June 26, 2014

Gold and pearls: Mauritshuis museum to reopen in The Hague

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 11:16 am

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The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, famous for housing iconic paintings such as ‘Girl with the Pearl Earring’ by Vermeer (see pic), will officially be reopened by King Willem-Alexander tomorrow. The Mauritshuis underwent renovations and refurbishing for two years and has been extended and made more easily accessible, with the entrance moved the main square. In fact, the renovation has made the building look more like the old building originally designed by Jacob van Campen in the 17th century.

Dutch Golden Age painting is the one of many good reasons to visit the museum where besides Vermeer you can also admire ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’ by Rembrandt and ‘The Goldfinch’ by Fabritius.

(Links: www.mauritshuis.nl, Photo of Girl with The Pearl Earring by Thebrid, some rights reserved.

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June 19, 2014

Dutch Eurovision entry sounds ripped off

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 9:52 pm

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Composer Ruud van Osch from The Hague is claiming that Ilse and Waylon, aka The Common Linnets stole his song to make ‘Calm After The Storm’, which won second place at this year’s Eurovision Song Festival.

In 2013 Van Osch had sent in a song to Ilse’s record company as a possible contender for the Eurovision Song Festival. He heard nothing back, which I’m sure is common, although he says he tried to get the company’s attention for months. However, only now has he decided to go public about it by telling The Hague broadcaster Omroep West his story.

Van Osch’s song was called ‘So Sad’ and has a very similar chorus and arrangements, which cannot be a coincidence unless the song is not his or he composed it after the fact. Even a secretary who had picked up the phone at the record company said to him: “Yes, they sound alike, I can’t deny that. Go get a lawyer.”

Have a listen to both songs superimposed and hear for yourself.

Here’s a video of Van Osch singing his song intermixed with The Common Linnets video.

The song sounds adapted yet recognisable, the lyrics are very different, but the chorus and feel of the song has been ripped off, which would equate to plagiarism. The 65-year-old composer in a wheelchair can’t fight the record company so he’s upset, but yes, it could possibly be a ruse to get some attention — but that’s all he is going to get. ‘Calm After The Storm’ sounds like a lot of other songs as well.

(Links: www.nieuws.nl, www.omroepwest.nl, Photo of Guitars by tarale, some rights reserved)

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March 20, 2014

The Hague launches ‘Bitcoin boulevard’ just in time for spring

Filed under: Art,Food & Drink,Online by Orangemaster @ 9:29 am

Today, 20 March at exactly 17:57, when spring will officially start here, the city of The Hague will open ‘Bitcoin boulevard’ along a canal, framed by the Dunne Bierkade / Groenewegje / Wagenstraat / Uilebomen streets, also known to locals as Avenue Culinaire for its selection of international cuisine. An art gallery is also said to be joining in.

Software entrepreneurs Hendrik Jan Hilbolling and two bitcoin fans were able to convince restaurant owners, including a one Michelin star joint, of their project, which probably wasn’t easy considering some of them had no idea what a Bitcoin was. The boulevard project will run for two months with a possible extension. The initiators themselves won’t profit from it financially, Bitcoin or otherwise.

On a smaller scale, shops in other Dutch cities accept Bitcoins.

(Links: www.coindesk.com, www.denhaag.nl, www.emerce.nl)

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March 2, 2014

Stapel.tv builds video walls with a vintage touch

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 8:54 pm

stapel-tvEvery video wall that the three entrepreneurs of Stapel.tv create is unique, financial news site Z24 writes.

Instead of clicking together countless similar LED screens the three friends from The Hague use old-fashioned CRT TVs, each screen a unique set.

Dave Seth Paul told Z24: “People hire us because they tire of the same-old state-of-the-art LED screens. Old TVs have a certain charm.”

The company uses old sets they get from friends or that they buy off Marktplaats for ten euro a piece. So far they’ve collected 60 TVs which enables them to build a vintage video wall of 6 by 2.5 metres. The units are driven by tiny Raspberry Pi computers.

For the Leiden International Film Festival a gate of TV sets was built by Stapel.tv (the name means Stack TV), each set displaying on of the movies shown at the festival. In front of the screens a small living had been constructed.

(Foto: Stapel.tv)

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January 12, 2014

Alexine Tinne, 19th century explorer, fashion designer and photographer

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 10:02 pm

alexine-tinne-pdApart from the Arctics, the interior of Africa was one of the last places left for Europeans to ‘discover’ and finding the source of the Nile was a major goal for 19th century explorers.

One of these explorers was a woman from The Hague, Alexine Tinne (b. 1835 – d. 1869). Growing up as one of the richest heiresses of the Netherlands in a time when European women were expected to ‘know their place’, nobody would have batted an eyelid if Tinne had stayed at home and prepared for marriage. But even at a young age Alexine Tinne shared with her mother Henriëtte (a former lady-in-waiting and daughter of an admiral) a thirst for travel.

In 1855 mother and daughter sailed up the Nile for the first time in order to reach Karthoum, but it would take them several expeditions to succeed. In 1861 they not only reached Karthoum but decided to push through to Gondokoro in Sudan (near present-day Juba) and beyond. Gondokoro was known as the last place where the Nile was navigable but Tinne fell ill there.

During an attempt in 1863 Tinne lost her mother, her aunt and two servants; it would be her last voyage up the Nile. Writer Redmond O’Hanlon told Historiek.net that he believes Tinne and her mother wanted to discover the source of the Nile: “that was their goal, I am sure of it.” But contemporaries did not approve of women explorers and O’Hanlon fears this is why the Tinne expedition kept schtum about its real motives. Samuel Baker, another Nile explorer of the time, wrote of the competition: “There are Dutch ladies travelling without any gentlemen… They must be demented. A young lady alone with the Dinka tribe… they really must be mad. All the natives are naked as the day they were born.”

Tinne, who felt responsible for the death of her mother and aunt, stayed in Africa. In 1869 Alexine Tinne, while living in Tunesia, decided to cross the Sahara. On 2 August of that year her caravan was ambushed by Tuaregs at the wadi of Chergui in what is now Algeria. Tinne was killed with two sword blows and a gun shot.

Although she only reached the age of 33, she accomplished quite a lot during her life. She designed clothes that she wore herself, wrote and drew the source materials for a botanical guide about the plant life in Sudan (the Plantae Tinneanae), started a half-way house for freed slaves and, in between two of her Nile expeditions, experimented with photography.

See also:

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November 11, 2013

How to sabotage freedom of information requests in the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:51 am

Two angry blog posts in as many months show the state of freedom of information in the Netherlands. Long story short, the government wants everybody to be transparent except themselves.

In the past year political blog Sargasso directed 30 or so freedom of information requests at all levels of government. Their report of how they fared (the first court victories are expected next year) reads like a how-to for civil servants—how to sabotage freedom of information requests:

  • Be late in everything you do.
  • Split requests into multiple parts and reject them all separately.
  • Send ten-page-long rejection letters full of legalese.
  • Let the complaints committee reject the inevitable complaints.
  • Once forced by a court of law, redact the information you return to the point of illegibility.
  • Wash, rinse, repeat.

Dealing with all of these things takes time and money, of which the state possesses infinitely more than the average citizen or reporter.

Sargasso also noted that they had no troubles at all with FOI requests for non-sensitive subjects (e.g. how many restaurant permits does a city have). Only once they started digging into things like the presumably fraudulent past of the former mayor of Helmond, Fons Jacobs, did they run into a wall.

In August the Retecool blog made minced meat out of the argument that the fines governments have to pay for refusing to perform their legal duties were too high and the result of systemic fraud. Both the Vereniging Nederlandse Gemeenten (Association of Dutch municipalities) and Minister of the Interior Ronald Plasterk had argued as much.

Retecool (a not always SFW blog) pointed out that many municipalities only had to pay one or just a few fines in 2012 which hardly points to systemic abuse. The few cases where abuse seemed real ended up before the courts who had no troubles finding for the municipalities when the facts warranted it. The city of Eindhoven (200,000 inhabitants) paid the highest amount of fines of any place in the Netherlands. The 119,060 euro in fines they paid last year were for all requests they failed to process in time, not just FOI requests. Retecool contrasts this to the severance packages the city handed to its former employees, which was 150,000 euro in just the first 9 months of 2012. The blog contrasts Eindhoven’s fines with the cost of The Hague’s new year’s party, 125,000 euro in 2013. Sounds to me like the fines may not be high enough.

See also: No fees for freedom of information requests says Dutch Supreme Court

(Photo of the closed city of Severomorsk in Russia by Sergej Shinkarjuk, some rights reserved)

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October 29, 2013

Dutch museums own some 139 contentious artworks

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 1:57 pm

According to years of research carried out by the Netherlands Museums Association on the origins of artworks, some 139 pieces of art acquired by Dutch museums between 1933 and 1945 (during the Nazi regime) are suspected of being stolen, confiscated or were sold to them by force. Some 41 museums have such artworks in their collections, many of which were owned by Jews.

The research, started in 2009, had as a goal of establishing what the extent was of the possession of contentious paintings after the end of WWII. Some 162 Dutch museums collaborated with researchers in order to help return artworks to their rightful owners and/or their heirs. A special website will go live at 4 pm has now gone live on Tuesday, 29 October (CET) for everyone to peruse and maybe even help.

The museum with the most ‘stolen’ artworks is the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (The Hague Municipal Museum), followed by Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Museum and Stedelijk Museum.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl, www.museumvereniging.nl, (Illustration: Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet. Source: politie.nl)

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June 28, 2013

Uselessly small parking spaces pop up in The Hague

Filed under: Automobiles,Nature,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:15 am

Parking in The Hague neighbourhood of Oud-Leyenburg is apparently a problem, which is why the city is working on it by creating some 500 parking spots. However in the Soesterbergstraat, construction workers worked some magic to get a round a tree that they didn’t have permission to move and have created a few completely useless ‘parking spots’.

On my street, Smart brand cars, which are very small, park quite creatively as well. Even Smarts wouldn’t fit in the wee spots The Hague has created. Smurf parking only?

(Link: www.omroepwest.nl)

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June 19, 2013

Armin van Buuren featured with vinyl records at Madurodam

Filed under: General,Music by Orangemaster @ 9:02 am
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Recently someone asked me if I had ever been to Madurodam in The Hague, an attraction many tourists and Dutch people visit, especially with kids, and my answer was ‘no’. Someone also recently asked me why Dutch DJs (music producers, really) Tiësto, Afrojack and Armin van Buuren were world-famous to which I pertly answered that Afrojack didn’t count in my books and that the other two make dance/trance music that the Dutch seem to make best.

Now that Armin van Buuren is just that much more popular than Tiësto and considered an export product like some sort of cheese, he’s now also featured in Madurodam.

As a DJ myself I am a bit miffed that Madurodam has set up turntables (you know, for vinyl records) as an attraction when in fact Van Buuren plays off CD players. I don’t care what he uses, but the art of using turntables is and will always be totally different than using CDs.

Madurodam, you’re willfully misleading children. It would be like giving them a chance to play with acrylic paints trying to mimic their favourite street graffiti artist.

(Link: www.omroepwest.nl, Photo of Armin van Buuren by Peter Drier, some rights reserved)

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June 13, 2013

Unemployed street cleaner sweeps to keep benefits

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:28 pm

Harry, 53, lost his job as a street cleaner in The Hague due to budget cuts. Harry now gets benefits while he looks for another job. To keep his benefits, Harry has to work as a street cleaner (he has the experience, right?), but for 400 euro less a month. Keeping Harry on the streets sweeping means the government gets the exact same work done, but pays Harry less, so Harry went to the media with this one.

Usually a re-integration into the labour market job is to help people find a new job, so how does this work then? If Harry was learning some new skills in order to get a new job, it wouldn’t have made the papers.

(Link: www.ad.nl, Photo of Broom on wet floor by Shyb, some rights reserved)

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