March 28, 2013
With very manly advertising about taming the beast, Amsterdam now has its own equivalent of Schorem, a man’s hairdresser that Rotterdam has.
Barber shaves & trims lets guys have a nice, old fashioned razor shave or a beard trim as well as a coffee, beer or even whisky while they get pampered.
(Link: www.amsterdamadblog.com, Photo of Barber pole by *Sally M*, some rights reserved)
March 17, 2013
Public swimming pool Tropicana was built in 1988 on the Maasboulevard in the heart of Rotterdam and closed its doors again in 2010.
The Vers Beton blog asked photographer Frank Hanswijk to go and take a peek, which he did. He created a short photo report in which he documents the rapid deterioration of an abandoned public pool. In as short a time as three years the water has receded and most of the plants have died, and in their stead rust and dirt are conquering every inch.
In the 1980s tropical themed public pools became popular in the Netherlands—at least in my recollection. These pools focussed less on lap swimming and more on other types of recreation. They were typically equipped with water slides, whirl pools, wave pools and so on, and were nicknamed subtropische zwemparadijzen.
(Link: Trendbeheer, Photo: Frank Hanswijk)
Tags: Center Parcs, Frank Hanswijk, public pools, Rotterdam, Tropicana, wave pools
February 24, 2013
Students of the Willem de Kooning art academy in Rotterdam have managed to take a search string, ‘ultimate business car’, and have this produce five pictures in Google’s search engine for images that, once put next to each other, form an advertisement.
Search engines are in a continuous battle with Search Engine Optimizers, companies with the morals of an arsonist who try to replace relevant search results with links to the sites of their paymasters.
Students Pim van Bommel, Guus ter Beek and Alwin Lanting used the help of ‘hardcore SEO-ers’ to get the ad to show up in Google’s search results. The ad is no longer visible in its original form. When 24 Oranges searched for ‘ultimate business car’, the first panel had disappeared entirely and the text panels were in a different order. Van Bommel told Bright: “As soon as users start clicking on images Google’s algorithm changes the display order based on popularity. Unfortunately that is an aspect we do not yet control. Ads in which the order of the images is of less importance would be a good solution.”
The students call this concept Search Engine Advertising.
(Image: guusterbeek.nl)
Tags: advertising, Google, Google Images, Rotterdam, search engine optimizations, search engines, SEO, Willem de Kooning
January 26, 2013
The thieves that stole seven paintings from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam last October considered burning the art, Rheinische Post reports.
The German newspaper says that Romanian detectives overheard a phone conversation in which the suspects discussed getting rid of the paintings. The suspects were unable to find buyers and presumably wanted to clear any traces that would lead to them.
It is not known whether the suspects managed to put their plan into action. Romanian broadcaster Antenna 3 claimed that two of the seven paintings had been found, but Dutch police was unable to confirm this, NRC reports. Last Monday three suspects were arrested in Bucharest.
The Kunsthal theft made headlines because the security system was laughably easy to break. The entire theft took no more than two minutes, Business Week reported back then.
The missing paintings are;
(Illustration: Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet. Source: politie.nl)
Tags: Claude Monet, Henri Matisse, Kunsthal, Meyer de Haan, Pablo Picasso, paintings, Paul Gauguin, Romania, Rotterdam, security, security systems
January 2, 2013
On New Year’s Eve in and around Rotterdam trams were free of charge because the check-in devices were programmed to believe that the year 2012 was a leap year. Since nobody could check in using the right device (scan their cards), transport was free.
A traveller also commented that when he tried to buy a monthly travel card on 30 December 2012 from the appropriate vending machine, it would insist the year had to contain 2012 in it and did not recognise the year 2013.
Maybe the software was programmed by Mayans.
(Link: www.rijnmond.nl)
Tags: public transport, Rotterdam, tram
November 25, 2012
Last year the store owners association Rotterdam Centrum came up with remarkable Christmas decorations, namely LED-lit plastic jerry cans.
An actual design agency called M.E.S.T. (the name means ‘manure’) came up with the idea, and of course they also came up with a back story. The use of jerry cans apparently highlighted the fact that Rotterdam is a port in which brawn is typically rated above brain and it also stressed environmental commitment. Perhaps unsurprisingly the brawny citizens of Rotterdam ignored the intellectualizations and thought the decorations were naff.
This year the store owners association of the Jan Evertsenstraat in Amsterdam took a long, hard look at the Christmas decoration dilemma and decided to take the same disastrous direction.
Amsterdammers were not amused. Unlike their brothers and sisters from the city on the Rotte they used stronger terms to display their displeasure: “This is an outrage, it is horrible,” one man told AT5. Another said that the decorations had to be done on the cheap, “and it shows.”
The district paid for the decorations with tax money so it is not surprising that they crow about the results, although even their copywriters had a little trouble coming up with language that didn’t sound sarcastic: “And this really is unique, you cannot even call them real Christmas lights.”
Our very own Orangemaster had a chat with the owner of trendy Bar Baarsch on the Jan Evertsenstraat and asked him what he thought of the lights. “I think they’re great”, he said. He liked the fact that they were festive but not Christmassy. I told him that it reminded me of a Mexican fiesta like atmosphere, with more of a summer feel to it. He also liked the idea that people didn’t like it because the publicity is great, too.
Tags: Amsterdam, Christmas, Christmas decorations, Christmas lights, Rotterdam, seasonal decorations
November 2, 2012
The recently restored former passenger liner SS Rotterdam will stay in the city it was named after, DutchNews reports.
