Last week Marc van Woudenberg won the Bicycle Mania Photo contest with this picture.

Van Woudenberg publishes a photo blog about cyclists in Amsterdam called ‘Amsterdamize’. My favourite photo of his is this one, from a series about biking in the winter. That back tire is almost flattened by the peer pressure.

The winning photo, called Family Cycle Train, can also be viewed on Flickr and distributed using a Creative Commons license.

If you were wondering, yes, this is a fairly common sight in the Netherlands.

The nice red Dutch bike that could, Drooderfiets, bikes in and around Amsterdam and blogs about its architectural, cultural and interesting findings in English and French. The puppet master is Alix, a French guy living in Amsterdam who takes very nice pictures with his bike in every one.

Disclaimer: I know Alix and I admit we should have written about him and his bike a long time ago. What’s nice about this blog is that not only does the red bike learn things, but so do we, Dutch or otherwise.

Check out all kinds of other pictures on the red bike’s Flickr page.

(Link: rooderfiets.tumblr.com, Photo of Kruiskerk, Amstelveen by Drooder Fiets)

Susanne Gilsing, an anaesthetist’s assistant from Utrecht, knocked on the doors of her neighbours on the Tuyllkade in Utrecht to ask them if she could take a photo of them in their living room, and twelve agreed.

Including the photo of her own apartment you now have a unique series documenting what thirteen Dutch families chose to do with more or less the same space. Use Flickr’s slideshow feature for the best effect.

(Link: l-rs.org.)

This photograph taken in 1977 of murdered, controversial gay politician Pim Fortuyn is up for grabs on ebay, bidding starts at EUR 495. If we can trust the description, it was ordered by Fortuyn, was never published and is authentic, on proper paper and all that jazz.

Pim Fortuyn, leader and founder of the LPF (Pim Fortuyn List, a party named after him) was murdered at the Hilversum mediapark (where all our radio and telly is located) by Volkert van der Graaf, a Caucasian male (that has to be said) who was upset at Fortuyn’s harshness towards Muslims.

(Link: parool.nl, Photo: Ebay)

Interestingly enough, Amsterdam’s local television station AT5 got part of this story wrong and here I am to set it straight.

Two men caught on CCTV at restaurant lounge Canvas in Amsterdam on 13 November where I just happen to DJ once a month stole expensive CD players (not turntables, which are way heavier and worth three times less). The building is apparently plagued with theft and the guy who hires me says he actually understands how easy it is to steal their stuff, but not anymore, as I had to replug everything myself before my gig.

Why be bold and print the burglars’ faces on a flyer? Simply because the police are totally indifferent to this kind of theft, and sadly I think rightly so, as it’s not breaking and entering. Is it legal to spread this flyer around? Yes it is, I checked and the local TV station thought it wise to blur their faces to protect themselves just in case. If the thieves didn’t want to be on film, they should have hid their faces or not committed a crime. Imagine my surprise when I saw a very different flyer this month, thinking some hiphop group was in town.

Dutch science writer Rik Kuiper of Utrecht has a cool blog called the The Museum of Unintended Use, which features objects that are used differently than they were intended. Feel free to send Rik pictures of stuff at unintendeduse (at) gmail.com and follow him on Twitter.

Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of things such as an old bath tub turned into a table with a sheet of glass over it, wooden wine crates DJs use to store 45s or the plastic shopping crates stored vertically that serve as shelves in one of my co-blogger’s bathroom. When I was young my mother fashioned plastic buckets and belts for us to go blueberry picking and I use a twist tie on the zippers of my luggage so it doesn’t open by mistake and can be opened quickly.

This amusing blog gives you a dog in a cup in a car, a wine bottle as a rolling pin (I’ve always done that) and handcuffs as a bike lock.

Kuiper adds stuff almost daily to his online museum. The main criterion is that the object’s conversion has to reversible. As he explains, a lighter being used as a can opener can still be used for its original purpose, but a design coat made from old post bags cannot.

