July 20, 2010
Tonight, on a Dutch television show that usually calls upon people to find missing children or criminals, we will be called upon for a stolen portrait of Arda Boogers (see painting here), painted by world-famous artist, Piet Mondriaan. It was stolen in mid June from the Freriks Museum in Winterswijk. Since we like numbers, it is insured to the tune of 28,000 euro. It is considered to be missing internationally, so keep your eyes open.
(Link: telegraaf.nl)
Tags: Piet Mondriaan, Winterswijk
July 19, 2010
Dutch gamers in Rotterdam have scored a Guinness world record for the most hours of consecutive gaming: 50 hours playing Red Dead Redemption. The old record was held by Chirantan Patnaik from India at 40 hours 20 minutes, according to the print version Dutch daily De Pers.
The attempt to break the record was organised by Dutch company Vogel’s Products that wanted to promote a Sony PlayStation 3 controller.
(Link: wireupdate.com, Photo of a PlayStation controller 2 by blindfutur3′, some rights reserved)
Tags: Rotterdam
Although Royal Horeca Netherlands has no hard data available, anecdotal evidence leads daily De Pers to conclude that Chinese families are moving more and more into the hotel business.
Vincent van Dijk, a ‘trend watcher’ who has taken it upon him to spend a night at a different Amsterdam hotel each night for a whole year, estimates that one in six hotels he stayed in were operated by Chinese people.
Alex Chang of Royal Horeca Netherlands sees a strong growth in hotels operated by second or third generation Chinese Dutch. He also notices investors from China are interested in buying or starting hotels in the Netherlands.
Is this the end of the archetypical Chin. Ind. Restaurant, establishments run by Chinese immigrants but serving mostly a sweet and greasy parody of Indonesian food, a cuisine the Dutch know from their colonial past? It took me a while to find such a restaurant for the photo illustrating this article (Ah Sang on the Overtoom in Amsterdam).
Tags: business, hotels, restaurants
July 18, 2010
Scientists of the Erasmus teaching hospital in Rotterdam have found that perinatal deaths (deaths of children between 0 and 7 days old) could be reduced by 25% if midwives and doctors communicated better, Volkskrant reports.
Currently, the Netherlands is a sad infant mortality leader in the European Union with 1 in 100 babies dying between the 22nd week of gestation and the first week of birth. Only France and Latvia are worse off.
Rather than taking responsibility, the union for midwives, KNOV, has responded furiously to the findings of professor Gouke Bonsel. Chairwoman Angela Verbeten berates the Rotterdam scientists for studying forbidden subject matter.
The Netherlands is the only country in the European Union with a sizeable number of home births (around 30% versus statistic noise in most other Member States). It is the midwife’s responsibility to warn a doctor about any complications during a pregnancy.
A 2009 study found that there are no differences between the perinatal mortality rates of home births and of hospital births, even though the latter pool should contain all the complicated births.
Although the reason for the KNOV’s anger is not apparent, it would seem likely that the home birth mafia’s contradictory depiction of home births as both natural and safe has something to do with it.
Tags: home births, infant mortality rate, midwifery, mortality rate
July 17, 2010
The Council of State decided last Wednesday that farmer Joop van Ooijen must remove the text “Jezus redt” (Jesus saves) from his roof or else he’ll be fined 15,000 euro.
The welstandscommissie of the municipality of Giessenlanden—a typically Dutch abomination that gets to rule on the beauty of any outdoors construction—had outlawed the Christian slogan before. The Council of State (1531) is the highest court of appeal for administrative decisions, and is formally presided by the non-elected Queen.
Van Ooijen told De Volkskrant he will appeal the decision. According to the council, an appeal is not possible.
Update: As Arnoud Engelfriet points out in the comments, the appeal will likely be at a European level.
See also:
(Public domain photo by Wikipedia user Apdency)
Tags: Council of State, freed, freedom of speech, law, Queen
July 16, 2010
An entire year after having been commissioned by the City of Amsterdam, a wall graffiti with annexed garden downtown on the Prinsengracht by The London Police apparently has to be painted over, as it doesn’t ’embellish’ the area of downtown Amsterdam it is in. Nonsense!
Seasoned Amsterdam residents know that this bit of nannyism is bureaucrat code for ‘we’re still trying to get Amsterdam on the Unesco list and this probably won’t help’.
Why was it put up in the first place? Why take one year to devalue something you’ve ordered? Who complained about it? Does it have something to do with Amsterdam’s new, slightly more conservative mayor Eberhard van der Laan? Was someone bored at work?
