March 26, 2015

Park in Utrecht dumps trash for team building

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:12 am

giro_trash

A park in Utrecht that apparently didn’t have enough trash in it had some trash added to it by the city to make sure that beer giant Inbev could have a proper team building session picking up rubbish.

Imagine being a neighbour watching city employees dump trash into a park for the sake of some company’s team building outing and busloads of white collar employees having fun picking up the trash like problem youth doing community service.

The city of Utrecht admitted it was a bad call to dump more trash in the park, although they still did. They are probably only saying this because they got caught doing it. The idea of putting trash into a park to then have it picked up again is retarded.

To make things worse Inbev claims it knew nothing about the extra trash and would not have gone through with it if they had known, which is plausible. Either way Inbev was stuck dealing with a load of rubbish. The employees, who were geared up to do a good deed, can now team build on the feeling of having been screwed over.

(www.welingelichtekringen.nl)

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March 21, 2015

Toy shop sells mirrors for assaulting women

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 7:37 pm

Mirror

A distant cousin of the 1970s T-shirt ‘Sex inspector first lesson free’ that was once funny but now icky, this wonderful gadget called the ‘Extendable inspection mirror’ could be used as a toy to find things stuck behind furniture, but the image on the box suggests otherwise.

The image conveyed here is that it is OK for young boys (what is up with those glasses?) to sexually assault women because it’s funny. Although I’m glad Dutch folks on Twitter blew the whistle on this one, the typical ‘we thought it was odd too, but we stacked in the shelves anyway’ response from the shop shows how much critical thinking some employees have, which is none at all. The toy shop in question is busy scrambling and pulling the item from their shelves after it hit the media because they were too stupid to come to that conclusion themselves.

(Link and photo: nieuws.nl)

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March 19, 2015

Stedelijk Museum bans man threatening to pee on art

Filed under: Art,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:10 am

Stedelijk2

Not only has a man threatened to pee on art from South African artist Marlene Dumas at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, but he is also a known Dutch artist, Rob van Koningsbruggen, giving this story a hint of sour grapes. In 2012 the Stedelijk Museum had banned Van Koningsbruggen based on an email threat to pee all over the work ‘Osama Bin Laden’ by Dumas, saying that his stream of urine would greatly improve the painting.

The sad thing is, Van Koningsbruggen had a name for himself in the art world until about 2000 and after that he’s been mostly known for his criminal record. Van Koningsbruggen was found guilty of arson in 2007 and got banned from the Stedelijk, where he once had a major solo exhibition back when disco was still a thing.

Van Koningsbruggen went to court over the ban to have it overturned, but it will remain in effect. There was talk of having it overturned recently, which is why Van Koningsbruggen was back in the news.

If you like pee art, there’s always Theo from Eindhoven who makes pee eagles.

(Link: www.kunstbeeld.nl, Photo of Stedelijk Museum by chrissam42, some rights reserved)

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March 13, 2015

Dutch town asks locals to adopt dustbins

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:04 am

Pumerend, the town with the owl attacking everyone, has more worries on its hands: their budget for dustbins. Having decided to remove 431 of the 1011 dustbins to save 150,000 euro on emptying them, Pumerend is asking its residents to adopt dustbins so that they can stay in place.

Adopting a dustbin isn’t code for paying for it to stay in place while already paying for rubbish removal, that would be crazy talk. It means emptying on a regular basis, picking up any rubbish within a five meter radius, cleaning it, removing any stickers on it and a few other things you can read about in Dutch.

(Link: nieuws.nl)

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March 7, 2015

Questionable Dutch Kickstarter projects

Filed under: General,Music,Technology,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:24 pm

Of course, there are some amazing ideas floating around in the Netherlands, but there will always be some ‘non-starters’ because anybody can ask for money for anything. Just the spelling mistakes are like bushwhacking through a forest of flies. Here is a small selection of Kickstarter projects that make you wonder:

– A workshop space only for men and ‘males’, but freely using the world ‘everybody’.
Half blind boy.

– A female-fronted metal album because just a band would mean it was ‘male’ and automatically good.
How to hit the wrong chord.

– A self-cleaning shower cabin – I want to believe!
‘Only a man would come up a way not to clean’ cliché.

– An app that shows you all the places Michael Jackson has been. Are you LOL, too?
Give me Elvis instead.

– Someone is building a TARDIS!
This could actually be pretty cool.

