March 17, 2011
A generous Dutch churchgoer donated an entirely built church organ to the Reformed Protestant church in Diever, Drenthe. In true Dutch fashion, we have to tell you the price of it: about 350,000 euro. The Neo Baroque organ has 1147 pipes and will be officially put to use this weekend.
The organ photo here is of a Catholic church in Barcelona.
(Link: waarmaarraar.nl)
Tags: Drenthe
March 16, 2011
The Volkskrant estimated that the Netherlands would be allocated some 100,000 tickets for the Olympic Games in London 2012, but apparently they are only up for grabs if you’re a card carrying Dutch person.
Non-Dutch Europeans in the Netherlands who want to buy tickets for the Olympic Games in London will have to pay by Visa card because the Dutch ticket allocation is only for Dutch nationals, the Volkskrant reports on Wednesday. The Dutch selling agent is only allowed to sell cards to Dutch nationals, and will charge them a 23.8% booking fee on top of the price of a ticket.
All ‘third party nationals’, a fancy term for non European, are obliged to buy tickets from the agents of their country.
(Link dutchnews.nl)
Tags: Olympic Games, Olympics
March 15, 2011
When it comes to environmentally friendly products, we tend to collectively think that they’re automatically better than conventional products without even checking. The media and marketing play on these warm and fuzzy feelings all the time, which tends to be echoed by people whose need to believe always seems to outweigh checking the facts. Yes, these are nasty generalizations and yes, I too want to believe, but I don’t — yet.
After an aquaintance had posted an ‘I’m better than you because I eat less meat’ blurb on a mailing list, I promptly responded with our posting on producing meat is actually less damaging to the environment than producing cotton T-shirts. I’ll bet you she still buys cotton T-shirts.
However, I do agree that the video linked below seems to gloss over the issue of pesticides and other interesting comments the farmers were trying to make, but the deception is real: organic products have their own issues and according to everything I have read from several countries as an ordinary consumer, they are very often the same or only slightly better than conventional products.
And yes, killing animals is still killing animals, I got that part.
Watch the short video report: ‘Organic meat not better for the environment’.
(Link: Radio Netherlands)
Tags: agriculture, cows, farming, meat
March 14, 2011
Vogelbescherming Nederland (the Dutch bird protection society) has set up web cams in and near 8 different bird nests. This spring you can watch two types of owl, a pair of storks, barn swallows, kingfishers, nuthatches, a pair of herons and a couple of peregrine falcons in the privacy of their homes while they try and raise their kids.
Each nest sports several cameras. You can also watch the favourite clips of the site’s moderators. Four of the bird types are on the red list, which means the birds are endangered.
Link: Holly Moors.
Tags: bird watching, birds, webcams
March 13, 2011
French bag maker Louis Vuitton has gotten itself a so-called ex parte judgement against Amsterdam based Danish artist Nadia Plesner, forcing her to cough up 5000 euro per day or stop using images of Vuitton’s Audra Bag.
Plesner had incorporated an image of the bag in her painting Darfurnica. On January 27 judge Hensen denied her the chance to defend herself in court, so that by the time she returned from a trip to Denmark she had already racked up tens of thousands of euro in fines. She will contest the judgement (PDF).
Plesner has already received a judgement against her for a similar ‘offence’ in France. Under Dutch copyright law she is unlikely to be found against, but this was a case about community design law, and I don’t know if that law has free speech exceptions.
Vuitton’s actions seem an obvious attempt to control the conversation about them. You cannot really blame a wild animal for being a wild animal, the fault lies clearly at the feet of the state giving it the means.
An ex-parte order is a travesty of justice. In order to obtain one you just shop at the judge without the other party getting a chance to defend themselves.
Judge Hensen is slowly building a reputation for issuing strange verdicts in intellectual property cases. In 2007 he/she/it concluded that legal downloading is illegal downloading (the case revolved around the question whether rights associations could collect money for illegal copies, which required a definition of illegal copies).
(Link: Trendbeheer. Photo: Nadia Plesner.)