The ship was bought in 2005 by housing corporation Woonbron which wanted to turn it into a hotel and restaurant complex after renovations. Renovations, however, cost 230 million euro, which is 224 million euro over budget. Woonbron started capsizing and had to let go of the monumental steamer, and at the same time of its board member Martien Kromwijk.
NRC adds that the high cost was partially related to the unexpected presence of asbestos on board.
In 2009 the cost overrun was still limited to ‘merely’ 169 million euro, as 24 Oranges reported back then.
The new owner Westcord Hotels, a Dutch hotel chain, paid almost 30 million euro.
(Photo by Jakub Bogucki, some rights reserved)
Tags: boats, budgeting, budgets, hotels, housing corporations, restaurants, Rotterdam, ships, SS Rotterdam, steam ships
October 23, 2012
By now the art world has heard of the seven works of art stolen from the Kunsthal museum in Rotterdam on 16 October, which included works by Picasso, Monet, Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Lucian Freud and Meyer de Haan. It took the thieves just two minutes to get the paintings and drive off.
Although they might have had some inside help, the thieves simply made sure that a piece of plastic was jammed between the doorpost and the door, making it look like the door was also locked. Normally, the doors are electronically locked until the alarm is deactivated. Once the alarm is activated, the doors unlock.
Insert face palm.
Earlier this year two visitors were stuck in the museum after closing time because security guards had not noticed them. The room they were in was the same room as the one were the paintings were stolen. The visitors left through the emergency exit, and it took the guards 10 minutes to notice it.
Museum director Emily Ansenk claiming the system is ‘state of the art’ in the media sounds like a communist quoting the party line. Dutch news site NOS qualified her statement as ‘utter nonsense’ . To make things even more embarrassing, the Kunsthal has placed large flower pots around the museum so no one can easily park a getaway car right outside it.
To quote an art restorer friend of mine: “I can sleep soundly at night knowing that the Netherlands’ cultural property is now being protected by flower pots.”
(Links: www.nrc.nl, www.businessweek.com, Photo of locked door by boetter, some rights reserved)
October 6, 2012
Controversial artist Tinkebell has announced she will report a theft with the police after a TV Rijnmond reporter took two snails from an exhibit with him. TV Rijnmond handed over the snails to Dierenbescherming (‘Animal Protection’, an association with 200,000 members and 31 local chapters) for further study.
Tinkebell is currently exhibiting some 1,000 live snails with beads glued to them as part of a larger exhibition at the Villa Zebra children’s museum called Ah, wat lief! (‘So sweet’). The exhibition is supposed to explore and challenge how children look at animals—which ones do they find cute, and which ones do they find horrid.
Earlier Tinkebell exhibits centered around exposing the hypocrisy of animal lovers by doing the exact same thing they do to animals, but within a completely different context. In one instance she made a leather purse, with the leather from her own cat. She also let hamsters run around a showroom while they were imprisoned in tiny plastic balls she had purchased at a pet store, something for which she was prosecuted but ultimately acquited.
In an article on left-wing blog Joop.nl Tinkebell explains how she got the idea of adorning snails with beads in the first place:
I have been painting all the snails I find in my own garden for years. [One day I spotted my neighbour salting his garden to kill snails and] I began to wonder where the snails came from, where they were going and how old they would get. In order to answer my own questions as well as try to change my neighbour’s mind, I started to paint numbers on the snails in my garden. There were many of them…
A year later and much to my surprise I saw that the snails were still moving through my garden, numbers and all. Wow! So then I numbered the unmarked copies in a different colour.
Another year passed and now three generations of painted snails were moving among my plants, and the year after I started with a new ‘tactic’, that of ‘beautifying’. I added glitter, flowers and little paintings. Each year my snails looked different, and that is how I kept track of different generations.
(Photo by Helen Cook, some rights reserved)
Tags: animal rights activitists, animal welfare, beads, cruelty to animals, glue, jewelry, jewels, museums, Rotterdam, slugs, snails, Tinkebell, Villa Zebra
October 5, 2012
Despite a whole bunch of bad jokes about the Netherlands’ second city, Rotterdam, it is often praised in the foreign press or in Wallpaper magazine, mainly for its modern architecture.
In this video, the city’s best know poet and jazz fan Jules Deelder sarcastically says, “I swear to you, Rotterdam can’t be filmed. It has no past and not a single stair-step gable,” echoing the opinion of many who think Amsterdam is top dog and Rotterdam must be treated like a less posh younger sibling who tries to mask their bombarded past by going modern.
The Willemswerf is the name of the office building martial arts star Jackie Chan slides down in his 1998 film ‘Who am I’, which has some excellent shots of parkour-like action in Rotterdam. Apparently, when asked back in 1999, Chan put it on his list of 10 favourite stunts, which can be read in his book ‘I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action’. Oh, and he performed that stunt himself by the way like he did so many others.
Even though one of his stuntmen proved it could be done from a lower level, it took Chan two weeks to get up the nerve to try it himself. The sequence begins with him fighting it out with some thugs on the top of a very tall building in Rotterdam. After battling with them around the roof, and nearly falling off once or twice, he finally took the quickest possible trip to the sidewalk below –sliding down the side of the building, which is slanted nearly 45 degrees, all the way to the ground. Twenty-one stories.”
At least Rotterdam has 21-storey buildings.
The movie also prominently figures the ‘koopgoot’ (underground shopping area), the cube houses and the Erasmus bridge. He also tries using a recumbent bike, a stunt in itself.
(Photo of Rotterdam, KPN building by Roel Wijnants, some rights reserved)
Tags: Cube houses, Jackie Chan, koopgoot, Rotterdam