Funny, Miami, New York, Munich and other big cities around the world have no problems with their London Police wall graffiti at all.
(Link: parool, Photo of Graffiti by London Police by Pierrot, some rights reserved)
Google books has received the green light on 14 July from the Dutch National Library to scan more than 160,000 public domain books from the 18th and 19th centuries. The scanned books will then be available on the library’s website and on Europeana, an online library with six million books. Scanning is going to take years, after which the books will be available again physically in the library. We wrote about the library’s ambitious plans earlier this year.
The collection features a wide range of historical, legal and social works, including Jan ten Brink, author and professor of Dutch literature, tutor of great Dutch author, Louis Couperus and L.A. te Winkel and Matthias de Vries, co-editors of the Dictionary of the Dutch Language.
According to Nrcnext as well as the Seattle Times, there is a worry that by being the sole administrator of all these books as well as turning a profit on them, Google will have too much power over the digital book market. “Our cultural heritage is not Google’s to have,” explains Geert Lovink, a media theoretician, in Nrcnext. He believes other companies can handle some of the scanning and distribution as well, even though he thinks the generally idea is good.
(Links: nrcnext.nl, kb.nl and seattletimes)
July 15, 2010
In the eastern province of Overijssel there is a lacustrine village called Giethoorn that has no roads, although according to wikipedia there is a bike path. Saying that is a ‘Venice of the North’ is a cliché since people call Amsterdam and St. Petersburg, Russia that already and with good reason. Giethoorn (referring to the horns of a goat) has some 2620 inhabitants, one of which we wrote about, Siegfried Woldhek, a famous caricaturist.
Back in 2008, Giethoorn celebrated the 50th anniversary of the film ‘Fanfare’ by Bert Haanstra, which was filmed there. See the news clip and bits of the film here:
You can always have a look at an elaborate video of Giethoorn, which starts with people skating over the water in winter:
Tags: Giethoorn, Overijssel, skating, tourism
July 14, 2010
Apparently, the popular city of Hersonissos on the Greek island of Crete is a popular piss-up destination of Dutch youth. And they get really blasted, and the numbers are scary, and thousands of young people end up in the hospital. Oh, and the boys drink 3-4 times as much as the girls if they go on holiday alone. This is as alarming as it is unflattering. You could easily compare it to the Americans going to some Caribbean island to drink without their parents around, Canadians doing spring break in Florida (guilty, I have it on tape to prove it, and I was of US drinking age), or the British going to Ibiza, Spain and coming home with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.
When I booked my very first vacation to Crete (where these pics come from) back in 2006, these Dutch cafés were mostly in or around Hersonissos, the city everyone told me to avoid. I stayed east of Hersonissos, walked along the coast to it, and kept going to Heraklion, the capital of Crete were the Cretians and normal tourists congregate.
You can’t miss the Dutch enclaves of orange, Dutch beer and Dutch junk food if you’re in Hersonissos, ‘littering’ the view of the old town. I can only imagine what that is like at night. I sipped Metaxa quietly at my hotel with the owner at night, a born and bred Cretian man who told great stories.
An elderly man at a bar on a terrace in Montréal one summer once said to me there were two distinct ways of drinking: alpha and omega, the A and Z of the Greek alphabet. Alpha was drinking too quickly (now referred to as ‘binge drinking’ ) and according to his gross generalisation, the way most of the Anglo-Saxon-oriented world seems to drink: cheap, shots, happy hour specials and quick, and all about quantity, not quality. Omega was the opposite, it was sipping good wine slowly the entire day in the sun on a terrace and getting wasted every so slowly like he was doing.
Even though it is – and I repeat – a gross generalisation, it has stuck with me all these years.
(Link: volkskrant.nl)
July 13, 2010
As I write this, some 500,000 people are currently not at work and partying with the Dutch football team back from South Africa at the Museumplein in Amsterdam almost like they actually won the World Cup. The team first took a boat tour through Amsterdam’s canals and I can see them drinking beer and dancing to our beloved techno-trance music on telly.
Why bother when your team has lost? Because getting that far in the World Cup feels like a win. Because it was planned in case we won, and hey, people want to party. Because it’s summer and nobody really wants to be working.
Because the newly elected goverment can’t agree on a coaltion formation, meaning we have no government at the moment and therefore, not too much news.
Here’s what it looked like in 1988 when the Dutch won the European Cup:
