February 18, 2011

It’s a matter of playing the cultural card at the right time

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 2:37 pm

The once very popular Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) party has been losing a lot of ground particularly in provinces such as Limburg, to make a long story short. Interestingly, many prominent politicians such as Maxime Verhagen (right), currently Deputy Prime Minister (and first Dutch politician to Twitter) comes from Limburg, speaks dialect, especially as of late when asked to because it’s election time for the Dutch Senate.

Picture your favourite American or British band yelling ‘we love [fill in city or country of your choice]’ to woo the audience. And it works. In this case, Maxime loses points for not being able to fill in the blanks of a hugely popular song by Rowwen Hèze, Limburg’s number one ‘export’ who play American TexMex style music mainly in Limburgs dialect and have been around for some 20 years.

Presentator Twan Huys also from Limburg decided to see if Maxime wasn’t just ‘talking nonsense’ and made him switch to Maastricht dialect. At least he was able to fill that in. You could hear the sound of the students’ hearts strings twanging when ‘one of their own’ spoke their language.

The chorus of the song ‘Kwestie van Geduld’ (‘A Matter of Patience’) is in ‘standard’ Dutch on purpose.

” ‘t Is een kwestie van geduld,
rustig wachten op de dag,
dat heel Holland Limburgs lult,
dat heel Holland Limburgs lult.”

(’tis a matter of patience, waiting quietly for the day,
that all of Holland ‘yaps’ in Limburgs,
that all of Holland ‘yaps’ in Limburgs.)

The verb ‘lullen’ means ‘to bullshit’ or ‘talk nonsense’, but is much more neutral, so I went with ‘yapping’.

Holland is a large part of the Netherlands, South Holland and North Holland, a differentiation made by Limburgers to point out their cultural differences, especially their use of dialects in daily life instead of the ‘standard’ Dutch language.

No one give me a lesson on all of this, I’ve been hearing it for 12 years from my Limburg co-blogger.

(Link: limburger.nl)

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February 16, 2011

Banks make 125,000 homes unsellable

Filed under: Architecture,General by Orangemaster @ 1:48 pm

Dutch television news show EenVandaag gave me a new reason to be scared to ever buy a house in the Netherlands. Since 10 February 2010 Dutch banks have decided not to approve any mortgages to people buying a house built on ground owned by a private person. This means that some 125,000 home owners are now stuck in their homes forever, unless they leave it empty and move, or rent it.

Homes in the Netherlands are often built on ground that is leased from someone else, usually a local government or a housing corporation, a very common practice in big cities like Amsterdam. In fact, real estate agents in Amsterdam, where most homes are built on leased ground albeit owned by the city, are now refusing to sell any houses built on ground owned by private persons.

Why would banks pull this? Acccording to De Telegraaf, the regulatory body of Dutch banks has a duty to assess the risk of the loan, and find it too difficult when the ground is privately owned. The legislation on ground leasing is said to be “complete chaos” and deals with “forced contracts” (I like the Dutch ‘wurgcontract’, which literally means ‘strangulatory contract’). These private ground owners are basically mimicking the government who also ask for “mafia-like amounts” when ground leasing. Fighting the government for unfair practices is one thing, but you can’t do that with a private person who can apparently do what they want.

(Links: ad, telegraaf)

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February 9, 2011

Bicycles as shop signs

Filed under: Bicycles,General by Branko Collin @ 8:30 pm

On Monday I saw this bicycle sticking out of a wall in the Westerpark neighbourhood of Amsterdam to indicate that the shop below sells and repairs bikes. Later that day I saw that another entrepreneur in De Pijp neighbourhood had come up with more or less the same idea, except in this case to confusingly signal the presence of a hotel.

Granted, it was a bicycle hotel.

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Flanders fears Dutch invasion of slow students

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 2:49 pm

De Telegraaf reports that universities in Flemish-speaking Belgium fear an influx of Dutch students once tuition fees in the Netherlands go up for ‘lazy students’.

State secretary for Education Halbe Zijlstra wants to crank up tuition for these students to about 5,000 euro, while studying in Flanders costs a mere 557 euro a year and is of comparable, if not sometimes better quality.

“Dutch students in Flanders already have a bad reputation: at the University of Antwerp Dutch students are twice as likely as Belgians to drop out and the failure rate at the University of Ghent is also very high.”

Under European law, universities are not allowed to discriminate against students from other Member States, and Flemish Minister of Education Peter Smit is keeping his eye on the border crossing. Sounds a bit much? It apparently happened to French-speaking Belgium (aka Wallonia) with an ‘invasion’ of French students some time ago.

And then using the word ‘lazy’ is something Zijlstra himself uses on telly as of late. He feels that someone who takes 7 years to complete a university degree has issues. Then again, stories like having sick parents, having been in an accident and ‘I chose the wrong study programme’ are often heard as responses.

(I took 5 years to finish my 3-year Bachelor’s in Québec because I did two years part-time (had to work part-time to pay for it) and had to do one year over when I switched universities because an entire year was refused by my new university. Laziness was not an issue! Oh and I graduated cum laude.)

(Links : dutchnews via telegraaf)

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February 5, 2011

Tombstone becomes property of survivors

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:35 pm

Tombstones will remain the property of those who bought them in the first place, Minister of the Interior Piet Hein Donner announced last Monday. Until now, cemeteries would assume ownership once the stone was placed on the grave.

