February 2, 2021

Iranian spy and terrorist stayed at Dutch hotel unencumbered

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 1:09 pm

Flag of Iran

Assadollah Assadi, a 48-year-old Iranian diplomat wanted by Belgian authorities for spying and terrorism, apparently stayed at a hotel in Meppel, Drente without any problems.

According to books in the hands of Flemish broadcaster VRT, Assadi stayed at Hotel de Poort, across the street from the Meppel train station. Hotel owner Henk van Duinen has not been able to find any record of the stay from five years ago. The Dutch authorities knew nothing of Assadi’s visit to Meppel either.

Assadi was arrested in Germany, and is facing a 20-year sentence. He’s been held in a Belgian prison awaiting the verdict in his trial next Thursday. It has recently emerged that while in custody he was visited by his superiors from Tehran. Apparently, he also gave other spies and terrorists instructions.

The Iranian frequented public spaces in many smaller European cities such as Meppel where he made appointments at tourist spots. The data reveal a predilection for meetings outside castles and fortresses. The only notable person I know from Meppel is my bookkeeper.

(Links: vrt.be, rtvdrenthe.nl, Image of Flag of Iran, some rights reserved)

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August 7, 2019

Newly discovered mushroom in NL gets a Dutch name

Filed under: Dutch first,Nature by Orangemaster @ 12:43 pm

In the Drents-Friese Wold National Park in the province of Drenthe, mycologists have discovered a type of mushroom never seen before in the Netherlands, the Pycnoporellus fulgens. It’s currently being referred to by its Latin name because there’s no Dutch name for it yet, but it won’t stay without a name for very long.

Normally, this type of mushroom is found only in old spruce wood forests, something more akin to Scandinavia than here. It is also odd that the Pycnoporellus fulgens has not appeared in the neighbouring countries of Germany and Belgium. The Dutch Mycology Association is not only trying to figure this mystery out, but also wants to give the mushroom a name, and are leaning towards ‘oranje sparrenhoutzwam’, or ‘orange spruce wood mushroom’.

(Links: nu.nl, Photo: naturetoday.com)

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September 5, 2018

Meppel issues many fines for people peeing everywhere

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 6:49 pm

According to RTVDrenthe, Meppel has the most people fined for ‘peeing and pooping in the wild’ of all the cities in the province of Drenthe.

Per 10,000 residents, some 25 fines have been handed out in Meppel, which is more than cities such as Coevorden, the number two (ha, pun) on the list, where 6,2 fines per 10,000 residents have been issued. In what timeframe, that’s not clear.

On the national level, Meppel is in the top list, with places such as Terschelling, Valkenburg aan de Geul, Leeuwarden, Noordwijk, Utrecht and Schouwen-Duiveland out in front of it.

Nope, no idea why, but the amount or lack of public toilets could definitely play a role.

(Link: rtvdrenthe.nl)

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June 9, 2017

Dutchman pens book about Chinese Indonesian restaurants

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 10:13 am

MarkVanWonderen

A friend of 24 oranges HQ, journalist and photographer Mark van Wonderen decided a while back to write a book about Chinese Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands, and is currently busy visiting all 1097 of them. There used to be a whole lot more ‘Chin. Ind.’ restaurants, but they are slowly being turned into more modern types of restaurants, especially in the province of North Holland. The ethnic Chinese born in the Dutch East Indies eventually came to the Netherlands as of the 1960s, and as a result opened a ton of restaurants, which are different than the usual Hunan and Szechuan Chinese fare you’ll find in other Western countries.

Van Wonderen is motivated by the fading kitsch factor of these family restaurants where the Dutch would either have a sit down meal with the family on a Saturday night for some special occasion or swing by on a Sunday night where you would order at a counter walled off from the main restaurant with its own waiting area and in a matter of minutes someone would slide a bag full of warm plastic containers through a food hatch for you to take home.

While visiting a bunch of restaurants in the province of Drenthe, Van Wonderen spotted the sign of a restaurant being closed to make way for an Italian restaurant. He decided he wanted to have the sign and bring it home, and the new owner said ‘sure, but you have to take it down yourself’, a process that apparently took two days. And yes he’ll be putting the sign in his living room.

(Link and photo: rtvdrenthe.nl)

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March 7, 2016

Regional accent research confirms language discrimination

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 2:57 pm

Dutch-Moroccans

I’ve been working with French Europeans lately and not 15 minutes goes by before someone points out my ‘charming’ French Canadian accent. The same group of people also work with North Africans and Dutch people who speak French but don’t point out their accents for fear of sounding either like racists toward non-Caucasians or insulting the white Dutch managers. It’s OK for a card-carrying French person to tell me as a white person from an ex colony that I have an accent, but they wouldn’t dare tell a black person from Senegal the same thing.

I explained this later down the pub to a French-speaking Dutch person who claims she doesn’t judge people by their accent right after telling me I had one. I asked her if she tells Dutch people who obviously have an ethnic background that they have an accent in Dutch and she says she wouldn’t do that, but didn’t tell me why. Someone then tried to explain that it’s because a ‘decent’ Dutch accent makes you accepted by the white Dutch majority, and recent research shows that a heavy ‘ethnic’ accent puts you at the bottom rung of the ladder where you’ll find the Dutch-Moroccans and their accent.

