I’d like to take this opportunity to wish everyone Happy New Year! Our resolutions for 2010 are to take more pictures and make more videos, and continue to post the good stuff. Please send us more stuff, too!
While the first ever Latin American same-sex couple recently got married in Argentina and another one got arrested for doing so in Malawi, Amsterdam will hold its first ever wedding fair for gays and lesbians on February 14, Valentine’s Day 2010. The fair will feature some 50 stands at the Westergasfabriek in West Amsterdam. Already married same-sex couples can visit the fair for free upon showing their marriage certificate.
Since 1st April 2001 gays and lesbians have been allowed to marry in the Netherlands and it was the first country to allow same-sex marriages.
Yesterday at the Farm Frites fries factory in Oudenhoorn, South Holland, three WWII grenades were harvested along with the potatoes. The cops were called in and the grenades were taken away. Oh no, wait. In Dutch fashion, they had a discussion about whether the grenades were dangerous or not.
One of the comments to this discovery is ‘patatje oorlog’, which literally means ‘war fries’ and is a junkfood dish of fries with all kinds of sauces that looks like war took place. Notice I don’t use the word ‘French’ with my fries simply because fries were never French, they were Flemish (Belgian) back in the day. And using ‘freedom’ to describe fries is for losers.
Miffy representative Mercis lost an old-fashioned game of bully-the-penniless-blogger yesterday when a web hosting provider who refused to lie down won most points of a copyright infringement lawsuit.
The hoster, Punt.nl of Gouda, argued that cartoons some of its users hosted in which Miffy is depicted doing cocaine or DJing at a party are parodies, and therefore protected by an exemption to copyright law. The court went along with that argument, and felt that since Miffy was depicted in the cartoons as engaging in activities Dick Bruna would never put her through, it should be abundantly clear to the reader that these are parodies. Using the same shaky logic, the court banned two cartoons that were too close to the original.
As Punt.nl’s Henri de Jong pointed out to De Volkskrant, “What the judge is really saying is the harder the better, because that way you put distance between the parody and the original.” Cory Doctorow argued something similar in his column for the Guardian earlier this year.
The text of the illustration goes:
The Party
Matt is at the party.
Dan is there too.
Matt is playing trance.
“What noise,” Dan yells,
And pushes Matt.
Dan throws a fat hardcore
Tune on the SL-1200.
Everybody is happy.
Matt is a dirty trance fag.
Several more Miffy parodies can be found in the verdict. According to De Volkskrant, Marja Kerkhof of Mercis denies the company is bullying bloggers.
(Source illustration: Iusmentis.com, artist unknown)
BUMA/Stemra has decided not to pursue its blogger’s tax of 160 euro per 6 embedded songs for 2010. At the same time, the collecting society for composers and performing artists has closed a deal with Youtube, allowing the Google daughter to serve videos containing music to a Dutch audience.
After a storm of protest, BUMA/Stemra cancelled its tariffs for non-commercial users earlier, leaving blogs like 24 Oranges in the cold, because we run Google ads. Now Webwereld reports that commercial users will also be exempt for one year, while BUMA/Stemra tries to iron out any legal glitches. I guess that is a step forward from past practices, where the society would start lawsuits against pretty much anyone and use the resulting jurisprudence as either law, or as a springboard for further lawsuits.
Music Week reports that the new licensing agreement covers “professional or user-generated video hosted on and streamed via YouTube in the Netherlands.”
Odd, then, that I still come across notices now and again that music has been removed from a clip after complaints by somebody pretending to be a rights holder (typically one of the Big Four). Let’s see how this will pan out in 2010. My guess though: Google will be paying lots of money for nothing in return.
Meanwhile the union for musicians, Nederlandse Toonkunstenaarsbond, has urgently requested that BUMA/Stemra apologize over the heavy-handed manner in which it introduced its tax for embedded videos. Chairman Erwin Angad-Gaur fears the society’s tactics have damaged the reputations of musicians. He told VPRO’s 3 Voor 12: “Musicians are not against copyright fees, to the contrary. But we do want more flexibility.” For instance the flexibility to decide they want money for certain songs only.
Supermarket chain Albert Heijn reported last week that the sales of carrots had gone up 25%, writes Z24.
The on-line business news publication speculates that the snow of last week may have had something to do with the increased demand: both snowmen and traditional winter dishes such as hutspot require carrots.
The name may be unknown to foreigners, or even to the Dutch themselves, but the designs of Ootje Oxenaar are deeply familiar to any Dutch person over the age of 10. It was Oxenaar who designed the Dutch banknotes between 1966 and 1985.
Unlike the drab money used in most of the rest of the world his designs were extremely colourful. Where Oxenaar could go for aesthetics instead of respectability, it appears to have been mostly because the Dutch bank, after some initial run-ins, let him be just a designer.
In this video he talks about his relationship with the Dutch bank, rejected designs, and the many Easter eggs he put in his banknotes. The exhibition at the Museum for Communication in the Hague runs until 10 April, 2010. It focuses on both his money and stamp designs.
Oxenaar’s Euro note designs were rejected, but can still be found on the web. Oh, how I would have loved to have unicorns on our bills!
Filed under: Art, Gadgets by Branko Collin @ 8:49 am
A team of nine people was necessary to run this wooden clock on November 27 for twenty-four hours in Rotterdam, at the place where the central railway station used to be.
Every minute the foreman called out the time, and his helpers then deconstructed and reconstructed the required digits. The clock was designed by Mark Formanek and produced by Mothership. Other volunteers filmed the complete running of the clock, the result being another clock.
Fed up of the same old Christmas songs on the radio? Then go and download your free copy of Christmas Candy from the Netherlands, a mostly English-language affair from up and coming indie bands that was put together to counter that horrible stuff they dish out on Dutch radio ever year.
In an attempt to talk about something else than snow and trains, I failed with the latter. The NS (Dutch railways) has banned a poster picturing a nude sculpture by British artist Marc Quinn of a disabled athlete missing one upper arm and lower leg because they apparently feel that it is too confrontational and unfit for the public at large. What about all the horrible (by horrible, I mean just badly done) sexist, sexy, racist, boring, stupid and ugly posters? If those are normal, them I’m a proud freak in my own sane way.
So bravo ‘normal people’ of the Dutch railways, you’ve managed to tell the entire country that disabled people are not normal as well as being ‘offensive’ to look at even in picture form. Splendid marketing coup for the exhibition I guess.
Miffy representative Mercis lost an old-fashioned game of bully-the-penniless-blogger yesterday when a web hosting provider who refused to lie down won most points of a copyright infringement lawsuit. 
BUMA/Stemra has decided not to pursue its blogger’s tax of 160 euro per 6 embedded songs for 2010. At the same time, the collecting society for composers and performing artists has closed a deal with Youtube, allowing the Google daughter to serve videos containing music to a Dutch audience. 
Supermarket chain Albert Heijn reported last week that the sales of carrots had gone up 25%, 