March 12, 2011
Somebody at Metafilter asked themselves this question, and then set out to find the answers. Why are the Dutch so tall?
The New Yorker had a long exploratory article in 2004 in which economist John Komlos argued that health and well-being may have something to do with it. And last November, Al Jazeera looked into the consequences of being the tallest people on Earth: these days, Dutch building codes prescribe door heights of at least 2.30 metres, instead of the skimpy 2.10 metres that used to be the norm.
The average Dutch man is 1.81 metres tall, by the way, and the average Dutch woman 1.67 metres, and those numbers are still increasing. How much is that in feet?
(Photo by Metro Centric, some rights reserved)
Tags: height, tall people, traits
March 11, 2011
The downtown district of Amsterdam will start offering subsidies to ‘undesirable’ companies if they change their type of business. The district lists so called coffeeshops (marijuana parlours), currency exchanges, massage parlours, prostitutes, small supermarkets, and other businesses that draw tourists to the city as eligible for a subsidy.
The borough wants to kill all kinds of economic activities in order to increase the variety of economic activities. Don’t ask me, I just live here.
See also: Unesco pulls trigger on Amsterdam.
Link: Plein Plus. Photo by Wikimedia user Bachrach44 who placed it in the public domain.
Tags: Amsterdam, marijuana, politics, prostitution, War on Fun
March 10, 2011
The Big Brother Awards 2010 for the ‘worse breacher of privacy’ was awarded to Trans Link Systems (TLS), the folks who brought to you the disaster of a public transport chip card here in the Netherlands. Even the public’s choice award went to them for the double whammy. The card has been cracked every which way possible, but the makers pretend they have the situation under control, but they don’t.
From unnecessarily fingerprinting the Dutch for a passport to forcing visitors of the city of Haarlem to register their comings and goings by car with their licence plates, breaching people’s privacy in the name of safety is illegal as well as a very slippery slope. In the Netherlands, citizens’ movement Bits of Freedom continues to draw attention to these problems and has had some success.
What a weird idea: the government breaks its own privacy laws made to protect citizens in order to check whether citizens are breaking the law. That can’t be good.
(Link: nu.nl)
Tags: Bits of Freedom, chip card, public transport
March 8, 2011
The minute in which bands have to compress their latest hit if they want to appear on De Wereld Draait Door, the popular talk show hosted by Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, has long been a nuisance to 3FM radio DJ Michiel Veenstra. But now he has come up with a remedy: the first band that dares to play the full version of their song (regardless of whether it will be broadcast or not), will receive a full hour of airplay on his show.
Newspaper De Pers, which reported the action, has weighed in by promising a mention on their front page of the same band, and an interview in the paper to boot.
De Wereld Draait Door responded by saying they simply have to cut the songs short because every minute of music makes them lose 200,000 viewers, Veenstra reports on his blog.
De Wereld Draait Door, literally The World Turns, is a pun meaning both “there’s always a tomorrow” and “the world’s going nuts”. Veenstra is the DJ that decided to spin music at the North Pole back in 2007.
Illustration: De Wereld Draait Door logo.
Tags: 3FM, bands, De Wereld Draait Door, DJ, Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, Michiel Veenstra, radio
March 7, 2011
I had heard rumors that in Sittard, Limburg, the carnival Prince throws oranges and I had to go and find out if that was true. Once his float arrived on the Market Square I snapped a picture of him (Tom 1) and I also caught an orange. I’m grateful he didn’t try to hit people with them.
A lot of the people parading also gave their social commentary about Sittard, a city falling apart and watching the number of inhabitants dwindle like many other places in Limburg. In local dialect, these signs read ‘Greetings from the torn down city’, referring to the many broken down and empty buildings in Sittard.
In sharp contrast to the ugly parts of town, the lovely Sjtadscafe de Gats dating back from 1535 on the Market Square makes for a lovely background. I saw a few more similar buildings from that era, as the town didn’t really suffer serious architectural damage from WWII.
