The stamp is valued at 2.20 euro, which according to TNT’s press release should be enough to send somebody a book.

The book on the stamp was written by Joost Zwagerman (photo), and can also be downloaded here. The book stamp was designed by Richard Hutten. It measures 3 × 4 centimetres, and 266,000 copies were made.

(Source photo: TNTpost.nl. Photographer: Roy Beusker. Link: Bright.nl.)

Until 2006 citizens could still exchange their guilder coins and bills for euro. The deadline for trading in guilder banknotes is 2032, and the Dutch national bank (DNB) estimates there are still about half a billion euro worth of guilder bills floating around.

According to Z24, DNB bases its estimates on the missing banknote numbers. About 24 million banknotes are still to be traded in.

See also:
* Rules for trading in guilder bills (Dutch)
* Oxenaar exhibit in Museum for Communication, The Hague

(Photo by Robin Papa, some rights reserved)

Driving down the Dutch highway I have seen overpasses for deers and I have heard of frog overpasses and tunnels, but this is a first for me too: the very first beaver tunnel in the country.

Yes, as of today, the wee village of Panheel (189 villagers) in Limburg has opened a 30-metre-long tube, 70 centimetres in diameter so that beavers don’t wobble down a busy street and get turned into road pizza. Not only have many beavers died, but they damage cars when then do because they are bigger and bulkier than they look.

The people and animal lovers involved believe that other small woodland creatures will use this tunnel as well. It cost 40,000 euro and was paid with contributions as well as tax money.

I have only respect for beavers, and OK, this one is darn cute. I spent part of my youth at summer camp tearing down their dams only to see them fully rebuilt days later. It was either portaging (carrying a canoe over your head because of lack of water or obstacles), with two 9-year-old girls lifting an aluminium canoe of 45 kg over their heads with backpacks for 2 kilometers through the woods being eaten by mosquitoes or tearing down a beaver dam that grows back like weeds and canoe on the water like normal kids.

(Link: nrc.nl, Photo of beaver by stevehdc, some rights reserved.)

The chair on the right is ‘Cinderella’s Chair’, a follow up of designer Anna Ter Haar’s 2007 graduation project ‘Buitenbeentje’ (meaning ‘odd man out’, but literally translated ‘outside leg’).

“Glass is a malleable material when heated, so the glass was blown onto the chair, which provides every chair with its own unique prosthesis.”

The chair on the left is from the original ‘Buitenbeentje’ project. Anna Ter Haar also designs other types of chairs, shoes, movies and more.

(Link: trendbeheer.com, Photos: annaterhaar.nl)

On 8 March, Sotheby’s auction house in Amsterdam auctioned off Dutch art belonging to cigarette makers BAT (British American Tobacco) to the tune of a record 13.6 million euro, the highest total for an art auction in the Netherlands. All but four of the 161 lots offered in Amsterdam found buyers.

Back in October 2008 we posted about a major art sale due to cigarette factory closing in Zevenaar, which is where some of these works used to hang, like Karel Appel’s ‘Tête Tragique’ (shown here), a 1961 oil on canvas, which sold for close to 493,000 euro.

(Links: bloomberg.com, nrc.nl, Photo: fast.mediamatic.nl)

I saw this on Dutch commercial television, which more often than not features American series and subtitled or dubbed American advertising ‘like you never left the US’.

Translation:
Guy: Hey, you owe me money.
Girl: …
Guy: For the burger.

Voice-over: So very Dutch! Our new (product name), etc.

Guy: Yep, right amount.

Voice-over: It can’t get any more Dutch.

The adjective ‘Hollands’ meaning Dutch has this reference to the olden days when the Netherlands was just North Holland and South Holland. It can be used in a neutral manner, derogatory or positive manner, depending on the context. In this case it denotes comfort food (brown bread and cheese being a classic here), which is positive.

The negative part remains the stereotype that the Dutch are cheap, which is a gross generalisation, but sometimes where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The Dutch are traditionally thrifty and save a lot of money and don’t run rampant with credit cards, not so much cheap. Oh, and all the Dutch television shows with people about to lose their homes due to overspending kill this stereotype, with the Dutch calling their situation ‘an American one’.

‘Going Dutch’ means paying your own way in English, which in American dating land is surely not a given. And of course, anyone who only wants to pay half the bill at a fast food chain while on a date could easily be labelled poor, not cheap.

Professor Jan van Ours of the University of Tilburg who performed the study together with Australian researcher Allison Booth, told De Pers: “People often assume that [Dutch] women go for a part-time job to be able to raise children. But women won’t start to work more once the children have grown up. A part-time job is not an intermediate phase, but a goal in itself.”

More than 50% of Dutch women between the ages of 25 and 54 work part-time, FD reports. Within a heterosexual relationship it is often the woman who performs the most household tasks. This doesn’t change if the woman works more.

Meanwhile, the barbarous practice of alimony continues unimpeded in the Netherlands. Sure, let women work part-time, but don’t punish the ex-husband for his ex-wife’s lack of ambition.

See also:

• Women have low impact on Dutch work force
• Dutch prefer to work around 27 hours per week

(Photo of Jean Gautherin’s Le Paradis Perdu by Thierry Caro, some rights reserved)

Last month previous champ BrewDog ousted Germany’s Schorschbock with 41 percenter Sink the Bismarck. Pussies!

Het Koelschip suggests you drink their beer like a gin, sipping it from a nice cognac or whiskey glass.

(Link: Food Holland.)

Catawiki is what you would get if you merged Librarything, an online personal library catologue, with eBay, and squared the result. It was founded in 2009 by René Schoenmakers and Marco Jansen, who bought an existing Flemish comics database with 110,000 entries to get started. Later catalogues for stamps, coins and telephone cards were added. The site bills itself as the catalogue for and by collectors.

Although Catawiki can be used to just show the world which books, comics and even barf bags you own, you can also use it to sell items.

(Link: Eamelje.net.)

Dutch house DJ and producer Fedde Le Grand has his own iPhone application, iFedde, available in the app store.

“Anything you can do at Fedde’s website, you can do with the app. You can upload and share pictures, chat with friends, find out what Fedde’s up to and send him direct messages.”

Find out more here feddelegrand.com.

I can see why the community aspect of this application is very important. Now I want to see other artists come up with apps and what will happen when 100 of your favourite artists want you to use their specific app!