May 2, 2012

British RAF pilots cycle to the Netherlands for memorial

Filed under: Aviation,Bicycles,History by Orangemaster @ 10:28 pm

A group of nine pilots from the 99th RAF Squadron arrived in Landsmeer near Amsterdam today after four days of cycling from the UK. They were welcomed with a fanfare by the mayor like heroes. Every year they go to the monument to commemorate their deceased Squadron members. And since the British army is cutting back on expenses, the nine men couldn’t fly over and so they decided in true Dutch style to bike 750 kilometres.

The first question RTVNH (Radio and Television North Holland) had for one of them in true British understatement style was “how are your buttocks?”.

(Link: www.rtvnh.nl, Photo of Memorial by Bjorn V., some rights reserved)

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April 26, 2012

Lottery stops giving away bikes, man stops dumping bikes

Filed under: Bicycles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:06 pm

A year ago, a town won 2,000 bicycles from a national lottery that picks its winners based on their postal codes.

Bike shops were not happy, as they claimed they lost business. This year, the national lottery stopped giving away bikes for that exact reason: they kill local cycle shop business.

The lottery used to award 1,000 bikes to winners who lived in the same postcode area. But several cycle shop owners said this was wiping out their business – particularly if the prize fell in a small village.

In other weird bicycle-related news, a ‘mentally disturbed’ man from Friesland was caught dumping 60 stolen bikes in a canal. Onlookers fished out a dozen bikes out of the water, and the local police helped fish out the rest. The man is apparently getting professional help for his problem.

(Links: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl, www.dutchnews.nl)

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April 14, 2012

Journalistic portraits of photojournalists

Filed under: Bicycles,Photography by Branko Collin @ 9:26 am

Hebbediekiek is a web site of six photojournalists in The Hague (the seat of government of the Netherlands) that publish action shots taken of their colleagues. It’s basically them zooming out a little so that you don’t just see the ‘actors’ of politics, but also the ‘crew’.

The site drew some national attention when it recorded a photographer tumbling (see screenshot, top right) when he was trying to get a shot of Prime Minister Rutte trying to make his getaway on a bicycle. Krapuul.nl suggests that Rutte is driven by a chauffeured limo to these sort of affairs, and he only bikes the last few hundred metres.

Hebbedekiek—‘hebbe die kiek’ with the spaces in all the right places—means either ‘get that shot’ or ‘gimme that shot’, ‘kiek’ being the Dutch word for ‘snapshot’ and usually used in the diminutive, ‘kiekje’.

(Illustration: screenshot of hebbediekiek.nl. Link tip: Jeroen Mirck.)

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March 5, 2012

BodaBoda produces pillow seats for bicycle luggage carriers

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 2:50 pm

It certainly surprised one American tourist when he noticed several women giving their male friends a ride on their bicycle’s luggage rack on a sunny afternoon in 2006. Why wasn’t the man doing the work? Lack of courtesy? Emancipation? The reason is much more prosaic, I am afraid. Luggage racks are pretty hard on one’s behind. And the unspoken rule in the Netherlands is that the owner of the bike gets to decide who gets to sit where.

Three Utrecht students are now selling seats for the luggage rack. According to De Pers they noticed bicycles in Kenya kitted out with such seats:

Crossing the border between Kenya and Uganda in a motorised vehicle costs a lot of money. That is why people get off the bus and walk the two miles to the other side. Cyclists saw a gap in the market and started carrying people across the border. They would advertise their services asking “Border? Border?” That is how the bodaboda was born.

Quax [one of the Dutch students] would ride one of those bikes, and being white, people would stare at him, especially the time he offered to give his landlord a lift to the station. “The people who saw us did not believe their own eyes. This should not be. This should be the other way around. A white person should be on the back”, Quax said.

The seats cost between 20 and 27,50 euro, or 35 euro if you want your own design printed on them. You can also buy a complete bodaboda bike for 300 euro (shown above).

The students from Utrecht are happy when they spot the occasional bodaboda rider in their home town. In Kenia in the meantime the bodaboda has really taken off, and more and more often bodaboda riders use motorcycles. The Star publishes articles on boda etiquette (“place your hands on the rider’s hips around the waist”), and a local government has set aside 2.5 million Kenian shillings to train 500 bodaboda riders, also according to The Star.

Just remember, next time you hear Gers Pardoel sing “why don’t you hop on the back of my bike”, he’s not necessarily being a gentleman, unless he owns a bodaboda seat.

Illustration: bodaboda.nl.

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February 26, 2012

Bicycle thief caught because he could not reach the pedals

Filed under: Bicycles,General by Branko Collin @ 1:48 pm

Last Friday a man in Nijmegen drew the attention of the local constabulary because he failed to reach the pedals of the bicycle he was riding on the Hazenkampseweg.

A quick check of the frame number by the police officers who had been driving in an unmarked car that the bike had been stolen on January 13 from the Dukenberg shopping centre. The 21-year-old man was apprehended on suspicion of theft and handling stolen goods.

The bicycle will be returned to its owner.

(Link: politie.nl)

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February 23, 2012

Etymology of Dutch word for bicycle cracked after 140 years

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 4:48 pm

Two Flemish linguists of Ghent University in Belgium have finally pinpointed the historical origin of the Dutch word ‘fiets’ (‘bicycle’, sounds exactly like ‘feats’). They claim it comes from the German word ‘Vize’ (pronounced ‘vietse’, almost rhymes with ‘pizza’), which means the same as the English ‘vice’ (like in Vice-President, a ‘deputy’ president). In this case, it’s a surrogate horse, a ‘vice horse’. And a ‘vice horse’ is understood to be a bicycle.

