December 26, 2012
A Philips ad for the company’s line of irons has been doing the rounds on the Internet.
In it an anonymous artist recreates portraits by famous Dutch painters such as Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer and self-portraits by Van Gogh and Rembrandt using little more than a white sheet and a steam iron.
The ad was made by the Russian branch of DDB, a worldwide advertising agency.
(Photo: crop of the video. Link: Trendbeheer)
December 24, 2012
It is dreary and wet and not that cold, and this year the weather report even predicted the dreariness and not-coldness to last beyond the apocalypse, the perfect time to read about the mad panic that would sweep the country if winter were coming:
And then abruptly and over the protestations of our doubts it becomes apparent that the fate of our very society is placed into the hands of a tall, blond, probably very sober and severe man most likely called Siebe or Wiebe or Hidde or Fedde.
[…]
And our Siebe will look very sternly into the camera and solemnly proclaim ‘no’, because that’s his favourite word, further tests need to be performed, the thickness of the ice will be continuously monitored, and same time tomorrow. And the next day will be the same, the press conference live on every network, a solemn ‘no’, and DAY TWELVE OF THE PANIC CRISIS.
[…]
And all the nation’s eyes will have turned North, to a province so obsessed with ice they just went ahead and called the place Freezeland, like a theme park for masochists, and our man Siebe will appear again, with all the journalists in the land having run out of questions to ask him, and it’s just as well, because he makes a face as if he is about to be forced to eat something disgusting, and says,
and says, and says … you will have to read the rest of Paul G. Hunt’s wonderful explanation of how Dutch Elfstedentocht fever works to find out.
(Photo by Paul van Eijden, some rights reserved)
Tags: Elfstedentocht, traits, winter
December 23, 2012
A museum dedicated to the computers of US manufacturer Apple has opened its doors in the town of Ureterp, just East of Drachten in Friesland.
The Apple Museum Nederland is run by volunteers and focuses on keeping Apple computers up and running so that visitors can experience first hand how these machines used to work. The museum is housed at the top floor of a Mac repair shop and is not affiliated with Apple.
On 22 December the museum opened its doors for the first time and it will also be open on 29 December and 5 January. The official opening will be on 16 March, Bright reports.
Macfreak says this is the third Apple museum in the world. The name Ureterp stems from Urathorp and means ‘Upper Village’, as in upstream from the river Boorne.
(Photo: Google Street View)
December 22, 2012
Project X-feest, a Project X party, has been voted the Dutch word of the year by dictionary maker Van Dale, Onze Taal reports.
The word refers to a spontaneous party to which everybody is invited, and is named after the movie Project X which tells the story of a similar party. In September this year the small town of Haren suffered over 1 million euro in damages after looters and rioters visited Project X Haren.
The second place was awarded to the word bangalijst, a list of girls that are considered ‘easy’.
Some other words from the West considered good, influential or popular, all from Onze Taal:
Some of the ugliest words:
One of my personal favourites, after watture, is the German word komasutra, the result of drunk people attempting to make love.
Tags: neologisms, words
December 17, 2012
Richard Garsthagen made this ingenious gift box for his 15-year-old niece for Saint Nicholas’ Eve.
On Saint Nicholas’ Eve many grown ups and teenagers in the Netherlands give each other gifts. To keep things affordable a spending limit is determined and the name of each recipient is drawn from a hat. The gift is hidden somewhere in the house or wrapped in a difficult to unwrap package called the ‘surprise’, and the person giving it writes a poem on behalf of Saint Nicholas in which the good saint mockingly reviews the recipients’ past year.
Garsthagen’s niece did not seem to understand the concept of a spending limit and asked for gifts that were much more expensive than that, so he hid her gift in a The Price is Right game. In the video he explains how it works, and at Instructables he explains how you can create a game like this yourself.
(Photo: crop from a screenshot of the video by Richard Garsthagen)
Tags: gift, Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas
December 16, 2012
We Make Carpets is an art project in which the artists use everyday objects to create temporary carpets. The carpet shown above was made of bottles and was displayed at the Taragalte Festival 2012 in M’hamid, Morocco.
The collective We Make Carpets consists of Marcia Nolte, Stijn van der Vleuten and Bob Waardenburg. Their base materials are “products that normally have no value once they have been used, such as plastic forks, plasters, paving tiles, pasta, cotton balls and pegs”.
