August 28, 2013

Foreign birds make history upon arrival in the Netherlands

Filed under: Animals,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Last May 11 Iago Sparrows flew aboard the MV Plancius on 6 May 2013 from the Cape Verde Islands. In the end, four birds (two male and two female) stayed on board until Hansweert, Zeeland, making them the first known individuals of that species (endemic to the islands off West Africa) to have reached Europe, and therefore writing history.

Once docked in Hansweert on 19 May, the sparrows stayed on board to eat breadcrumbs and hang out with the captain.

All four sparrows were timid and passive, up until the moment I released the male from his confinement on the bridge. The other male then sought the company of the Captain’s sparrow, and the two cocks started a fight. The aggressive display ended in a clear attempt to copulate. One male definitely mounted the other and tried to copulate. The male that was mounted did, however, not assume the classic submissive solicitation posture (crouched, neck drawn in, wings slightly drooped), a posture known from observation of female House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) that solicit copulation.

Please feel free to insert all kinds of good-humoured jokes in the comments.

(Links: www.improbable.com, moeliker.wordpress.com, Photo of Iago Sparrow by Hans Zwitzer, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

February 7, 2013

Hotel chef finds pearl in oyster

Filed under: Food & Drink by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Dutch chef Jacco Beck who works at Hotel Sanadome in Nijmegen found a pearl in an oyster, 7.7 mm in diameter and worth an estimated 1000 euro. The good news is, he can keep it. According to a representative of the fishing authorities, the chance of finding a pearl is 1 out of 35,000. The five-year-old oyster came from the Grevelingen lake in Zeeland where a pearl of this diameter has never been found.

(Link: www.bnr.nl, Photo of pearl by Amboo who, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

May 10, 2011

Beware of Zeeland’s kissing cyclist

Filed under: Bicycles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:33 pm

A whopping 41 women have reported being unwantedly kissed by a male cyclist in the Southern province of Zeeland, something that has been going on since 2009. The cops aren’t sure it’s the same guy and the women’s reports tend to differ. Call the alarm number (it’s 112 here) and snap a pic with your phone is the cops’ equivalent of ‘take two aspirins and call me in the morning’, as they can’t seem to catch him. The man asks cycling women for directions, kisses them and asks them where they live and I imagine has other propositions as well.

(Link: blikopnieuws)

Tags: ,

November 9, 2010

Visiting a neighbourhood built by Hitler

Filed under: Architecture,History by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Built in 1941, but only completed after WWII in 1947, the Maria Christina neighbourhood in Heerlen, Limburg, was designed by German architects Karl Gonser and Hans-Georg Oechler by order of Hitler and has been protected heritage since 2008. The locals have long referred to this neighbourhood as the ‘Hermann Göring’ neighbourhood, as the story goes that he actually visited the area before construction started. Although thousands of houses were originally planned, the neighbourhood ended up with 240 homes of different sizes, clearly meant for families with many children (many small rooms upstairs and big gardens by local standards), in this case German mine workers that were to take over the mines from the Dutch.

A plaque I read while visiting the neighbourhood explains that the houses with big attics had saddle roofs masoned with rare bricks called ‘vechtsteen’, bricks made of clay that came from the region along the river Vecht. There is also a rumour that houses were broken down in the province of Zeeland, all the way across the country just to building these houses, which is plausible considering that there was ‘vechtsteen’ to be had in Zeeland.

As you can see in both pictures, some houses have a 17th century Dutch bell gable. The first picture shows a row of houses with prominent bell gable houses, while on other streets, the bell gable house is in the middle of the row. My personal impression was that I was looking at row houses in Ireland, and that I was not in the Netherlands.

Many houses on either side of the bell gable house in the second picture are for sale and surprising inexpensive: 135,000 euro on average for 125m2 of living space. To give you an idea of how affordable that is, neigbours of mine in Amsterdam, the country’s most expensive city only rivalled by Utrecht, are trying to sell their 110m2 house for 335,000 euro, down from 349,000.

(Links: rijckheyt and nrcnext)

Tags: , , ,

February 25, 2010

Berbice Dutch from Guyana is now extinct

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 11:32 am
Berbice

Berbice Dutch, a Dutch creole spoken in part of Guyana, has been declared officially extinct, according to the next Dutch edition of National Geographic.

Berbice Dutch was spoken in plantations along the River Berbice, part of Guyana which was once a private colony founded by Dutch planter Abraham van Peere from Zeeland. It is a mixture of the Zeeland dialect of Dutch, the local Arawak Indian language and Ijo, spoken by slaves from Nigeria.

Here a video of this woman, one of the last speakers of the language, gets going at about 1:00 with explanation in English.