(Link: www.kickstarter.com/discover/countries/NL, photo of a lightbulb by Emil Kabanov, some rights reserved)

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February 17, 2015

Dutch porn filmed at Belgian university

Filed under: Film,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:05 pm

Porn-UA

On a Dutch porn site Belgian journalists spotted a Dutch porno filmed at the University of Antwerpen with a Flemish girl in the lead as a student called Cloe who meets up with a cameraman and then gets down to business. The journalists passed on the tip to the university who says they are going to try and sue the people who made the film for hurting their reputation. The university campus of Groenenborger is clearly shown in the film as is the institution’s logo.

The site apparently indicates that Dutch porn queen Kim Holland could be involved, but that remains to be seen.

(Links: nos.nl, www.standaard.be, Photo of Anti-porn poster by fidelramos, some rights reserved)

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January 31, 2015

Haarlem bans freezer bags used by thieves

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 1:10 pm

Facepalm

The city of Haarlem has changed its local city ordinance to include a ban on reusable supermarket freezer bags, used to carry home frozen food. The bags have an inner layer of aluminium that foils supermarket alarm systems, making them popular with thieves. What if a thief put the freezer bag in a regular bag?

The ordinance was modified to be easier and less odd for the police to stop and question people carrying freezer bags, a bit like monitoring people buying screwdrivers and crowbars at the DIY store. Or else it looks like the cops are trying to score pizza and ice cream.

Municipal council justified their decision by saying that now the police “will be less racist and won’t just stop people based on their appearance”.

The Mayor of Haarlem, Bernt Schneiders, who came up with this brilliant idea is the same man who got his silver livery collar stolen from his office in 2011 (maybe a freezer bag was involved) and who in 2008 ‘corrected’ the Mayor of Beijing Wang Qisham telling him the Dutch had invented the printing press even though he was dead wrong.

(Link: www.haarlemsdagblad.nl, Photo of Paris Louvre facepalm by Phelan Riessen, some rights reserved)

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January 13, 2015

Royal military police have sex in Golden Carriage

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:19 am

golden-carriage-zoetnet

Riding in the Golden Carriage took on a whole new meaning this week as the media reports that young Royal Military Police (Marechaussee) regularly use it as a location to engage in intercourse. The Golden Carriage is to be used by the Dutch royal family once a year to bring the monarch from a palace to a ceremonial hall in order to deliver a throne speech.

The source of the story is the mother of one of the military police who claims photos and videos have been made as proof. The military police’s lawyer says the youth have extremely static and boring work, and so they get extremely bored. He’s not surprised that they act lewdly, as their moral consciousness is not fully developed.

In July 2014 some members of the military police were fired for stealing from a sweets vending machine. Older members of the corps have demonstrated bad behaviour as well when the man who stole a piece of royal carriage admitted to it 50 years later.

(Link: nieuws.nl, Photo by Zoetnet, some rights reserved)

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January 12, 2015

‘My first day with my drone’ goes viral

Filed under: Technology,Weird by Orangemaster @ 5:10 pm

Zwier Spanjer, 26, was playing with his new DJI phantom drone for the first time and it all went South, which you can see and hear on the video at about 0:26 when it starts to sound like a swarm of killer bees descending on an unknowing Dutch village.

At the moment of writing this, the video had over two million hits on YouTube and according to Vice.com some 7 to 8 million hits on Facebook and other social media. Be sure to watch the 15 second ‘love edition’ as well.

(Link: www.vice.com, Photo of Drone by Karen Axelrad, some rights reserved)

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January 7, 2015

Annoying Dutch adverts: pretty pans and superfluous sloths

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

‘Mooi’, the word repeated in the video below means ‘nice’ or ‘pretty’ — you get the idea. The problem with this advert is near the end when the man says, ‘they’re all really nice pans, but where can I find (buy) them?’ His tone is irritating, as if he’s imitating a stereotyped middle-aged Dutch woman or possibly a gay-ish man. The woman, who sounds more like a Dutch man, answers ‘fonq’, a brand name pronounced a bit like ‘funk’. ‘Are you going to cook, then?’, she says in an insulting manner, implying the man doesn’t do any cooking. ‘No, I’m going to bash your brains in with them,’ a retort that is meant to be funny, but falls flat like a pancake on the floor.

A wok shown in the middle was the Boomerang Wok, designed by Dutch designer Nicolai Carels.

The pan advert was recently nominated for Most Annoying Dutch Advert 2014, the ‘Loden Leeuw’ (Lead Lion) 2014 by television consumer program Radar, but
lost to a health insurance company that features animated sloths who save so much money on their health insurance they get unnecessary cosmetic surgery, as would Dutch celebs with too much time and money on their hands.

(Photo of a cooking class kitchen by Jana Gumprecht)

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