Cemeteries, Uitvaart.nl reports, now have to contact the survivors once the grave rights run out. Survivors can then opt to collect the tombstone.

Grave rights in the Netherlands typically last 10 or 20 years. The new regulation enters in force on 1 March, having already been in force since 1 January 2010 for new graves.

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February 3, 2011

Stop smoking by blackmailing yourself

Filed under: General,Health,Online by Orangemaster @ 9:12 pm

Ah yes, trying to stop smoking. I’ve heard that’s really tough.

And now there’s trying to stop smoking 2.0 using a Facebook app, created for the Dutch anti-smoking council, called ‘Blackmail yourself’. And before you go ‘pfff’, think of all adverts in your country making people feel guilty by showing blackened lungs and yellow teeth, or teenagers trying to act cool and all those ads that never ever worked.

I have a problem with the video’s narration, telling you to pick a controller (friend) and “giving him permission to post your picture if he ever spots you with a cigarette again.” I don’t understand why such a presumably important message is in English (speaking of trying to be cool) and assumes everyone is a ‘he’, as women smoke too and probably also want to quit.

I dare to suggest that there is no such thing as an anti-smoking campaign that works. In recent years banning smoking in public places and in bars and cafés in the Netherlands seemed to be the only thing that has had some effect.

(Link: amsterdamadblog)

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January 31, 2011

Even gossip queens have a right to privacy

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:47 am

The Court of Appeal in Den Bosch has recently ruled that the public prosecutor must start a case against broadcaster BNN reporters Sophie Hilbrand and Filemon Wesselink for spying on TV presenter Albert Verlinde and his husband, Onno Hoes.

Ironically, Albert Verlinde is one of the presenters of TV gossip programme RTL Boulevard, and Onno Hoes is the Mayor of Maastricht—between them they must have committed more privacy violations than all the hidden cameras in girls’ locker rooms the world over combined.

Volkskrant reports that reporters Sophie Hilbrand and Philemon Wesselink installed audio recording equipment in an award they presented to Verlinde, the ‘Golden Ear”, with which they successfully recorded a discussion Verlinde and Hoes had in the car on their way home. The public prosecutor had already fined the reporters, so that they now get punished for the same offence twice. For the record, double jeopardy—or ne bis in idem as it is called here—is illegal in the Netherlands.

(Photo of Albert Verlinde by Thomas van de Weerd, some rights reserved)

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January 30, 2011

RFID readers sold out after news of hackable transport card broke

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:51 pm

Trouw reports that the SRR220A RFID card reader is sold out in at least one webshop after word got out that hacking the Dutch transport card is both cheap and easy. The card reader will let you top up the card without paying.

Volkskrant adds that another online store, i-Pos, has sold hundreds. “It’s a mad house here, the orders are coming in day and night,” General Manager Dirk van der Heijden told the paper.

Meanwhile, Trans Link Systems (TLS), the besieged company behind the ill-fated Dutch transport card, refuses to warn users who forgot to swipe the card on check-out, Webwereld reports. The result is that many travellers are ‘fined’ 4, 10 or 20 euro every time they forget to check out—the amount depends on the deposit the transport company charges when you check in.

Dutch parliament told TLS that it has to send forgetful passengers an e-mail upon detecting the error. According to TLS, detecting the problem is a “technological impossibility”. Webwereld readers were quick to point out that just a few days ago TLS was boasting about how easy it is to detect use of a fraudulently topped-up public transport chip card.

Asking for a restitution seems to be an arduous task as well. Only in 1 in 18 passengers go through the trouble.

According to Dutchnews.nl, the province of Zuid-Holland has delayed the abandonment of paper bus tickets (the so-called Strippenkaart) due to the current problems with the transport card.

See also: Right to public transport refunds finite.

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January 16, 2011

Fathers of young children prefer part-time jobs too

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 3:38 pm

Women with partners prefer part-time jobs, we wrote last year. In fact, 50% of all Dutch women already have a part-time job. And dads want in on that action. According to the New York Times (via the Deccan Herald), one in three men either work part-time, or work four nine-hour days:

For a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush hour traffic.

There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch economics ministry, offices have moved into ‘flex-buildings’, where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.

The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.

Radio Netherlands wonders if society’s demand that fathers take a more active role in the upbringing of their children will lead to new Super Dads. Surely men will have to spend more than just one Daddy Day with their children to earn that moniker? When the term was applied to women, it meant women with two full-time jobs: one at home, and one at the office. It seems that even in the gender equality debate, a man gets the same reward as a woman for less work.

(Photo by Eelke Dekker, some rights reserved)

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January 12, 2011

KPN phone booth to disappear for good

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:43 pm

Back in 2008 ex phone company monopoly KPN was reducing the number of pay phones from the streets, only leaving some in places with a high concentration of elderly people. In fact, KPN was legally obliged to still have one pay phone per 5,000 inhabitants until 2008. Now it’s time to get rid of them altogether because the mobile phone has made them obsolete. I can’t imagine it’s easier for the elderly to even find let alone use a pay phone with the cards and codes.

The picture here is a stack of phone booths in Haarlem across from the Carlton Square Hotel.

(Link: dutchnews, Photo of KPN phone booth art by Shirley de Jong, some rights reserved)

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