October 12, 2013

Van Persie new all-time top scorer with 41 goals

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 3:16 pm

By scoring a hat trick yesterday in a match against Hungary, Robin van Persie became the all-time top scorer of the Dutch national football team. His total is now 41 goals in 80 matches, Dutchnews reports.

The previous record holder was Patrick Kluivert who, being one of the assistant coaches of the Oranje yesterday, congratulated Van Persie after the second goal. Kluivert is now in second place with 40 goals in 79 matches. Two years ago AD still considered Klaas-Jan Huntelaar the most likely pretender to the crown. Van Persie had been a failure at the 2010 world championships in South Africa and in 2011 Huntelaar led the man from Rotterdam with 3 goals in the rankings. Huntelaar hasn’t played much since then whilst Van Persie racked up an impressive 8 goals in the 2014 world cup qualifiers

Both players were born in August 1983 and still have time to work on their personal bests. Huntelaar is now the one who faces the uphill battle though. Dennis Bergkamp was the record holder between 1998 (he took it in typical Bergkamp fashion with a quality goal) and 2003. Up to 1998 Faas Wilkes topped the list for an amazing 38 years and 243 days, nu.nl reports.

Hungary had to win the game to still have a shot at qualifying. The Netherlands were already through—coach Louis van Gaal used the match to experiment, fielding Vlaar and Bruma as central defenders . The Netherlands won the home game 8-1.

(Photo by Ronnie Macdonald, some rights reserved)

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October 7, 2013

Funny website lets designer Niek Gooren look for a job

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 12:59 pm

Multimedia designer Niek Gooren from Weert in Limburg lost his job earlier this year. Applying for new jobs the traditional way did not help, so he decided to set up a website full of funny hyperbole to show the world why it should hire him.

Next to a photo of Niek begging in the street a banner admonishes would-be employers: “As a citizen of the Netherlands you contribute to Niek’s unemployment benefits. Surely it would be better to hire him. That way you and he both benefit.”

Overlayed on a photo of Niek watching noise on the television is the text: “While you are reading this, Niek lies on the couch at home, lonely and unemployed, eating crisps.”

Also: “Did you know that Niek likes his coffee black? That makes him cheaper than the average coffee drinking employee because you will save on sugar and milk.”

Gooren’s campaign appears to be a success. He told Bright.nl that he has got a day job, figuratively speaking, in going to job interviews on the basis of his website. He’s already been interviewed by Banbao (toys), Wehkamp (mail order), Air France KLM (airline) and De Bijenkorf (department store).

Gooren’s website is at helpniekuitdeww.nl, ‘help Niek off the dole dot nl’. The illustrations are screen shots of that site.

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October 5, 2013

Krol under fire after exposure as pension fraud

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:04 pm

Yesterday the leader of 50PLUS quit his seat in the Dutch parliament over allegations that he had failed to pay pension premiums for his employees when he was still editor-in-chief of Gay krant, a recently collapsed monthly magazine for the gay community.

50PLUS is a political party that claims to represent the elderly. Stronger pensions are one of the main issues for the party as exemplified in a Ben Cramer / Peter Koelewijn song that goes like “Keep your hands off my dough / This is my last warning / Keep your hands off my pension / I won’t vote for you again.”

Law professor Evert Verhulp told Volkskrant that not paying premiums counts as breach of contract.

An Elsevier blogger headlined today: “Irony flirts with Henk Krol.” Former member of parliament for the Christian Democrats Ger Koopmans tweeted “Henk Krol not paying pension premiums is like Geert Wilders converting to Islam.” The elderly as a group are among the most affluent of the country, even though the babyboom generation that Krol represented put remarkably little into the pension funds as Sywert van Lienden and others point out. According to Van Lienden the babyboomers worked four-day weeks. The generation before worked harder and the generation after will have to work longer. In 2023 the Dutch legal retirement age will be 67, ten years later than the early retirement age that was possible from the mid 1970s until approximately ten years ago.

(Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg, some rights reserved)

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September 30, 2013

Dutch law turns solar panel owners into entrepreneurs

Filed under: Sustainability by Branko Collin @ 8:08 pm

It sounds like a win-win plan for everybody: the government subsidizes the purchase of solar panels for private families who use the panels to generate clean energy and sell any left over electricity to the public utilities.

Strictly speaking, selling electricity is a commercial transaction over which value added tax must be paid. The Court of Justice of the European Union confirmed this in a ruling in an Austrian case earlier this year. Dutch junior minister Frans Weekers confirmed last week that the ruling also applies to the Netherlands, Z24 reports. Owning a solar panel and selling electricity to the public utilities automatically makes it impossible, the minister told parliament, “to deny one’s status as an entrepreneur” where value added tax is concerned.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons. Solar panel owners rarely get to see how much they have sold back; the utilities just charge them for the balance. Paying VAT also means you have to start bookkeeping. You can ask for an exemption if you expect to pay less than 1,345 euro a year which also releases you from the obligation of bookkeeping.
According to Vereniging Eigen Huis, minister Weekers considers the judgement undesirable and will ask the European Union for a change in the regulations. In the meantime he will initiate talks with the utilities.

I remember when I started freelancing. I made so little money that the people from the tax office laughed at me when I told them I wanted to register for paying added value tax. The difference between me and solar panel owners was of course that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and saw keeping accounts as part of the cost of entry.

According to Dutchnews earlier this year, “solar panels in the Netherlands produce some 100 million kilowatt hours of power” whereas “Dutch solar panel makers had a turnover of over € 490m in 2010”. A quick calculation using the rates of a local supplier shows that solar panel using home owners lowered their electricity bills by 6.5 million euro in 2012, making the solar panel manufacturers the big winners.

