This week American stand-up comedians Greg Shapiro and Tom Rhodes are touring the Netherlands and if you are quick, you can win tickets!

24 Oranges is giving away two tickets to one lucky winner for the show on Thursday 30 January at Schiller Theater in Utrecht.

You can enter by sending an e-mail to submissions (at) 24oranges.nl in which you tell us the title of Greg Shapiro’s latest & greatest book. Your entry needs to be in before Tuesday 28 January.

This week Shapiro & Rhodes will be performing in Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Enschede, The Hague and Utrecht. In 2002 and 2003 Tom Rhodes hosted a talk show on Dutch television called Kevin Masters, and he lived in the Netherlands for five years. Greg Shapiro has been working for the Boom Chicago comedy group in Amsterdam since 1994 and calls himself The American Netherlander.

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.

OIII Architects from Amsterdam designed this bank building for a competition for a new bank in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In the end, it was the design of German architects Henn that won, but the OIII entry still looks pretty amazing.

(Link and source image: Designboom.)

Building bridges well is one thing, but how to maintain them? Rijkswaterstaat, the governmental entity concerned with building and maintaining roads and such, has offered a grand prize of 500,000 euro for the person coming up with the best scheme to renovate a bridge. Rijkswaterstaat isn’t satisfied with its own procedures. They especially don’t like the way their current methods hinder traffic.

According to the rules, anybody can participate, although if you read on you’ll discover that with anybody they mean anybody who is registered at a Dutch chamber of commerce. Another rule states that you must speak sufficient English and Dutch to be able to explain your plan. The ten best ideas will net their creators up to 100,000 euro to further develop their plans, and only one winner will get the grand prize of half a mil.

The deadline for the first round is April 10.

Link: Z24 (Dutch). Photo of the bridge to IJburg, Amsterdam by me.

Stani Michiels, artist by day and Python hacker by night, created a five euro coin using only free software for a design competion issued by the Dutch mint, and won. The coin, commemorating a rich Dutch architectural tradition, should be available nowish.

The coin’s obverse consists of a portrait of the queen made up out of the names of famous architects, and the reverse displays an outline of the country that doubles as a skyline made by positioning architecture books in a circle.

Michiels — a Belgian responsible for SPE-IDE, a Python IDE, and Phatch, a photo editor — outlines all the little design details in a long blog post, including the software he used (Python, of course) and the calculations and Google search results that went into this design. Unfortunately the mint would not allow Michiels to release the designs under the GPL license.

The Netherlands has a long tradition of meaningful and elaborately designed money, as we touched upon earlier.

Via LWN.net.