March 7, 2018

Van Gogh on sale for 3.5 million euro

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 6:01 pm

van-gogh-harvest-detail

A still life by Vincent van Gogh will be for sale at The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, a painting made in 1885 when Van Gogh lived in Nuenen, Noord-Brabant, which features bottles and cowrie shells. Since 1968, the painting has been owned by a private individual.

This will also be the second time that a Van Gogh painting is up for sale at TEFAF. The first time it was a townscape that changed hands for 1.4 million euro.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl, Image: extreme close-up of The Harvest via Van Gogh Museum)

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January 24, 2018

Sexist carnival theme gets students’ funding cut

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 1:07 pm
carnaval

The Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Eindhoven University of Technology, Jan Mengelers, ‘blew up’ at a student association for using a sexist and ‘rapey’ carnival themed party on campus entitled #nietoo intended as a play on words and a rhyme of #meetoo.

Translated into English, the theme is ‘What women want doesn’t count’ (‘De wil van de vrouw doet er #nietoo’), with a wonderful image of a young woman with tape over her mouth and #nietoo stamped on it. These are future engineers in the making; their parents must be proud.

Mengelers gave the representatives of this student association, which I have a feeling has little or no women in it, a stern talking to on the same day he found out and in true straight up Brabo style told them this conversation wasn’t going to be a long one and told them their annual funding has been cut off.

The student association plans to publicly apologise, cancel the party and investigate internally. In one month, these morons will have to talk to Mengelers again and see if they’re still the cavemen they’ve shown us they can be.

update: The poster in question (see link), which was a bit tough to read, also reads ‘for 18 years and up and 5 years and under’ which shocked a lot of people more than the sexist remarks.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl)

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December 5, 2017

Road sign riddle in Zaltbommel

Filed under: Animals,Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 6:28 pm

Signs-from-Zaltbommel

These signs spotted in Zaltbommel, Noord-Brabant look like more of a riddle than actual road signs, but the worse part is, they say exactly what the municipality needed to say: no horseback riders.

Why not a sign with a horseback rider and a red stripe around it sort of business like with other types of road signs? Because the sign that expresses no horseback riders isn’t an official sign any more by law, although one was actually put one on the shoulder ‘to make things clear’. By law, horseback riders are now considered agriculture vehicles even if the vehicles in question don’t require horses.

The top sign in this image is ‘road closed to horseback riders, cattle, motor vehicles and motorbikes that cannot go faster than 25 kph and microcars, as well as cyclists, scooters and handicapped vehicles’. The bottom sign says ‘except’ (the ‘U’ in the word ‘uitzondering’ (‘exception’) in Dutch should be lower case) and then the same pictograms, but excluding the horseback riders.

(Link and image: omroepgelderland.nl)

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November 24, 2017

First Belgian-Dutch series to hit Netflix

Filed under: Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 11:36 am

The first Belgian-Dutch co-production ‘Undercover’, a 10-part series, is set to hit Netflix in 2019, and it stars Anna Drijver (Dutch), Frank Lammers (Dutch), Elise Schaap (Dutch) and Tom Waes (Belgian), produced by Jan Theys (Belgian), with writer and showrunner Nico Moolenaar (Dutch) and directed by Eshref Reybrouck (Belgian) and Frank Devos (Belgian).

For those of you who have watched the Netflix series ‘Narcos’, an American series about the cocaine trade in Colombia, consider this its European ecstasy cousin, but then set in the Netherlands and Belgium. Not a week goes by in the Netherlands and possibly Belgium without a news item about drums of chemicals used to make ecstasy (aka MDMA) found dumped in woods in the province of Noord-Brabant, so someone might as well make a series about it.

“I found it incredible to learn that the Netherlands and Belgium are such a huge part of the global drug trafficking network”, said producer Jan Theys. As for cocaine, the Netherlands remains the ‘Colombia of Western Europe’ and used to be the best and biggest cocaine producing country in the world until WWII.

(Link: broadwayworld.com, Photo: DEA)

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November 7, 2017

World’s first hybrid mobile crane is Dutch

Filed under: Automobiles,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 8:14 pm

Crane

Crane manufacturer Spierings from Oss, Noord-Brabant will be presenting the world’ first hybrid mobile crane, a zero-emission vehicle, with the exception of using a small diesel motor on the motorway. Its SK487-AT3 City Boy will be unveiled on 18 November to guests from around the world.

The SK487-AT3 City Boy was specially designed for an urban environment where environmental requirements are increasingly higher. It is modular, runs on electricity, and is easily manoeuvrable in typically narrow Dutch streets and busy cities. Like a hybrid car, the SK487-AT3 can be charged up and can also run on its own battery for a few hours.

(Link and photo: omroepbrabant.nl)

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October 7, 2017

Eastern Europeans berated for picking mushrooms

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Orangemaster @ 11:30 am

Shiitake

A Dutch friend who really enjoys a good walk in the woods of Noord-Brabant and talking pictures of mushrooms and other fungi not far from their village has been very upset at all the Eastern Europeans picking ‘buckets full of mushrooms’. I don’t know if they saw any of them pick the mushrooms (I think so) or if they read it in the papers and found culprits to get angry at, but either way, Eastern Europeans really like to pick mushrooms, as I know from that part of my own Eastern European background. And this year is a grand cru year for mushrooms according to experts.

To Eastern European this is harvest time: they will make soups, marinated mushrooms, many dumplings stuffed with mushroom and the likes. It’s free food in the woods and they know which mushrooms to pick and which ones not to. Many cultures are taught not to pick mushrooms at all because some of them are poisonous and they could make a mistake and get sick, just like another part of my own culture taught me.

However, even if the culprits ‘plunder’ the woods, straight up blaming a group of people for a behaviour that is 1) not fully understood by the locals and 2) where the rules are unclear even to the Dutch, then you’ll cultivate racist and bigoted comments in no time, which is exactly what happened to my friend’s post.

There are roughly 5,000 types of mushrooms in Dutch nature, of which about 100 are poisonous, which is why the Dutch learn not to pick them, and people do get sick every year from eating the wrong kinds. Forest rangers explain that mushrooms are not protected by law, but if you do pick too many of them, you’ll mess up nature. They say picking 250 grams is socially acceptable, again none of this is the law and I can imagine that groups of people of all nationalities are going to ignore this. More than the suggested 250 grams is considering ‘stealing’ and can ring up a fine of about 100 euro. However, none of this is a deterrent for someone who wants to just pick a whole lot of mushrooms and has been doing so since they were children.

Besides not knowing the rules and not understanding why the Dutch would leave food lying around in the forest, Eastern Europeans know their mushrooms well. It’s up to the Dutch authorities to find a way to get their vague yet well meant message across instead of making blanket racist comments on social media. That’s not going to work at all.

(Links: ed.nl, nhnieuws.nl, Photo of shiitake mushrooms by pjah73, some rights reserved)

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September 20, 2017

Inflatable refugee floats through Breda

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 7:51 pm

Refugee

A six-meter-high Inflatable Refugee, an art project by Dutch-Flemish duo Schellekens & Peleman, will be floating around the waters of Breda, Noord-Brabant as of today, after having done the same in big cities such as Venice and Copenhagen.

The refugee is made of the same material as the rubber boats used by human traffickers to transport refugees. As Schellekens & Peleman explains, the rubber is too fragile for the sea, making this figure extra vulnerable.

Will the refugee arrive safely on land or will he pushed away? The size was very deliberate, representing how the Western world looks at the refugee problem. Does he represent an opportunity or a problem? The goal was to start a discussion.

(Link: omroepbrabant.nl, Photo from Facebook)

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July 15, 2017

World’s biggest mobile swing ride in Uden

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 8:56 pm

oktoberfest1.JPG

The city of Uden, Noord-Brabant is currently featuring the biggest mobile chair swing ride in the world. It stands at 80 metres and can go up to 70 kilometres an hour. Specification wise, it is identical to the Star Flyer at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen, although that swing ride is a fixed one.

The biggest fixed swing chair ride in the world can be found at Six Flags Over Texas in the United States, and its called Sky Screamer. It has a height of 121 metres and reaches speeds of 56 kilometers an hour, which makes sense given the sheer size of the ride (POV video).

(Link: ed.nl, Photo of a chair swing ride at Oktoberfest, Munich)

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April 12, 2017

Giving birth in another city or province? Hell no

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

What could be better than giving birth to a healthy baby? Having it born in the same city or province where you live.

While the city of Amstelveen next to Amsterdam has been busy delivering ‘Amsterdam’ babies due to maternity wards shutting down in Amsterdam, women from the province of Noord-Brabant bordering on the province of Limburg don’t want to give birth down the street outside their province, if we believe half of what can be read on De Limburger. (I spent 30 minutes logging in and getting red error messages trying to read the rest and I have given up).

According to a midwife from Noord-Brabant, about 10 times a year women refuse to give birth at the nearby hospital in Weert, Limburg simply because of the locality. The arguments are ‘we have nothing to do with that part of the country, we don’t know the city our child would be born in and we don’t want that city in our child’s passport’.

Since quite some women in the Netherlands give birth at home, worrying about have children born elsewhere was not much of an issue until more women started giving birth in hospitals, some of which are not in their locality. Internet searches tell me that women don’t mind giving birth elsewhere in principle, but when they find out they cannot claim their locality as the place of birth of their children, they change their plans. Hospitals around the country have even tried to see if they can’t have some sort of exclave set up so that the women get what they want in the child’s passport, but that has never been allowed. Three days after birth, a child has to be registered in the locality where it was born, end of.

This article from Noord-Brabant even claims that residents of Valkenswaard “will die out” because they are being born in Veldhoven instead of Valkenswaard, which, if you think about it, could mean in the future almost an entire city full of people not born there just because the hospital is down the street. I say almost because of home births, but then people also move later in life.

My two siblings were born at a hospital in a city that they never lived in, while I was born at the same hospital many moons earlier, but actually lived in the city in question, albeit later in life. The hospital was rezoned roughly a decade ago and now all three of us have never lived in the city where the hospital is today.

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January 6, 2017

World record Game of the Goose in Dutch hands

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 6:32 pm

Ganzenbord

And it’s a wrap: the Dutch world record of playing Game of the Goose is now 80 hours and is in Dutch hands, getting the four guys who played it into the Guinness Book of World Records.

According to Omroep Brabant, the last few hours were exhausting and not much fun any more, but once they had broken the old world record, they got a boost to finish the job. Fighting against the will to sleep was the most difficult part of what they had to do, but they did it.

(Link and screenshot: omroepbrabant.nl)

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