(Photo by Mhassan Abdollahi, some rights reserved)

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September 29, 2013

If you see this ad, the model has died

Filed under: Health by Branko Collin @ 2:53 pm

Two years ago the Dutch ALS Foundation (ALS is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in North America) started a bold advertising campaign to call attention to the disease.

The campaign consists of portraits of ALS sufferers on posters and in videos. New ads are released only after the model has died. The caption printed on the posters, “ik ben inmiddels overleden”, means “by now I have died”.

In 2010 the foundation made portraits of 9 patients which it expects to distribute in the next few years. It generally takes 3 to 5 years from the onset of the first ALS symptoms to the death of a patient. In 2011 the campaign kicked off after two patients had died, a woman called Conny Deenik and former hockey player and Olympian Theodoor Doyer (photo).

There is no cure for ALS. The disease causes nerves to die, after which the respiratory system breaks down.

(Photo and story: Adformatie / Stichting ALS Nederland)

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September 28, 2013

The gifts her neighbour brings her

Filed under: Comics,General by Branko Collin @ 11:02 pm

Merel Barends is a cartoonist from Amsterdam. Her neighbour, J., “visits us almost every day. Sometimes he is drunk. Sometimes he is not. Often he brings a small gift.”

Sometimes that gift is an old newspaper or a roll of peppermint. Sometimes he brings fenugreek or chocolate, because he feels Merel is too thin. Once it was statuettes: “if you look up on the Internet what they are worth, then we will split the profits.”

Link and photos: Merel Barends.

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September 22, 2013

‘Underwater’ bridge for bicycles in Haarlem

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 3:24 pm

The city of Haarlem wanted to create a safer situation where a main road crossed another main road coming off a bridge.

For some reason all practical solutions turned out impossible (more likely someone couldn’t be bothered) so the city opted for a work-around, albeit a well designed one. They built a bicycle bridge that wraps around the underside of the other bridge and then partially submerged the bicycle bridge. The result is either a submerged bridge or an open air tunnel, your pick.

The bridge was designed by IPV who seem to be specializing in these sort of crazy work-arounds—check their bicycle roundabout hovering above Eindhoven.

Mark Wagenbuur, the bicycle vlogger, visited Haarlem and shot one of his trademark videos there.

(Photo: ipv Delft)

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September 20, 2013

Dutch Little Golden Books turn 60, publisher celebrates with ‘giga’ version

Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 7:45 pm

The famous Little Golden Books, a series of children’s book originally published by Simon and Schuster in the USA, have always been popular in the Netherlands.

The booklets with the golden spine were first published in 1942. It took 11 years for the series to get its launch in the Netherlands with a translation of Little Peewee, or Now Open the Box. This year Dutch publisher Rubinstein celebrates the 60th anniversary of the series in the Netherlands with a large format release of the translated booklet.

According to Holly Moors, the success of the series in the Netherlands is due “largely because Annie M.G. Schmidt improved the American versions irreparably.” Moors has a photo of his 2-metre-tall son (?) Rik reading the book for comparison. The Giga Golden Book, as Rubinstein calls it, has 14 extra pages that were in the American original but not in the Dutch translation of 1953.

The early 1950s must have been a good year for American cultural exports to the Netherlands (so close after the war). In 1952 the Donald Duck weekly was launched in this country and that publication is also still going strong.

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September 16, 2013

The Netherlands has finally become a police state

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:18 pm

Rhetoric? Offensive sloganeering? Have I finally gone off the deep end? No, I am just getting a pun in there. Volkskrant reported last Saturday that the biggest employer in the Netherlands is the police.

In 2012 the police provided jobs to 63,778 people. They passed the military which was the biggest employer in 2011, but had to cut down their numbers due to budget cuts.

The top 5 large employers in the Netherlands are:

  • The police, 63,778 employees
  • The military, 61,749 employees
  • Rabobank, 41,402 employees
  • PostNL, 33,284 employees
  • Air France-KLM, 31,189 employees

According to Volkskrant their top 100 of companies employs about 1 million people in the Netherlands. Their distribution follows a power curve, the top ten employs a third of that million. According to Statistics Netherlands there were 8.68 million people working in the Netherlands in 2012 and 0.66 million unemployed citizens. The self-employed made up 1.25 million of people working. And there were 9.24 million jobs in 2012.

(Photo by FaceMePLS, some rights reserved)

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September 15, 2013

Moving meeting room looks like a stealth plane

Filed under: Art,Design by Branko Collin @ 11:14 pm

Secret Operation 610 is an artwork created by Rietveld Landscape and Studio Frank Havermans that doubles as a meeting room.

The artwork consists of hangar 610 at former Dutch airbase Soesterberg (hence the name) and of a vehicle that looks a bit like an F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter plane.

The creators, Frank Havermans and Ronald Rietveld, told Volkskrant that they had been asked to create a piece of furniture for the hangar. “But if we had created something that was attached to the hangar that would mean the building itself would be compromised, which we did not want. So we started joking about furniture on wheels. At first that did not sound realistic, but before we knew it we had bought a plane wheel from a dealer in Oss and we could not turn back.”

The vehicle can be driven slowly over the air strip using a joystick. Havermans and Rietveld are open to renting out the vehicle as a mobile meeting space. “As long as people don’t turn it into a beer shack.”

Secret Operation 610 is one of the art works that were created to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Peace of Utrecht. The work was revealed during Festival De Basis which started yesterday and which will last until Sunday 22 September. Airbase Soesterberg was closed in 2008 due to cuts in the Dutch defence budget.

A video showing the unveiling of the project and some of the other works at the former airbase can be seen at De Utrechtse Internet Courant.

(Photo: Rietveld Landscape)

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