(Links: rnw.nl, caribbeanlanguages)

Tags: , ,

October 8, 2009

The Pirate Bay moves in to a Dutch bunker

Filed under: General,Online by Orangemaster @ 12:21 pm
outside16

The Pirate Bay, the Swedish website that hosts all those torrents and was ordered to shut down, has found a new crib in our water-ridden little country. The Cyberbunker is a former nuclear bunker built by the military in Goes, Zeeland. It has everything a modern-day pirate needs, including surveillance, fresh water, sea and mussels, room to chillax and an allure blowing many cheap Hollywood hacking-cyber-nerd movie sets out of the water.

Pirate Bay had tried to buy the even cooler and more controversial micronation of Sealand a few years back, a no man’s land on a sea platform off the coast of England. The obvious Zeeland-Sealand pun is just one of life’s little linguistic coincidences.

(Link: torrentfreak, Photo: cyberbunker)

Tags: , ,

April 2, 2009

Zeeland to give free bicycle helmets to kids

Filed under: Bicycles,General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 8:35 am
kid-bike

Everytime I see parents with unprotected small children on their bikes, sometimes two, or when I see small children riding hard and recklessly in traffic without helmets, I cringe. And everytime single time I have brought this up at parties, the Dutch tell me to shut up because they know better and that no one gets hurt since they were all born on bikes.

If that really was the fantasy world we lived in, then handing out 35,000 free helmets to children in Zeeland would be a total waste of money, right? Over the next five years, the Zeeuws Coördinatiepunt Fiets (ZCF) in the province of Zeeland will be doing just that, handing out free bicycle helmets to stop children from getting injured or killed.

Last year, the emergency wards in Zeeland treated 4,000 children up to age 17 for head injuries. On an annual basis, 10 to 15 children under age 13 die in traffic riding bikes. About 20,000 children between age 0 and 12 get treated in hospitals as a result of a traffic acccident.

Imagine your cute kid dying because you think no one gets hurt on bikes. Blame all the cars? Write off Zeeland as a ‘different’ part of the country?

And then, the best argument of them all: snowboarders and mountainbikers use cool, hip helmets, what’s wrong with doing so on your bike? It’s not ‘tradition’? The statistics are wrong? Kids just don’t really get hurt?

Bravo Zeeland!

(Link: ad.nl, Photo: holcus.nl)

Tags: , ,

February 23, 2009

ATM use on Sunday banned

Filed under: Religion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:57 pm
Rabobank ATM

The War on fun and practicality strikes again — and punishes old people. In the wee town of Scherpenisse, Zeeland, the ATM shuts down on Saturday night because the owner of the building is a Reformed Protestant. This means that Sunday is the day of the Lord and “taking out money is absurd.” The Rabobank, who operates the ATM, considers its machines open for business seven days a week.

The talk of the town is whether the owner can actually keep shutting the ATM down on Sunday, which makes life harder for old people.

(Link: blikopnieuws.nl, Photo: cwi.nl)

Tags: , , ,

October 19, 2008

Second Dutch Project Gutenberg sampler

Filed under: Art,Literature by Branko Collin @ 8:36 am

I decided to make another Nederlandse Project Gutenberg Reader, containing the Dutch books that were released in the past month at the internet library. Once again you can find it at Brewster Kahle’s excellent Internet Archive.

Since the past month was a bit quiet with regards to new releases, I decided to add a couple golden oldies. The new releases were Jacob Cats’ Spaens Heydinnie and Shakespeare’s Twee edellieden van Verona. Cats was a moralistic writer from the Dutch Golden Age. Spaens Heydinnie (Spaans heidinnetje, Spanish gypsy) is a reworking of Cervantes’ La Gitanilla, in which an infant girl of noble birth is kidnapped and raised by gypsies. The third release last month was a lecture held in 1840 for the Frisian Association, which I find wholly uninteresting, but I am not going to be all judgmental about your kinks.

I added two extracts from older works. The first is a travel account of the Netherlands, Door Holland met pen en camera, by the French journalist and photographer Lud. Georges Hamön. Let me translate a bit for you:

One has to keep in mind though that Holland is a desperately flat and monotonous region, that it does not spark any fierce emotion, nor does it lead to excited enthusiasm or even quiet inner delight. Holland is the land of serenity, where one submerges in the calmest comfort.

The opposite of calm comfort is Herman Heijermans’ Diamantstad (Diamond City), a novel about and an indictment of the poor living conditions of the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam around the turn of the century. Earlier I sort of translated the fragment I quote in the reader over here.

Photo of Father Kick in quiet contemplation by Lud. Georges Hamön. See also the first Dutch Project Gutenberg Reader.

Tags: , , , , , ,

April 16, 2008

Watercity to be built in Zeeland

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 11:54 am

[Visualisation of the new city]

Architect Taco Tuinhof proposes this city on piles to be built in the sea near Goes in Zeeland according to Bright (Dutch). The city would be called Westerschelde Water Stad. Tuinhof is currently looking for investors.

Image: Bright/RDH.

Tags: ,