August 31, 2011

Pianos take over the streets of Tilburg

Filed under: Art,Music by Orangemaster @ 5:27 pm

A project entitled ”Play Me, I’m Yours” by English artist Luke Jerram at Tilburg’s annual Incubate Festival will feature 101 pianos scattered around the city between September 12 and 18. Anybody can go and play the pianos in the parks, squares and at train stations. And they’ll surely be painted all kinds of pretty colours.

Some 200 musicians and music students have already showed a keen interest in giving concerts. And with so many people wanting to go and play the pianos, the city of Tilburg will surpass Jerram’s previous projects that took place in major cities such as New York and London.

Incubate donated the pianos and volunteer residents will babysit and care for the pianos during the event. Pet pianos, if you will. And with all this rain, that sounds like a good idea although all the rumours point to fantastic weather in September. And there will be music, too.

(Link: refdag.nl, Photo of piano keyboard by Adam Henning, some rights reserved)

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August 30, 2011

24 Oranges: switching from a Facebook Group to a Facebook Page

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 7:50 pm

We will be abandoning our Facebook Group and continue with a Facebook Page instead. You can find the page at http://www.facebook.com/24oranges?sk=wall.

If you were a member of our group, follow us on Facebook by ‘liking’ our Page, as the group will be deleted.

We use Facebook for all kinds of things. We connect with our readers through it, and our page wall has its own content, although sometimes we post a link to a blog posting if the article is especially apt for our Facebook friends.

As for the difference between Facebook’s ‘pages’ and ‘groups’, they continue to mystify us and everybody else including, I gather, Facebook themselves. It would seem that the philosophy behind a page fits us better. From what I understand, Facebook initially intended groups to be a way for friends and family to connect, whereas pages are intended for larger groups of people.

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Christians first, then we rank people

Filed under: Religion by Orangemaster @ 2:32 pm

Since 2001 practicing, recognised Christian bureaucrats down at city hall where told that part of their job was to marry everbody, including gays and lesbians. Christian Democrat Minister of Education, Culture and Science Maria Van Bijsterveld said that practicing Christians could refuse to marry gays and lesbians on religious grounds, as long as it does not go against the basic principes set out in the Dutch constitution — they cannot refuse on the basis of race. Therefore, Christians can refuse to marry gays and lesbians, but not an Asian couple. Even my argument assumes the practicing Christian in question is white and has light coloured hair.

According to Piet Hein Donner, Christian Democrat Minister of the Interior, anyone of any other faith does not have the right to refuse to marry anybody on those same grounds. Christian are therefore protected by law, but other people have to just do their job and shut up. In my book, that’s discrimination. Or favouritism.

And so we’ve learnt two painful facts about the current Dutch government: Christians are above people of other faiths and people of other ethnic backgrounds are better than gays.

No one ever got the memo that the Dutch constitution has an apartheid-like reading to it. Parliament plans to have a lovely discussion about this state of affairs.

(Link geenstijl.nl, Photo of the Saint Gertrude cathedral in Utrecht by Wikimedia user pepijntje, some rights reserved)

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August 29, 2011

Parrot helps catch its thief

Filed under: Animals by Branko Collin @ 8:43 am

Last Wednesday the Barneveld police arrested a thief after the parrot he had stolen responded to its owner’s call.

The African Grey was one of 70 birds that had been stolen from a nearby location. The owner had received a tip that two of his birds had been spotted at the animal market of Barneveld. When he called the bird’s name, it came to him. The police then verified the owner’s claim by checking the ring numbers. A second bird from the theft was also retrieved.

Two other birds were discovered in the home of the thief, a 30-year-old man from Hilversum.

(Photo of an unrelated African Grey parrot by Wikipedia user Jonathan G Wang who released it into the public domain)

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August 28, 2011

Weather prediction for the next ten years—rain, rain, rain

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:09 pm

It’s been raining a lot here this summer—I thought I’d share the pain (and the view from my window) a bit.

Meanwhile, Noordhoff publishers and the Dutch weather office, KNMI, presented a climate atlas last week. Some interesting tidbits:

* Worldwide the temperature has risen 0.7 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years, in the Netherlands that was 1.4.

* The temperature in Amsterdam averages 11 degrees Celsius over the past thirty years, which is the same average as Lyon (in the South of France) had thirty years ago.

* The rainiest places in the country are the Veluwe (the nature reserve in the middle of the country) and the North of Amsterdam.

* The skies released 850 litres water per square metre on average; 100 years ago that average was 700 litres.

Since we’re in the middle of a period of global warming, it is expected that these trends will continue (though KNMI is hedging its bets).

Update August 31, 2011: Dutch News: It’s official: this is the wettest summer since 1906.

(Links: Parool.nl, Vereniging voor Weerkunde en Klimatologie)

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August 27, 2011

Government party ends freedom of speech room in parliament

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 1:48 pm

The Freethinkers Room in the buildings of parliament has ceased to exist. The exhibition of endangered art was abandoned some time during the past months by government party VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy), Volkskrant reports.