The Moroccan accent is said to have no prestige whatsoever and is seen as negative on all fronts by the predominantly white students interviewed in a recent survey, even though other ethnic groups and the native Dutch use words and pronunciations from this ethnolect. Researcher Stefan Grondelaers, who has a Flemish accent, says that Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb and comedian Najib Amhali, both Dutch-Moroccans, have had to “limit their Moroccan accent to a minimum to get ahead”.

Researcher at the Radboud University in Nijmegen and linked to scientific research into Dutch regional accents, Grondelaers explains that we use stereotypes to avoid collecting information about others that we don’t intend to use, and this is part of our evolutionary process. He goes on to explain that when people judge each other’s accents based solely on what they hear, they make snap judgements.

A Dutch television program (kicks in at 25:10, in Dutch) that discusses the discrimination Dutch people with regional accents face would have been handy in the pub yesterday. A part of the video has two women in booths that cannot see each other. A younger woman with an accent from Drenthe reads the news to an older woman from the Randstad area, the ‘prestige accent of the country’. The older woman, knowingly enjoying her ‘standard’ accent, says the younger woman sounds like a farmer with a bad perm, big glasses, bad clothing, and whole bunch of other stereotypes that she couldn’t possibly know. Grondelaers explains that the woman with the Randstad accent can look down on others because all other accents are less prestigious than hers.

Another part of the video shows a Dutch-Morrocan man trying to get a test drive for a car who is treated very differently on the phone than a white Dutch speaker. It’s so bad that the person on the other end does nothing to keep the conversation going. The Dutchman gets everything he wants and actual conversation. Grondelaers basically states that people are simply “racist beasts that walk upright.”

(Link: www.kennislink.nl, Photo of Djellabas by Roel Wijnants, some rights reserved)

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January 20, 2016

Emmen plans world’s first wooden bike path

Filed under: Bicycles,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 3:46 pm

After solar-powered bike paths, heated bike paths and glow in the dark bike paths, the next trend in bike paths would be wooden ones. The city of Emmen, Drenthe has announced that it is planning to renovate a 200-metre stretch of bike path using a biocomposite material made from woodchips and bioresin for its robustness and resistance to wear. Any new material for something like a bike path needs to be able to also deal with vandalism, the weather and last a long time.

If the test goes well, it could lead to the manufacturing of these sustainable biocomposite plates in a factory that would employ 75 people in Emmen. The entire idea is part of getting more innovation going in the region.

(Link: www.dvhn.nl, Photo of a Schwinn Tailwind Electric Assist bike by Richard Masoner, some rights reserved)

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November 16, 2015

Postal worker hoards three year’s worth of mail

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:47 pm

The police have found 60 mail bags containing about 13,000 undelivered letters at a Dutch postal worker’s home in Eelde, Drenthe. A local resident filed a formal accusation against PostNL after not having receiving important letters and the police who investigated discovered the mountain of mail at the postal worker’s home.

The worker claimed to be overwhelmed and let her work pile up quite literally from 2012 to August 2015. In 2013 a quick Google search tells us that in Tilburg a postal worker hoarded mail in his shed for three years as well.

Some 20,000 people (lots of women, students and seniors) work mainly part-time delivering mail in the Netherlands, as compared to the image of the full-time possibly unionised mail man. Another quick search using ‘Nederland’ (‘The Netherlands’) and ‘postbode’ (‘mail delivery person’) will regale you with postal workers hoarding mail up and down the land.

Hoarding was not exciting enough for one woman who decided to kick it up a notch and burnt everything to a crisp after just two weeks on the job.

(Link: nos.nl)

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November 5, 2015

Listen to the city through a trio of horns

Filed under: Art by Orangemaster @ 7:33 pm

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An interactive installation called ‘Toon’ (‘Tone’) by Dutch artist Jeroen Bisscheroux at the Vincent van Gogh College in Assen, Drenthe, features three dark-red horns a person can sit in the middle of and listen to environmental sounds. They can hear sounds from three different locations, including nearby sports pitches, passers-by from the park, as well as the sounds of people leaving school. By having three horns pointed in different directions you get a mix, creating a veritable soundscape.

Bisscheroux has many different installations related to sound, one of which called ‘Oor’ (‘Ear’) that many people drive by on motorway A50 near Son en Beugel, Noord-Brabant.

(Link and photo: inhabitat.com)

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October 7, 2015

National holocaust monument becomes glass house

Filed under: Architecture,History by Orangemaster @ 6:38 pm

westerbork

The green and white wooden house is one of the last remaining buildings at Kamp Westerbork, a WWII Nazi transit camp in Hooghalen, Drenthe where Dutch Jews, Sinti and Romani stayed and were readied for transport to Nazi concentration camps elsewhere. German Jewess Anne Frank passed through there as well in her final months before being transported back to Germany. The house was declared a national monument in 1994.

Intended as a memorial to WWII, the large glass box creates a vitrine-like enclosure around the clapboard residence of SS commander Albert Konrad Gemmeker. According to Oving Architecten from Groningen, it will both preserve the structure and be used to host educational events.

(Link: www.dezeen.com, photo ovingarchitecten.nl)

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March 29, 2015

Warehouse echoes Rietveld’s famous weaving mill

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 8:25 pm

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The jagged roof of this warehouse and office space in Meppel, Drenthe was designed by Dutch architect Arnoud Olie to reference a 1950s weaving mill, Weverij de Ploeg (photo) in Bergeijk, Noord-Brabant thought up by world famous Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld.

Olie wanted to avoid the traditional ‘square box’ buildings that are typical for the region and therefore went with an upgraded Dutch design classic.

(Link and photo: www.dezeen.com)

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