The year 2019 in review for 24 Oranges starts with one of the coolest stories I have read in a while: microscope pioneer Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s original specimens were photographed by Wim van Egmond through one of the former’s original microscopes. Among the specimens were the optic nerve of a cow, a slice of cork, and ‘heavenly paper’, a matter that people in the seventeenth century described as paper fallen from heaven but that Van Leeuwenhoek brusquely identified as some sort of dried-out pond scum.

The cutest story must have been that of a kitten stowed away on a fishing boat that sailed from Harlingen, Friesland. The fishers took pity on the animal and let it gorge itself on fresh herring. They could swear little Katrien put on some weight during the trip.

Have you given up on the idea of a Huxleyan hell scape of soma and surveillance? Then we had some good news for you, yes you! In Helmond—because what is in a name?—you could get free housing for a year. The catch? Companies would get to record your every move using sensors, and harvest the resulting data. “Own your data”, they called it, because the scheme turned your complete lack of privacy into a handful of pennies.

You may have heard of a verbal agreement being legally binding, but Dutch law doesn’t have much to say about how you agree on anything, as an unnamed amateur football club from Rotterdam found out to its own detriment. A contract written on a coaster was enough to force the club to pay one of its players 11.000 euro in back pay.

In 1991 Manja Blok became the first female operational F-16 pilot in the world, and in 1993 she became the first Dutch Air Force pilot since WWII to engage in armed combat. We probably should write an article about her some day. Blok has left the Air Force long since and this is not that story. The days of a progressive Dutch Air Force and competent pilots seem behind us, now that Dutch fighter pilots actually shoot their own planes during exercises. In January an F-16 managed to catch up with the bullets from its own MA61A1 Vulcan Gatling gun at a military range on the island of Vlieland.

While Dutch universities closed their Dutch language studies, the Dutch tried their hand at seagull scream impressions. The Netherlands also experienced its warmest summer day in history.

Finally, for us at 24 Oranges HQ personally 2019 stood out mostly because of a short but sweet experiment in a different medium. We had our own radio show! From May to October we had a weekly programme on Broadcast Amsterdam called Happy Hour in which Orangemaster and I discussed the local news. Sadly, we had to give it up (doing the show took up Orangemaster’s only free night), but we had a great little run!

Related: last year’s review.

The year 2015 was the year of ‘concerned citizens’ who made a lot of noise whenever different looking asylum seekers threatened to appear. However, that didn’t stop us from finding some great stories in 2015.

One way to escape this annoying din is by taking an airplane and flying above it, except that planes taking off and landing actually produce a lot more sound than you’d think. For this Schiphol Airport came up with an ingenious landscaping solution.

We like to write about beautiful things when we can. Did you catch the video of opera singer Ambrož Bajec-Lapajne undergoing brain surgery? In order to check whether the surgeons were keeping important areas of the brain intact, the tenor sang parts of Schubert’s lied ‘Gute Nacht’ during the operation.

Jolene Carlier designed a cool little popcorn maker and Hendrik Willem Mesdag once wrote a sweet love letter on the back of a tiny landscape painting, discovered only this year.

A friendly civil servant in Utrecht thought his parks were too clean for the team building exercise brewer InBev had in mind for some of its employees, so he put some litter back in. Just what politicians, multinationals and pundits alike needed – they all fired up their outrage engines.

Single and same-sex parents are still experiencing many problems not only raising children, but also getting them in the first place. Single women are systematically excluded from IVF treatments and gay couples find that the world gets increasingly smaller when it comes to surrogacy (external link, Dutch). Currently three baby hatches in the country, with plans for more, allow mothers to safely abandon their baby.

The oldest living bonds in the world were issued in the Dutch Golden Age to pay for dikes and other works that control the flow of water. An American university travels once every generation to Houten to collect a few euro in interest from the local water board and to keep their bearer bond alive.

It was also a good year for dogs who got their own money. Unfortunately for them, it’s counterfeit money.

(Photo of oliebollen by Andy Smith, some rights reserved)