(People of the NRC that we quoted: Your link to the museum is broken (leads to some empty German page) and it’s ‘museum’, not ‘musueum’ in the caption.)

(Links: nrc.nl, unintendeduse)

A rotonde is a roundabout in Dutch, so when Tijs van den Boomen and Peter Jonker set out to create a website about roundabouts and the often ugly art that is in their centres, they of course called it rotondologie.nl. (The Flemish say rondpunt.)

Rotondologie.nl has pictures, videos and stories about roundabouts from all over the world, but you can hardly blame them for paying extra attention to the Netherlands. The website is clunky at times—rather than showing you a whole story at once you get little Javascript arrows with which to scroll, even if there is nothing to scroll towards—but if you click the big Collectie button, you get a nice big site map listed by country, province and so on.

Trendbeheer unearthed a quote from the site about a Doesburg roundabout that exemplifies the wrongness of moral rights (a part of copyright):

“I thank God that [the centre piece] is not art,” alderman Fred Jansen told De Gelderlander. “If it had been, we would not have been allowed to touch it for sixty years. Everybody thought it was garbage, citizens, entrepreneurs and visitors.”

(Photo of a roundabout in Venray by Google Streetview, immortalised because this is presumably the location where the Streetview car made an infraction that caused a police car to stop it two blocks further.)

Although tech blog Techcrunch ran this story this summer, it seems they weren’t really interested in the people behind the site who are — you know it — Dutch. At the risk of being told by friends that I’m playing ‘Zoek de Nederlander’ (“Find the Dutch person”), a friend, Maurice Sikkink told me about one of the many sites he has, including Rollip.

Rollip is a site that lets you turn your ordinary pictures into those slightly discoloured but oh so lovable Polaroid pictures. Maurice tells me that it is almost impossible to properly reproduce these ‘fake’ Polaroids on real film, making the digital version much more desirable. People can sign up for Rollip pro and have their pictures processed with many kinds of filters. I can imagine that for a travel magazine or a 1970s article on someone’s family that a Polaroid-like picture would definitely jazz things up.

Back in the 1970s my parents had a Polaroid land camera and I still have a lot of Polaroid pics of myself, including this one, ironically taken by co-blogger Branko back in 2000. Another Polaroid I have, which I will publish if you insist, is of me and — I kid you not — Mormon poster child singer Donny Osmond.

I once read that the cities of Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris made up an interesting cultural triptych, and an upcoming exhibition of Jacques Brel photos entitled ‘Le Pont d’Amsterdam’ by his official photographer Jean-Pierre Leloir in Amsterdam seems to support this imaginative theory.

Brug 9, a newly opened Amsterdam venue under a canal bridge will be featuring an exclusive, three-day photo exhibition of famous photos of Belgium’s iconic singer Jacques Brel, taken by world famous French press photographer Jean-Pierre Leloir opening on October 9. The exhibition will coincidentally feature 31 photos — coincidentally because it’s been 31 years since Brel’s death on 9 October 1978. Thirty of the pictures are black-and-white, with one colour photo of his last concert.

Rockarchive Amsterdam’s Michelle Lemesle, a Parisienne and huge fan of Brel, is supplying the photos for this exhibition. “Jean-Pierre Leloir is the most unknown famous photographer there is and has a huge archive of photos,” explains Michelle to anyone who asks when people come to her gallery.

The event is organised by MSTRDM, Alter Fritz and Rockarchive, with yours truly DJing at the opening.

(Photo: Jean-Pierre Leloir, courtesy of Rockarchive, Amsterdam)

Over at the Google Earth forums, a user called Thomas de Bruin has assembled a complete alphabet made of shapes spotted in the Dutch landscape by the Google aerial cameras.

He has created capitals, small letters, and all kinds of miscellaneous characters, such as the ten digits and the euro character. You will also find a KMZ file there, so that (if you have a copy of Google Earth installed) you can look up what part of the Netherlands you are looking at.

(Link: Google Earth Blog.)