February 12, 2017

The Republic of Catan has a Dutch connection

Filed under: History,Weird by Orangemaster @ 8:20 pm

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There I was talking to a British guy about the snow we’re having in Amsterdam and he told me a story about having to call up the Republic of Catan for work and how nice they were. I thought he said ‘Qatar’, but no, he meant Catan.

Nope, nothing to do with most of your Google searches that will tell you about a board game. According to my digging, the Kingdom of Catan is the smallest nation in the world to claim full sovereign independence.

The Republic of Catan is a micronation, founded on March 10, 1999 by James Klaassen-White who is also King James Klaassen-White I who speaks English, French, Dutch and Spanish. I’m thinking one of his parents is Dutch. My British guy told me their first ever King a woman and that they always have a King regardless of gender, which I can’t confirm, but that’s pretty cool. Their ‘Patron Saint’ is King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, the area claimed is 3 square kilometres with a population of 14 in the UK close to Leeds.

And besides finding very little information and constantly reading ‘its’ as ‘it’s’ in at least three websites about Catan, I’m done searching. Oh, and Foreign & Kingdom Minister Booner announced that the Catan Government will put aside € 48,000 to assist the new Dutch Government fund for International Groups who support abortions, so they have some money apparently.

(Links: micronations, kocatan.eu, Flag of Catan)

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February 6, 2017

Unique Jewish Frisian wedding caught on film

Filed under: Film,History,Religion by Orangemaster @ 12:37 pm

A film of the only known footage of Frisian Jewish life from before the Holocaust is currently doing the rounds, and “comes amid a wave of popular interest in the Holocaust, including in films and series with record ratings and in the construction of monuments – most recently with the opening last year of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam.”

This unique black-and-white, silent document from 1939 shows the wedding of a Frisian Jewish couple who escaped the genocide, and was shown on Frisian public broadcaster, Omrop Fryslân. In late January the film was placed on YouTube by the Frisian Film Archive. The film reel was discovered by the couple’s children in their late mother’s suitcase in 2008, but they needed all those years to process its content.

Just a year after filming, the people in the movie would come under the Nazi occupation that decimated the Frisian Jewish community, along with 75 percent of Dutch Jews — the highest death rate in occupied Western Europe.

The Dutch government’s policy of storing information about its citizens enabled the Nazis to efficiently murder as many Jews as possible. Against all odds, this couple survived. Watch images of the wedding of Barend Boers of Amsterdam and Mimi Dwinger from Leeuwarden, Friesland.

(Link: timesofisrael, Photo by Jacques Lahitte, some rights reserved)

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January 23, 2017

Funny video explains the Netherlands to Trump

Filed under: Food & Drink,History by Orangemaster @ 12:05 pm

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Here’s some Dutch humour from Arjen Lubach’s show ‘Zondag met Lubach’, similar to The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in the United States.

The English video below introduces the Netherlands to Donald Trump in a way he should be able to understand: with someone who talks just like him. You’ll notice the Dutch crowd laughing when the narrator pronounces Dutch stuff properly. It also makes fun of the Dutch, which might account for quite a few dislikes on YouTube, but it also takes a good stab at the Dutch government, which is always a crowd-pleaser.

Since facts are going to be more important than ever this year, let’s again note that Trump vodka is made in the Netherlands, in Rotterdam by the Wanders Distillery.

Oh, and without giving away any spoilers, the word ‘pony’ in Dutch means ‘bangs’. Watch the video, it will makes sense.

(Link: parool.nl)

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January 18, 2017

Cannonball from the 17th century found in Groenlo

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 8:21 pm

Archaeologists have found a cannonball from 1627 in Groenlo, Gelderland during an excavation along the A18
motorway. It weighs four kilos and dates back to the Eighty Years’ War when the Dutch revolted against the Spanish King, Philip II. Experts know what year it is from because the Dutch army had established a siege line in Groenlo to reconquer the town from the Spanish.

Although pieces of pots and jewellery have also been found, this is the most interesting find so far. And the good news is the archaeologists have until May to uncover more exciting finds, as excavations are taking place in 10 locations along the A18 motorway.

(Link: omroepgelderland.nl, Photo: BOOR Rotterdam)

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December 30, 2016

Branko’s favourite postings of 2016

Filed under: Bicycles,Food & Drink,General,History by Orangemaster @ 1:30 pm

It’s that time of year again where we look back and tell you about some of the things we wrote about, and this year we had one clear theme that stood out and that, sadly, was ‘tastelessness’.

First the weird junk food combos:

Spring: the discodel

Summer: frikandel ice cream

Winter: smoked sausage and kroket

Dear Dutch snack bars, please follow our neighbouring countries and sell halloumi, and stop mixing crap already.

Next up, we have a tasteless escape room with Anne Frank as a theme.

The entire year saw some tasteless bashing of Ukraine. What did Ukraine ever do to us? Oh yeah, they gave back stolen Dutch paintings to a museum to show how classy they are.

As well, we found out in 2016 that supermarkets sell fertilised eggs, chicks prove it, we saw a food bank snub the poor over a Facebook like and had a good laugh at this organic fries truck stuck at a junk food chain drive.

And then to move towards some more classy bits, here’s the bicycle tunnel built in a single weekend in Utrecht, police training eagles to attack drones and a woman as the world’s first ever Professor of Fatherhood.

To finish off, here’s a story that went from classy to tasteless, an elderly woman sews bags from abandoned umbrellas, but then a few months later is pushed off her mobility scooter and robbed of her gold chain.

We’ll leave it at that, thanks for all your comments, and a reminder that next year is our 10th year anniversary in February, so I guess we should think about doing something special.