(Photo: We Make Carpets)
Tags: art out of garbage, carpets
December 15, 2012
The best employers in the Netherlands give employees the feeling that they are appreciated, Effectory and VNU Vacature Media claim.
The two companies polled employees in 269 organisations. Employees in the companies that were rated the highest gave the biggest marks for the following qualities:
The top three of the companies with 1,000 employees and more were:
Stichting Buurtzorg Nederland, a home care foundation, won the Best Employer Award for the second year in a row. CEO Jos de Blok is a former nurse.
December 11, 2012
A company called 3DSVP will start offering 3D printing services on the premises of the Meneer Paprika store in Haarlem next January, Hyped.nl reports.
The store expects to sell products mainly made of polyamide, but also jewellery made of silver and stainless steel. 3DSVP has been running a web shop since September, showcasing the type of products that you can have them print.
A similar service will be offered by Office Centre in the first quarter of 2013, the difference being that the Easy 3D printing service will use paper as its base material. Office Centre is a Dutch company (founded in 1993 as a merger) that is now owned by American office supplies company Staples. According to Engadget the service “will handle architectural designs, maps, medical models, replica weapons and anything else that can be made with fragments of paper arranged in 0.1mm layers up to a maximum height of six inches”.
Note that realistic replicas of guns are strictly forbidden in the Netherlands.
See also: Ultimaker, a lightning fast 3D printer.
(Link tip: Laurent Chambon. Photo of an Ultimaker-printed casing for a small video camera by HeatSync Labs, some rights reserved)
Tags: 3D printing, GoPro, gun laws, gun replicas, guns, Haarlem, replicas, replication, weapons
December 9, 2012
Why would you want to ask a court whether an Apple iPad is a phone or a general computer? Well, if computers given as a Christmas bonus are considered income and phones are not, you might have an incentive, especially if the back taxes amount to 323,687 euro.
Broadcaster RTL Nederland gave 664 of its employees an iPad in 2010, including a Vodafone 3G subscription. The law says that something supplied by one’s employer does not count as income if this something is intended “to prevent costs, expenses or depreciations needed for a correct execution of one’s employment”, Arnoud Engelfriet reports.
The law also prescribes categories of devices that are applicable, including “phones, Internet and such communication devices, but not computers, nor similar devices or peripherals”.
RTL Nederland sued the Dutch tax office and the question before the court became whether these iPads were mainly computers or mainly communication devices. The court ruled on 30 November that “considering the format of the iPad (the version the claimants provided has a 9.7 inch screen diagonal) verbal communication should not be seen as the central function of the iPad.”
RTL Nederland will appeal the decision. “We are a media company,” a spokesperson told Webwereld. “We work with those iPads, they are part of our daily business.”
Tags: communication, companies, employees, employers, income tax, iPad, law, RTL, RTL Nederland, tax service, taxes, telephony
December 8, 2012
On 27 July 1668 lawyer, doctor and libertarian wunderkind Adriaan Koerbagh was convicted for heresy. His crime? Writing and publishing a dictionary* two years earlier.
Koerbagh was a religious man, but he held no truck with (too much) superstition. A thing that irritated him was the use of foreign (Greek or Latin) words in the Bible to obfuscate their often simple meanings. In his dictionary he pointed out that ‘angel’ merely meant ‘messenger’, that ‘devil’ meant ‘slanderer’ (“the devil was invented by theologians**”) and that Jesus Christ ought to be called Jesus the Anointed. He felt that theologians, lawyers and doctors used foreign words on purpose to keep the common man from seeing through their dogmas.
According to Pim den Boer, Koerbagh was the first Dutchman to publicly denounce miracles: “Theologians claim that a miracle is something that stands above nature or goes against it, but that is not true, because nothing can be above nature or go against it.”
In 1993 lexicographer Ewout Sanders published an anthology of Koerbagh’s dictionary, but now DBNL.org has published the whole thing. It is not clear to me if the book is still forbidden.
About the Bible Koerbagh wrote: “If the word would no longer be protected by fire and sword, it would deteriorate in no time.” The author would feel the force of that fire and sword. Two years after his conviction he died in prison at the age of 37.
*) Titled A Flower Garden Full of Loveliness Without Sadness.
**) I should point out that the common Dutch word for theologian, theoloog, is also derived from Greek. Koerbagh of course uses the Germanic form godsgeleerde.
(Link: Marc van Oostendorp)
Tags: Adriaan Koerbagh, dictionaries, lexicographers, lexicography
