July 19, 2012
The extremely rare Callopistria juventina, a moth of the Noctuidae family, was spotted in late June in the South of Limburg by a butterfly catcher. In 30 years, it has only been seen twice before in the Netherlands, in 1984 and 2000, and is usually found in this country.
(Link: www.limburger.nl, Photo of Callopistria juventina by dhobern, some rights reserved)
July 18, 2012
In March, but also just last month, there have been disruptions of the emergency number 112 throughout the country. In fact, the last time a man died because an ambulance came too late, as a result of 112 being difficult to reach.
This month, Dutch news programme Eenvandaag reports that the country’s deaf and hard of hearing population have had no access whatsoever to 112 for more than 70 days now. The clincher is that the company that provided them with a chat service to access 112, AnnieS, went bankrupt in late May, early June. Interest groups ask: why doesn’t 112 have the technology to supply this service themselves? AnnieS also helped people communicate with the tax office and other organisations as well as with one another.
Before this service, they had a text service that wasn’t great, but worked most of the time. When AnnieS was launched in September 2010, they didn’t hook up the existing text service dating back from 1997 and some deaths ensued.
The government is working on getting a Swedish company to get the AnnieS-like service up and running, which it says should be around mid September. However, in the mean time when a hearing man dies because 112 is not available it’s news, but if a deaf person dies because of this discriminatory situation, they’ll be treated as second class citizens due to the government’s inability to plan properly.
(Link: www.eenvandaag.nl)
Tags: 112, deaf, emergency number, hard of hearing, hearing impaired
July 17, 2012
Cyclists union Fietsersbond says it’s high time to remove bollards from bike paths, which account for some 300 serious injuries every year in Amsterdam, and surely across the country. The city still has a lot of them (quite different from the one in the picture), but how much of a big deal is it? What if people just watched out a bit more or is that too easy to say?
Wikipedia says since trucks push over the bollards and smaller cars pass between them, the use of bollards doesn’t prevent cars from parking on sidewalks. Sidewalks in Amsterdam are currently being slightly elevated from the streets, meaning that the bollards are no longer needed to separate the sidewalk from the street.”
So why still have them on bike paths? And is removing them worth it?
When cycling home slightly drunk from the pub, tired from work or through rain that cuts down on your visibility, you can miss a lot on the bike path, including things like broken glass (nails?) à la Tour de France. You could be that cargo bike mum arguing with your whinging offspring or being the douchebag chatting with your BFF on the phone not paying any attention to stuff on the road.
If the bollards don’t work anyways, why not just get rid of them? It would save 300 trips to the hospital. You could also assume than many of those trips are tourists, blame tourists for making this an issue and just say that people should pay more attention when they cycle.
Either way, pick the cheapest is my Amsterdam answer. I’m more worried about the douchebags on the phone, especially the ones cycling with children, reminding me what bad parenting looks like.
(Link www.parool.nl, Photo: Jihyun David)
Tags: Amsterdam, bike paths, bollards
July 13, 2012
After hearing from two curators of Amsterdam’s Eye Film Institute (white building on the left, the other is the delightfully retro former Shell building) that Queen Beatrix really liked Sokurov’s The Russian Ark, which is known for having been filmed in one go with no editing, I also find out more about Hollywood heavyweight Paul Verhoeven.
To the Dutch, Paul Verhoeven is a major director who launched the career of fellow Dutchman Rutger Hauer, starring in films such as the 1973 Dutch classic Turkish Delight, while to Hollywood he’s the guy that came up with blockbusters such as Robocop, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers. Another face you may recognise in his films is Hollywood actor Jeroen Krabbé who played General Koskov in the Bond film The Living Daylights.
After 20 years of tinseltown Verhoeven came back to continue working on films in the Netherlands. In May he was present at the premiere screening of his restored 1980 film ‘Spetters’ (‘Hunks’ (male and female), but also meaning ‘spatter’ and even ‘ejaculation’). Lucky for some, it’s playing a few times with English subtitles in Amsterdam this month.
Spetters is being presented in its ‘uncut’ version, which means explicit sex scenes were put back in the way the film originally intended, including a blow job scene in the Rotterdam subway. Critics were very harsh on the film at the time, saying that it portrayed youth as amoral anti-gay bashers (one of the main character’s is gay) and the feminists had a field day with the blatant sexism and misogyny that actually makes the film amusing today and makes me wonder why the many women in Verhoeven films didn’t make it to Hollywood.
Here’s the Hollywood voice over trailer, with a wee bit of functional nudity:
And here’s the restored version of the trailer in Dutch. This one has explicit sex it in, which doesn’t need translation:
Tags: Eye Film Institute, Jeroen Krabbé, Paul Verhoeven, Rutger Hauer
July 12, 2012
Five of the seven paintings stolen from an elderly woman in Bilthoven, Utrecht back in 1999 turned up at a Christie’s auction last Wednesday. The police were called in and they’ve arrested three suspects, two in the Netherlands and one in Germany, involved in drugs and, well, theft from little old ladies. The most famous painting of the lot is probably ‘Antonius en Cleopatra’ (‘Anthony and Cleopatra’) from 1677 by Jan Steen. The other paintings are from the late 16th and 17th century.