The exhibition was founded in the party’s quarters in 2008, and was an initiative by VVD and PVV (Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party) who were both in opposition to the governing coalition at the time.

The room was used to display art of anti-Islamic xenophobes. When a left wing politician suggested that the room also host the “Wilders is an extremist” poster, PVV quit the initiative. Later prime minister Rutte banned further art critical of Wilders from the room, even though its makers had received “grievous threats“.

At the time one commentator surmised that Rutte built his Freethinkers Room mainly so that he “could have a photo opportunity with the parents of Theo van Gogh”. De Pers on the other hand states that the room was merely a cheap campaign trick to begin with.

(Photo: the poster by “Internationale Socialisten” that led to the arrest of three protesters, and to the beginning of the end of the Freethinkers Room. Text: “Geert Wilders. Extremist. Can cause damage to you and the society.”)

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August 26, 2011

‘Oldest Dutch cat is 25’ and living in Vlaardingen

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 11:05 am
tightrope_moonster2a.jpg

It is really difficult to determine whether a cat is really that old except to trust their owners to tell the truth. When we wrote ‘Oldest’ cat of the Netherlands dies, we put quotes around ‘oldest’ because it really is hearsay. And ‘our’ cat story had a 29-year-old cat. And we wrote about it because on the same day, my cat died at age 21.

Of course, when you’re a tabloid and the news is dominated by non-Dutch things and rainy weather, a cute cat story in a pinch will do (our story comes from the same paper). The article says the oldest living cat is 21, which means my cat and the two above made the record. It all sounds too easy to me.

The thing I want to heckle is the uneducated stupid attempt to calculate the cat’s age in human years, which is preposterous at best.

A 3-month-old cat is a kitten, a two-year-old cat is an adult, a 10-year-old cat is a senior. The development of a cat is not comparable to that of a human. If you want to try and come close to the animal’s human age with an adult cat, add four years to their cat age and multiply the outcome by four. I grabbed this calculation in a Dutch book called ‘Encyclopedie van misvattingen’ (The Encyclopedia of Misconceptions), which I highly recommend if you spread repeated nonsense about cuckcoo clocks being made in Switerzland (instead of Germany) and Inuits have, I dunno, 53 words for snow.

That crap of multiplying animals’ years by seven is for stupid journalists who repeat things like parrots do.

(The cat in the pic is our deceased Moonster.)

(Link: ad.nl)

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August 25, 2011

Transgenic silk to make bullet-proof skin

Filed under: Art,Science,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:02 pm

Often at odds, an artist and a scientist could be on the verge of making an incredible discovery. Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi and Utah State researcher Randy Lewis have collaborated and come up with a bulletproof, skin-like material made from silk threads produced by a genetically modified silk worm. The goal would be to someday create synthetic human skin with artificial tendons and ligaments.

“Luckily for me I found an article in Science about Randy Lewis and his team about how they succeeded in isolating the spidersilk producing genes of two spiders and embedded them in the genome of a goat. Creating a goat that produces in addition to her normal milk also significant quantities of the spidersilk protein. He also made a press release more recently that he pulled off the same trick with transgenic silkworms, who now produce spidersilk instead of normal silk.”

Read about Essaidi’s ‘New silk road’, the story behind the silk used for the DA4GA (Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award) project: 2.6g 329m/s aka Bulletproof-skin.

(Links: neatorama.com, jalilaessaidi.com, Photo of Silk worm by Jo Naylor, some rights reserved)

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August 24, 2011

Huge Dutch bunny art invades Sweden

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 6:43 pm

Rotterdam artist Florentijn Hofman has shared with us [Designboom] images of ‘stor gul kanin’ (big yellow rabbit), his newest large-scale sculpture for this summer’s Openart Biennale in Öreboro, Sweden. Challenging the function and purpose of the public space, the 13-metre high installation explores the notion of scale and urban perspective by providing a new focal point in the open square.

Made out of locally-manufactured shingles and a wooden armature, the temporary sculpture depicts a giant plush rabbit that has been seemingly dropped into the centre of the Swedish plaza.

(Link: designboom.com, Photo by Florentijn Hofman)

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August 23, 2011

Priest refuses to do funeral after euthanasia

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

Although euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002, all of a sudden a priest from Noord-Brabant has decided he won’t perform a funeral for someone who has been euthanised.

The family feels punished by the local church and has had to go to another church to hold their loved one’s funeral. The priest claimed he is just following orders set by the diocese and is also telling his colleagues not to handle funerals of the euthanised. His church says that they can understand his reluctance, but not finding a replacement is wrong, and are looking into it. The church also expects some apologies to be given to the family and that the priest might lose his job.

The local churchgoers are pissed that this could happen and are not so generous in giving their church funds to fix the organ all of a sudden.

(Link: trouw.nl, Photo by Johan Wieland, some rights reserved)

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