January 29, 2015

Dordrecht detains unrelenting serial letter writer

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:10 am

Despite a court order to minimise his letter writing, Mustafa Karasahin of Dordrecht, aka the serial letter writer, has started ‘harassing’ city hall again with a barrage of letters. The city of Dordrecht has to make its position clearer and has placed Karasahin in a detention centre. Fining the man hasn’t worked, so detaining him was the next step.

Dealing with his letters has cost the city of Dordrecht nearly half a million euro. Back in 2013, the court had limited him to 10 letters a month (although the source below says two). Either way, 16 letters as of late was over the limit.

According to the city and experts, the law governing access to information requests needs to be modified to address this kind of abuse and doing so is taking a long time. In the mean time, the serial writer has given no signs of letting up once he’s free again. Karasahin owns some 40 buildings and rents room illegally to migrant workers. He is considered a slum lord.

(Link: www.binnenlandsbestuur.nl)

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October 26, 2014

Woman trolls offline, bad mistake!

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 3:49 pm

church-koewacht-rijksdienst-cultureel-erfgoedFor the past three years citizens of Koewacht, a village straddling the Dutch-Belgian border, have been receiving anonymous hateful letters, but two weeks ago the perpetrator was caught.

Cristel was known to be a respectable woman, living a model life with her husband and dog in a detached house. However, behind those immaculate walls, AD says, the 51-year-old was busy writing letters to her neighbours signed with “a mother of three children” and “the group” in which she told the recipients that they were ugly, had ugly faces and big posteriors, and that she hoped their children wouldn’t grow up to be as ugly.

Don’t trash talk my children, a 32-year-old victim must have thought, and she contacted the neighbourhood cop who as it happens had also received hate mail from the same author. The police discovered about 15 people had received hurtful and sometimes threatening letters. Eventually the author was caught on 15 October and confessed immediately.

Last week during a meeting in the village’s only restaurant, ‘T Hoekske, the letter writer apologised to the victims. Her husband told people that his wife is undergoing treatment, although it’s not clear from the newspapers if it’s for her hateful tendencies.

Since none of the victims filed charges, the police won’t prosecute, much to the chagrin of the online peanut gallery who immediately branded her as a lunatic and a terrorist and clamoured for her arrest. This in turn led columnist Luuk Koelman to conclude that the woman’s biggest crime wasn’t writing hate mail, but doing it through the traditional post.

“On Internet forums it is custom to belittle everybody who disagrees with you. In real life the police may hunt you down when you tell a neighbour you think she is ugly. Online you can safely express your desire to see her dead or wracked with cancer. Nobody bats and eyelid at that.”

(Photo by Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, some rights reserved)

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March 30, 2013

Court limits serial letter writer to 10 letters a month

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:36 am

Mustafa Karasahin of Dordrecht was told by the court last week that he had to limit the amount of letters he sends to the city of Dordrecht to ten a month for the next two years.

Called a slumlord by Binnenlands Bestuur (huisjesmelker, literally ‘house milker’), Karasahin apparently sent the city of Dordrecht 2,247 letters over the past years. The city estimated that it would have to spend 400,000 euro a year to reply to Karashin’s letters, complaints and freedom of information requests if he kept at it. It had to employ four civil servants just to deal with Karasahin’s past missives, according to Radio Rijnmond.

The judge ruled in favour of the city because Karashin indicated his letter writing campaign was intended as a form of harassment.

Deputy Mayor Piet Sleeking of Dordrecht sees the court’s decision as a good starting point for further reducing civil liberties. Maybe parliament should get involved, he feels, and think about “when using a right becomes abusing a right”.

Karasahin owns 40 buildings which he apparently lets to migrant workers. He has started letting others write his letters for him.

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May 30, 2010

26 letter shaped chairs by Roeland Otten

Filed under: Art,Design by Branko Collin @ 12:19 pm

Designer Roeland Otten hopes to mass-market these alphabet chairs, writes Bright. He can see them being used by elementary schools.

The so-called ABChairs were made possible thanks to a grant by Fonds BKVB, the rich government sugar daddy for the visual arts. Otten, a 1999 Design Academy Eindhoven graduate, calls the Naked Alphabet by his teacher Anthon Beeke an inspiration. He is looking for a manufacturer to help him mass produce the chairs in plastic.

Unfortunately Otten uses one of them newfangled and unlinkable Flash sites instead of a real website, I would have linked to his work earlier if he had not. If you go there, see under “recent stuff / transformatie-transformatorhuisje” how he let an ugly electrical substation disappear from his Rotterdam neighbourhood.

(Photo: Roeland Otten.)

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January 4, 2009

Frits Jonker’s typefaces

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 2:15 pm

Fool’s Gold editor Frits Jonker is playing with typefaces, faces drawn using the letter shapes (only and all) of a person’s name. He’s got a longish Flickr photostream with just typefaces of what I assume are his friends, but the image above with Batman and Robin and Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie was taken from the latest Zone 5300.

Speaking of which, the winter issue of Zone 5300 has an exerpt from Nozzman’s “drawing book” (“not a sketch book, because even if I don’t study or research these drawings, they’re still mature”), part 1 of Mr. Mack’s very handy guide to trucker’s CB talk, Robert van Raffe’s look into dandyism, an interview with detective writer Philip Kerr, and much more.

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