January 8, 2019

Don’t let horses lick your car

Filed under: Animals,Automobiles by Orangemaster @ 11:46 am

Some of you might be rolling their eyes, others like me are surprised: apparently horses like to lick car paint, damaging cars, and one Dutch nature association in Nijmegen, Gelderland is warming people about it with the pictogram above.

I have zero scientific knowledge of why horses like car paint and metallic paint in particular, so I’m going with a Google search for plausible answers:

– They like shiny things
– They really need salt
– Lack of nutrients from the plants in their pasture (I vote for this one)
– Boredom
– They like the taste of metal

In any case, it’s bad for them and bad for your car! And it’s like chips (crisps) for humans: once they taste it, they want more.

The idea is to park your car far away from the horses. Having to explain horse damage to your insurance company is probably difficult as well.

(Link and pictogram: naturetoday.com)

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October 5, 2015

Watching paint not dry and move around to music

Filed under: Art,Music by Orangemaster @ 10:56 am

Run-Away

Dutch band Jo Goes Hunting’s latest video ‘Run Away’ features models covered in paint by Amsterdam-based material designer Shai Langen.

Langen was asked for something ‘less conventional’ and came up with models dripping of paint, an effect that was not easy to achieve: a mixture of wallpaper paste and acrylic paint chosen as a simple technique that would let the material itself create movement.

The headpieces were made from lacquered and reinforced cardboard, and although one of the oval-shaped pieces shown is almost as large as the model’s body, many of them were scrapped. I can imagine they didn’t stay in place that easily, either.

The black and white patterns created on the models has a quality that makes you want to look and see what the next pattern will be. ‘After applying paste, I smeared paint onto the models’ bodies using cocktail sticks and rollers to create various patterns,’ explains Langen.

(Link and photo: www.dezeen.com)

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September 7, 2014

Pink refuge islands will keep their colour, Wijchen says

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 2:05 pm

refuge-island-wijchen-branko-collin

Last week bright pink refuge islands started popping up on Havenweg in the town of Wijchen near Nijmegen.

According to Volkskrant, the civil servant responsible for ordering the paint used the wrong colour code (it should have been a dark red) and the painters never questioned the result, so now Wijchen has its own ‘world famous’ refuge islands.

Realising their mistake, the municipality wanted to have the pink islands painted over but citizens liked the effect, so the striking colour stays. Deputy Mayor Paul Loermans said about the mistakes: “To err is human. Apart from getting the colour wrong, the painters actually did a neat job.”

Omroep Gelderland suspected a marketing stunt because a bike race for women will be passing through Wijchen next week, but everybody involved denies the allegations vehemently. “A lucky mistake”, both the organizers of the race and the municipality told the broadcaster.

This shade of pink is sometimes called ‘zuurstokroze’ in Dutch, ‘candy cane pink’.

(Photo: reconstruction via Google Street View)

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June 14, 2010

Poking more fun at the Germans

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 11:01 pm

Dutch World Cup ads continue to rib the Germans. Paint manufacturer Histor came up with a ‘paint whisperer’ who can tell how happy a room is:

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