, but not royalties.

It’s possibly the biggest selling Dutch film of all time in China and at the same time, it’s the biggest flop in Maas’ career. Only 30,000 people out of a Dutch population of 17.5 million saw it. The Lift is probably his most famous film, or at least the one the Dutch mention first when someone talks about Dick Maas. The film is about a lift (elevator) that inexplicably begins to function alone, trapping people and doing nasty things to them.

Here’s the official trailer for Prey in Dutch with English subtitles. Now I want to watch it, too.

(Link: dutchnews.nl, Photo of Dick Maas by Rob C. Croes / Anefo – Nationaal Archief, some rights reserved)

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March 23, 2019

Van Gogh in American museum finally authenticated

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 11:43 am

Dutch experts from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum have finally declared that the painting ‘Vase with Poppies’ (‘Vaas met klaprozen’) is a real Vincent van Gogh. The painting, which currently hangs in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, USA, was painted by the Dutch artist in 1886, just after he moved to Paris.

The painting has been part of the American museum’s collection since 1957, and when a prominent expert in 1990 starting questioning its authenticity, the museum put it in storage. Nowadays, using a Macro-X-ray Fluorescence (MA-XRF) scanner to analyse the painting like they did with Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ last year, the underpainting revealed what looked like a self-portrait, which strengthened its authenticity.

The Wadsworth Atheneum now officially has two Van Goghs in its collection. The other is a self-portrait painted in 1887.

Why does it take so long to authenticate a painting? Well, MA-XRF scanners cost in the hundreds of thousands of euro, which means few museums own them – they usually have to borrow one. Besides getting your hands on such a scanner, the time it takes to scan and proper analyse the findings means the painting is out of view for a while and that your staff is busy doing that instead of other things.

(Links and image: gelderlander.nl, apnews.com)

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March 22, 2019

Free housing in exchange for all your data in Helmond

Filed under: Dutch first,Science by Orangemaster @ 11:09 am

Binary code

In Helmond, Noord Brabant, there are plans to build a neighbourhood, called Living Lab, where people will be able to live for free, but there’s a catch: they’ll have to give up all their data.

Part of the Brainport Smart District, Living Lab will be the ‘smartest neighbourhood in the Netherlands’ with 1500 homes where 4000 people are expected to live. Their behaviour will generate a huge flow of data and that’s the goal. Basically, you’d be a guinea pig with free housing. Sensors will measure what you do, how you sleep, what you do online and whatever else companies will pay to find out.

Free living for only a year is not very practical, but considering how difficult it is to find a place in this country, I’m sure they will find 4000 people ready to give up their privacy, which is a bit sad in a way.

Toronto, Canada was the location of a similar project called Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. The difference is that this project hit a brick wall when it came to privacy and proprietary rights of the data.

Living Lab is on the edge of what is actually acceptable, which means it’s not out of the woods yet. But again, in a country where corruption is common in the housing market, having a free space to live that’s nice will have people willing to give up quite a bit of their lives. Let us not forget that social media seems free, but many of us are giving away our data there as well.

(Link: Bright)

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March 21, 2019

Dutch family caught with 3300 kilos of coke

Filed under: Animals,General by Orangemaster @ 3:38 pm

A Dutch father and his two sons living in Spain and Germany were caught by the police with a staggering 3300 kilos of cocaine back in 2017. They gave themselves up and are now in prison in the Netherlands, and I guess now the press can talk about it.

The cocaine, which was found in Hazeldonk near Breda, Noord Brabant, known as an important corridor between the Netherlands and Belgium, was hidden in a shipment of bananas from South America that was to be transported from Antwerp to the Netherlands.

Back in 2017, the owners of the transport company and the driver were arrested and a police team starting investigating to find out who was behind the smuggle. They did as you do and followed the money, and found villas, cash and expensive cars.

And because of a rough news week in the Netherlands with a terrible shooting and a racist party getting more leverage in the Dutch senate after yesterday’s elections, here’s a short video of a goat riding a sheep that I know I needed to watch.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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March 19, 2019

University student bequeaths record amount

Filed under: Dutch first,Science by Orangemaster @ 4:05 pm

An alumna of Utrecht University from Rotterdam has left 1.2 million euro to the university, making it the biggest amount ever bequeathed to it in Dutch history.

Annie van Leerzem studied medicine in the 1950s in Utrecht, as Rotterdam did not have a faculty of medicine back then. Although she graduated, she never practiced medicine, as the care of both her parents fell on her shoulders.

A fund has been set up in her name, the Familie van Leerzemfonds. The money will be used for young clinical researchers in general medicine.

(Link: rijnmond.nl, Photo by Tom Varco, published under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license)

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March 18, 2019

Sudden street name changes hurts business

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:07 am

A couple from the small town of Soesterberg, Utrecht apparently woke up one day to find out that their street had changes name, from Sterrenbergweg to Sternbergweg. Google and the likes point to Sterrenbergweg, while there are no streets called Sternbergweg in the Netherlands.

They thought maybe it was a mistake, but walked down the street to read Sternbergweg once more, so in fact, it’s probably a huge mistake. What’s more, they run a business from their home and have had to tell their clients that their street name has changed for reasons unknown, which has costs them money. And I bet they’ll have to do another round if and when the town fixes the mistake or doubles down and have to compensate people for messing up their lives.

Of course, they contacted the town, but have to wait a whopping 14 days for an answer, which is a good reason to go to the media. They love their town, but this has upset them quite a bit. Their theory is also that whomever ordered the signs can’t spell.

People make mistakes, but when it forces people to incur costs, that’s not OK. We’ll keep you posted.

(Link: .rtvutrecht.nl)

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March 14, 2019

New traffic sign warns cyclists for tram rails

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 2:46 pm

The Netherlands is a country with a sign for a ‘singing bike path’, a silly walks pedestrian crossing and this riddle about horses, but now it’s time for a sign that warns cyclists about tram rails.

Only Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague are used to dealing with trams, and sadly, cyclists are also used to cycling over trails and sometimes getting a wheel stuck in them. Today, a sign was unveiled in The Hague, and the idea behind it is to avoid injuries, which apparently happens more than we all think. To be sure everybody gets it, under the new sign it says in Dutch ‘Watch out, tram rails’.

Back in 2017 start-up SafeRails found a solution to this problem (see video), using a profile from recycled plastic that can be inserted into existing tram rails, but that never materialised. Ironically, they wanted to start with The Hague.

Moral of the story: scoring election points (we have elections on 20 March) is better than actually implementing a solution.

(Link: nos.nl)

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