Happy New Year!

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December 14, 2016

Almere misspells historical Dutch street sign

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 11:07 am
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This street sign is from Amsterdam in 2007, with an extra ‘r’, wavering between ‘brug’ and ‘burg’.

A lot of people don’t care about spelling unless it’s their name being butchered. The city of Almere messed up the last name of former Dutch Prime Minister from 1973-1977 Joop Den Uyl by going with ‘Uil’. It was noticed by a politician of the Labour Party, of which Den Uyl was a member – he’s now deceased.

The park where the ‘path’ (‘pad’) actually is, is called ‘Den Uylpark’ where there’s a statue of Joop Den Uyl with what I’m sure is a plaque with his name also written as ‘Joop Den Uyl’.

Almere apparently has a reputation of messing up its colourful street names. In 2011 it took the city three tries to get ‘Chicagostraat’ right: first it was ‘Chigacostraat’, then ‘Chigagostraat’ and finally ‘Chicagostraat’. In 2008 ‘Popeyestraat’, named after the American cartoon character Popeye was ‘Popeystraat’, and the character ‘Marsipulami’ from the Belgian Gaston Lagaffe comic strips was first ‘Marsipulamihof’ instead of ‘Marsupilamihof’.

(Links: nos.nl, nu.nl, Photo of a misspelled street name in Amsterdam by Herenlunch)

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December 10, 2016

Amsterdam’s oldest coffeeshop forced to close in 2017

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 10:15 pm

Amsterdam is currently on a mission to close down many of its coffeeshops in 2017, as some of them are too close to schools, following a policy called ‘Project 1012’, referring to a downtown postal code and one of their next targets is the city’s oldest coffeeshop, Mellow Yellow opened in 1972, albeit at another location.

The mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan made a deal back in 2011 with the Dutch government that if they didn’t force him to make Amsterdam coffeeshops register foreign patrons he would close down coffeeshops that were less than 250 metres from schools. However, a report from the Bonger Institute of Criminology says the remaining coffeeshops are now so overcrowded that they have twice as many patrons with people queueing outside to get in, which is disruptive.

Then there’s stories about coffeeshops allowed to stay open because schools are either closing or moving, and when a school moves then other coffeeshops may all of a sudden have a problem. And there’s the story of a coffeeshop not having to close after all because someone measured the 250 metres incorrectly. Oh, and there are newspaper articles about coffeeshops being shot at and closed temporarily, so that the actual number of coffeeshops in Amsterdam is never quite right.

Goodbye Mellow Yellow, 1972-2017, the experts think you should stay open, but not the city who doesn’t want to see the new problems caused by shutting the likes of you down.

(Link: parool.nl, a report on Project 1012Photo by Eric Caballero, some rights reserved)

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October 10, 2016

Tourists school the Dutch on Dutch World Heritage sites

Filed under: History by Orangemaster @ 9:30 pm
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Yes, the quiz is in Dutch, but feel free to try and guess which sites are actually Dutch World Heritage sites (Wikipedia cheat sheet) by clicking on this link. I got 9 out of 15.

And if it makes you feel any better, the Dutch world heritage people have gone so far as to have a video campaign that says “Our world heritage is world-famous, soon to be famous in the Netherlands”, which is passive-aggressive speak for ‘how embarrassing, we don’t even know our own heritage’.

The underlying gripe in the Dutch media is that World Heritage sites in foreign countries are way cooler because the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and all that. I’m a foreigner who thinks there’s some great stuff to see here that even my family pushed me to visit years ago, which helped my score.

(Link: rtlnieuws, Photo: philips.nl)

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October 3, 2016

Help! My mammoth takes up too much space

Filed under: Animals,History,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:04 am

Online auction site Catawiki has all kinds of stuff up for grabs, and as of last weekend, there’s a Dutch person selling off a complete mammoth skeleton.

According to the auction site, there are seven complete mammoth skeletons in the Netherlands, and this was the only one not owned by a museum. Originally found in the North Sea, the bones are not from the same mammoth, and were carefully collected over time. The skeleton is 3.2 metres high and 5.5 metres long, with 270 bones and two tusks that are three metres long.

Catawiki expects the skeleton to fetch between 200,000 and 260,000 euro. As of last weekend the highest bid was 35,000 euro.

UPDATE: A German museum that wishes to remain anonymous has bought the skeleton for 120,000 euro.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo: Wolfgang Staudt, some rights reserved)

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September 29, 2016

New letters and photos of Mata Hari published

Filed under: History,Literature by Orangemaster @ 10:17 pm

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The Frisian History and Literature Centre Tresoar in Leeuwarden, Friesland have made public a gift of 48 letters and 14 photos never been seen before they received from the family of the ex-husband of famous Frisian exotic dancer, Mata Hari. The only thing Tresoar had to do in return was turn it all into a book, so that everyone could enjoy the discoveries. The book ‘Don’t think that I’m that bad’ (‘Denk niet dat ik slecht ben’) by Marita Mathijsen-Verkooijen should be out at least in Dutch any day now.

One of the letters written during Mata Hari’s life in Paris in 1904-1905 talked about her one day become a mother and how difficult her life was in general, while in another she talks about living in Nijmegen and having to sell her bike to be able to survive. Mata Hari’s life story is a great read in itself, and these letters will certainly help historians and fans find out even more about her turbulent life. Next year in 2017, the legal documents of 1917 about her execution by a firing squad just outside Paris for being a German spy on 15 October 1917 will be made public, so stay tuned for more.

(Link: nos.nl, Photo of Mata Hari in the public domain)

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