The Dutch word ‘fiets’ was very different from the French word ‘vélocipède’, where the bicycle originated from in 1870, the English word and the German word ‘Fahrrad’. The French abbreviation ‘vélo’ couldn’t possibly have turned into ‘fiets’. A man called E.C. Viets from Wageningen started making bicycles around 1880, which was often quoted as a possible origin, but that was historically incorrect.

One day, one of the linguists was pouring some cider for a German colleague from a region who called it ‘Vize’ (vice-wine, surrogate wine), although in Dutch it could have sounded like the German had said ‘bad wine’ (‘vies’ in Dutch means ‘dirty’ or ‘bad quality’ in this case). But the German was speaking German and meant to say ‘surrogate wine’, ‘Vize’ being used for all kinds of surrogate things in his region of Germany.

The German ‘Vize-Pferd’ (‘surrogate horse’) was discovered by the linguists in written documents and then they found German dialect words ‘Fitz’ and ‘Fietse’, which was the missing link to ‘fiets’. A lot of Dutch words come from German, but for some reason, ‘Vize’, a bit like saying ‘bike’ or ‘vélo’ never made it over the German border.

(Link: www.standaard.be)

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February 8, 2012

Parking enforcement officers set the worst possible example

Filed under: Automobiles,Bicycles,General,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 12:41 pm

Parking enforcement officers in Amsterdam, and surely in other cities, cause nuisance to cyclists and pedestrians on their scooters. They drive side by side, sometimes against cycling traffic, and faster than the allowed 25 km/h. They have no reason or right to do any of this, either. Let me remind you that scooters and mopeds cause 10 to 20 percent of all accidents in the Netherlands.

And that’s not all. According to Nieuws uit Amsterdam, they don’t wear helmets and drive a polluting type of scooter, while the city pushes for traffic safety and clean air. You can imagine why cyclists union Fietsersbond highly recommends these parking enforcement officers do their jobs on a bicycle just like a whole bunch of other working people do.

Ever since the cold spell started well over a week ago, the beloved ticket givers have traded in their scooters for taxis. That’s right: the city is paying for them to be driven around town with taxpayers’ money by taxi. In Canada they’d just walk around wearing warm clothes, but oh no, snow is dangerous here! Why don’t they just have cars?

True, scootering around on icy streets is dangerous, and cycling is also not a good idea, but what’s wrong with walking? It’s like nobody thought of it. Tons of people work outdoors day in day out despite the cold, why are these people so special? Before ‘do you it yourself and see how cold it is’ pops up in the comments, I was a bike courier in Montréal, Canada for three years also during the winter with temps of -25 celsius. Dress warmly and keep moving.

(Link: www.nieuwsuitamsterdam.nl)

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January 19, 2012

‘Steep increase of kids in cycling accidents’

Filed under: Bicycles by Orangemaster @ 11:50 am
Pink bike

Children are placed on their parents’ bikes as babies, they learn to cycle to school at a certain age in the Netherlands and grow up to be adults that cycle to university and work. That’s how the Dutch roll.

However, accidents happen with cars, other cyclists, one’s own mistake, ducks crossing the bike path, etc. All parties involved (well, except the ducks) blame each other and it’s part of Dutch life to fall off your bike sometimes, even in a canal. That’s how the Dutch roll.

It’s a free country, so if people (expats usually) really think their kids wearing a helmet is going to help, fine, but most people don’t unless they’re in the Tour de France. That’s how the Dutch roll.

However, it’s one thing to have your kid come home crying and/or ending up in the hospital from a cycling accident, it’s another to realise they were playing a game on their mobile phone or texting their BFF while not looking where they were going. I mean, if mommy and daddy can do that driving to the IKEA on the weekend, they can too, right?

And so there are 35% more cycling accidents according to hospital reports between 2006-2010, with campaigns concentrating on collisions with cars, which is only part of the problem. Blaming cars is easy, but if you know anything about cycling in a bigger city, cyclists are sometimes their own worst enemy.

As a copywriter once put it, “safety is boring”.

I find injured children due to lack of proper parenting even more boring.

(Link: binnenland.nieuws.nl)

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December 28, 2011

Orangemaster’s favourite stories of 2011

Filed under: Bicycles,General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 5:33 pm

Another year of posting is coming to an end and it’s time to pick our favourite stories of 2011.

We had a lot of stories about cycling and bicycles which were retweeted by many people (thanks!), encouraging us to make a category for them, and a lot of stories about discriminatory and absurd laws and situations. Oh, and some sports news.

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December 25, 2011

De Sjonnies sing M’n Fiets is Gejat

Filed under: Bicycles,General,Music by Branko Collin @ 1:03 pm

Feliz Navidad, that sounds almost but not quite like M’n Fiets is Gejat (2007, My Bike was Stolen).

My bike was stolen (3x)
That sucks
My bike was stolen (3x)
That sucks

I don’t want to walk home
I have no money to buy a new one
By now my bike is at the bottom of the canal (gracht)

De Sjonnies (The Johnnies, named after Amsterdam singer Johnny Jordaan) were a Nijmegen based band from the 1990s and 2000s who had a smallish hit in 1995 with Dans Je de Hele Nacht met Mij? (Will You Dance All Night With Me?). As I was a student in Nijmegen in those days, I heard that song rather a lot.

Let me conclude by wishing you a mijn fiets is gejat from the bottom of my gracht.

Video: Youtube/Thijs de Nijs. Link: David Hembrow.

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