June 24, 2010
Just when you think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the craziest of bikes, a guy like Wouter van den Bosch, Dutch art student and former mechanical engineer from Arnhem comes up with a monster bike, made from a tractor tyre and some metal parts that took three months to build.
Watch this YouTube sensation now:
(Tip @sshanx (Twitter), Link: dailymail.co.uk)
Tags: YouTube
June 23, 2010
After axing American Snoop Dogg with the excuse that violence would ensue and after much protest about the homophobic lyrics of Jamaica’s Beenie Man, the bureaucrats who couldn’t make up their minds went with Ivory Coast’s Alpha Blondy as headlining act for The Hague’s Parkpop festival on Sunday 27 June.
That probably means festival visitors will get to hear some African French reggae.
Here’s Alpha Blondy perfoming ‘Ça me fait si mal’ (It hurts me so) about Africa and hardship
Tags: Alpha Blondy, Parkpop, reggae, The Hague
Contrary to many other European countries, the Netherlands has very few homeless people (or so it seems) and in general, very few beggars on the streets. I’ve been to Paris and Brussels recently, which reminded me again how few beggars a city like Amsterdam has, even in the tourist season.
Apparently, in the town of Amersfoort, where someone has counted 25 homeless people, they have their own bar. They get free beer and can get food, a shower and medical attention while they’re at it. And that’s not all: they get a client card, allowing them to drink a 500 ml beer every hour and a half, with a max of 10 a day. Lucky them, as Dutch beers are usually a wimpy 200-300 ml.
It seems very sad to get them to drink more in a way, but my money is on the getting them off the streets for the sake of the yuppies and nice families who live in Amersfoort.
(Link waarmaarraar.nl)
Tags: Amersfoort, beer, homless
June 22, 2010
A hashtag in Twitter is a word or phrase preceded by the pound sign (#). If it’s a sentence, like #whatsontelly, it is written without spaces. It gives a certain punch to tweets, as a tweet is only 140 characters long. It is also used for people to search for subjects like #obama #oilspill #tigerwoods and so on.
Our favourite Internet-savvy lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet explains how some Dutch folk have missed their mark.
First of all, the trademark claim for #weetjevandedag (roughly, this day in history or what happened on this day) was claimed on an image (a square, black-and-white, cartoon-like smiley face), not on the hashtag expression. If you don’t use the image, it’s not an infringement. Second, such an expression is general and does not differentiate the trademark in question from other things. Third, the trademark claims it already won a court case on someone using their trademark with no proof anywhere to be found to back it up. In English it’s called ‘hot air’, in Dutch it’s lovingly called ‘baked air’ (‘gebakken lucht’).
(Link tip @wilbertbaan (Twitter), blog.iusmentis.com)
Tags: hashtag, Internet, trademarks, Twitter
June 21, 2010
Jamaican dancehall artist Beenie Man has now been signed to replace Snoop Dogg at The Hague’s Parkpop festival on Sunday 27 June, which we wrote about a few days ago. However, replacing an artist who has never had any crowd problems in Europe with an artist that has been cancelled several times for his anti-gay lyrics, is beyond anyone’s comprehension.
Wikipedia mentions Beenie Man’s song ‘Damn’ with “I’m dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays” as well as an explanation from the artist that ‘gay’ in his country refers to child molesters. Although it is a very bad choice of words internationally, I also know that Russians have something similar, which gets lost in its cultural translation as well. But OK, The Hague isn’t booking a Russian artist here.
No matter the real reasons or the context, Beenie Man is way more controversal that Snoop Dogg and has been cancelled much more often. Beenie Man was banned from The Hague two years ago for homohobic lyrics, which makes the country wonder what kind of susbstances the bureaucrats down there are on these days.
UPDATE: Beenie Man is not coming either!
We’ll keep you posted!
(Link: dutchnews.nl, Photo: gayspirituality)
Tags: Beenie Man, gays, homophobia, Snoop Dogg
The Dutch will have bought 250,000 tablet PCs by the end of the year, market research company GfK predicts. Currently, there are about 50,000 e-book readers in the Netherlands.
GfK’s Laurens van den Oever told this at the Mediapark Jaarcongres two weeks ago, Bright reports. He also predicted according to Emerce that in three years’ time, 60% of the Dutch households will own a TV with an Internet connection. Today, that number is 10%.
(Photo by Rego Korosi, some rights reserved)
Tags: future, statistics
June 20, 2010
At the height of a fight between a 22-year-old man from Leiden and a 31-year-old taxi driver in The Hague last week, the former jumped onto the bonnet of the vehicle. The taxi driver then got into his car, and drove to the police station with the 22-year-old still on it.
Charges were entered against both men when they arrived. On the way over, the man from Leiden also managed to punch the windscreen so hard it cracked, AD reports.
(Photo by Ben Fredericson, some rights reserved)
June 19, 2010
Bankruptcy trustees often keep on-line shops running even though the companies behind them have gone bust, and therefore cannot deliver the goods.
Last week, Webwereld reported about at least three on-line stores that kept taking orders and payments even after they had gone bankrupt. Trade association ICTWaarborg had already sounded the alarm about this last year, but notices the problem continues unabated. According to the trade org, trustees in bankruptcies should shut down the on-line stores as part of their jobs.
In the Netherlands, the trustee in bankruptcy is the one who gets their salary by skimming the property off the top, and is often a lawyer appointed by their law school buddy, the judge. As you can see, absolutely no conflict of interest could possibly take place there.
From what I understand, people can only get money back from a trustee (curator in Dutch) when there has been an ‘undeniable mistake‘. The article I link to tells of a case where somebody wanted to wire money to party A, but accidentally wired it to party B who had just been declared bankrupt. That is considered an undeniable mistake, because the party making the payment had never intended to pay the bankrupt party.
Tags: bankruptcy, economic crisis, judges, law, lawyers
June 18, 2010
Ah yes, the pseudo-tolerant cliché of the Netherlands rears its ugly head: all of a sudden, hip hop artist Snoop Dogg, head act for The Hague’s Parkpop festival on Sunday 27 June, is not welcome. His show at the Melkweg in Amsterdam the next day is sold out. I’ll bet he’ll say some nice words about the bureaucrats in The Hague at his show.
Parkpop, said to be Europe’s biggest free pop festival, will feature Nena, Nick Lowe and Juliette Lewis. The mayor of The Hague, the attorney general and the cops think that it is a good idea to cancel Snoop Dogg, “in order to preserve the free, open and friendly nature of Parkpop.” Say what?
And not giving an explanation makes us imagine the worst of reasons. Even political parties are wondering why Snoop is being banned. Fear has to be part of the excuse.
Here is a great television appearance by Snoop Dogg on an old episode of ‘Jensen’ (Dutch talk show). It’s mostly in English with Dutch subtitles.
(Link: NOS.nl, abc.net.au)
Tags: bureaucrats, Jensen, Snoop Dogg, The Hague
June 17, 2010
Meet Peter Smaardijk and Ilse Segers, twittering cops. These two police officers from Etten-Leur and Breda respectively have started posting about their beat from their Blackberries last week.
Together with two officers from Tilburg they will post tweets about their daily police life in order to be more accessible. The Noord Brabant police also hopes to increase its network of eyes and ears this way.
In practice, the four officers twitter both standard police announcements (“watch out for pick pockets”) and their day-to-day affairs (“Spent the rest of the night writing the report.”). The police recommend citizens do not to use Twitter to report a crime.
(Photo: Twitter.com / Politie Midden en West Brabant. Link: BN/De Stem.)
Tags: Breda, Etten-Leur, police, Tilburg, Twitter
