The year 2014 was a year of coming to grips with progress and uncovering the past.
Voting booths all over the country were the backdrop for ‘stemfies’, selfies that voters took in spite of voting secrecy. Opponents feared that people would be forced to prove they had voted for the right party and although a court shared their concern, it saw no legal reason to outlaw stemfies.
Rail operators were not allowed to block porn on the publicly funded Wi-Fi on their trains and a hospital had to give a man his amputated leg so he could turn it into a lamp.
Doctors finally figured out how to euthanise psychiatric patients. Euthanasia was legalised in 2002, but the rules of due care made it difficult to decide if psychiatric patients declared their death wish while sound of mind.
Design provides a constant source of puff pieces in newspapers and on aggregator websites, but 24 Oranges took the hard road and reported not only on cool designs, but also on the inevitable failures when design meets reality. Daan Roosegaarde’s glow-in-the-dark roads stopped glowing after the first day when they got wet and a solar-powered bike path cracked at the first sign of frost.
The game show Lingo put TV producer Harry de Winter on the map 25 years ago, and this year was the quiz show’s final season.
The past came alive when somebody recorded Hieronymus Bosch’ buttock music and Shan Kuang, a paintings conservation student at the University of Cambridge, discovered a whale in a 1641 Golden Age painting. In Amsterdam history student Charlotte van den Berg discovered that when a few surviving Jews returned from the Nazi death camps after WWII, the city of Amsterdam presented them with bills and fines for back taxes. The city has promised to at least pay back the fines.
Remember the euro note bridges we wrote about in 2011? This year 24 Oranges went to Spijkenisse and looked at what the bridges look like today.
Happy New Year! We’re going to take a few days off again.
(Photo of Fireworks in Scheveningen by Haags Uitburo, some rights reserved)