The two paintings still missing from the now deceased elderly woman are more recent paintings, namely Isaac Israëls’ ‘Café-interieur-restaurant’ (‘Cafe interior restaurant’) from the 20th century and Wouterius Verschuur’s ‘Paarden in Schuur’ (‘Horses in a stable’) from the 19th century.
At the time of the theft, the paintings were valued at what is now 1,3 million euro (three million guilders).
Nice tangent: at age 63, Isaac Israëls actually won a Gold Medal at the 1928 Olympic Games, which were held in Amsterdam, for his painting Red Rider, an art competition that was part of the games.
(Links: www.dutchnews.nl, www.rtvutrecht.nl, Photo of Jan Steen by Stifts- och landsbiblioteket i Skara’s photostream, some rights reserved)
Tags: auction, Bilthoven, Christie's, Jan Steen, Olympics, paintings, Utrecht
July 5, 2012
Imagine you’re chilling on a terrace in downtown Nijmegen, minding your own beeswax when along comes a swarm of bees heading right for your table like a homing device.
Last Tuesday, some 15,000 bees decided to go shopping for a new home and took a liking to the underside of one of the terrace tables. The patrons fled inside and the cafe shut its doors and windows. Forget calling the police, the owner called up a beekeeper to explain to the bees in bee speak that his cafe was not a good place to expand their honey business.
It was a battle to the end, with the queen bee not wanting to go gently. Finally, the beekeeper grabbed her with gloves on and they were all sorted. Nobody was stung.
The year 2012 is the year of the bee, but this major hive meeting was not on the agenda.
(Link: www.gelderlander.nl, Photo of Bee swarm by quisnovus, some rights reserved)
July 3, 2012
Any links to be made between Dutch things and Québec ones are just me thinking that some things could be Dutch even if they aren’t. There’s nothing Dutch about the Keurig coffee maker, it comes from the US. However, ‘keurig’ in Dutch means ‘proper’, ‘neat’ and ‘trim’. I just have this feeling there could be a connection.
A Dutch oven is not an oven but a pan (duh), although the one I use, called a braadpan is apparently the same thing. These pots are made to fry things in as well, and then let them simmer. I had to get used to that as I always fry things in a frying pan first.
As for other Dutch things that people either know is Dutch or at least know they are European, Heineken beer is always one of them, as is TomTom navigation systems. TomTom apparently doesn’t have the best customer service in Canada, and charge extra for a bunch of things that Garmin (US) provides for free. I use my smartphone for navigation, while nobody does that here because a) no smartphone b) no mobile Internet (it’s like 45 CAD a month as compared to 5-10 euro a month in the Netherlands).
I also heard that the city of Montréal wants to move its prostitutes from the usual downtown spot to an industrial area like the Dutch do, called the ‘tippelzone’ (roughly, ‘hook up zone’). A ‘tippelzone’ is a municipally controlled area of town where prostitution is tolerated. The problem is, the Netherlands has tons of problems with theirs, and in Montréal, industrial businesses don’t want to be associated with prostitution — it’s bad for business. Hookers are very scared of working where the police wouldn’t normally come to help them if something went wrong.
I’m keeping my eyes open for any other connections.
Tags: coffee maker, Dutch oven, prostitution, TomTom
June 29, 2012
Since I’ve been back to visit family in Québec, the comments about the Netherlands have been reduced to coffeeshops, whores and cheese, which are polite jabs, but also pretty accurate. However, a recurring theme is chips or crisps, or even ‘croustilles’ for the proper French word. The proper Dutch word is ‘chips’, following the North American tradition. Szechwan, that’s pretty exotic. Salt n’ vinegar, nothing special. Mesquite BBQ I had to look up, and has something to do with a style of BBQ sauce in Texas.
One interesting trend was that many of these Canadian chips were advertised as kosher. Canadian food products have always had kosher symbols on them, but there are many different ones (COR, K, MK, etc.) and seem to me to be more prominent. It was swiftly pointed out to me as well that these products (not all junk food by the way) are in fact more expensive to produce because a rabbi has been part of the process. In other words, these kosher products cost more for people who don’t eat kosher. The press has written that regular people are being had for more money at the expense of people who choose to eat kosher and even halal foods, as it is a life choice and not a health issue. The conclusion was that there are tons of symbols for gluten-free, no nuts and low-sodium products, which can even be life-saving for many people, even religious people, and may even cost more to produce, but they are for the benefit of society as a whole, not a select religious group.
I am amazed this discussion hasn’t popped in the Netherlands yet, albeit regarding halal foods.
June 28, 2012
A while back on telly and surely on the radio, the unflattering description of a bland, thirtysomething Caucasian Dutch woman included a cockatoo haircut and white capri leggings. This type of woman is often slightly overweight, middle class, and has a husband that wears old jeans and a jean jacket, drinks cheap beer and loves football.
A Dutch guy decided that he had had enough of looking at this fashion don’t and started the Facebook page Stop De Witte Driekwart Legging Nu (‘Stop white capri leggings now’) that’s getting national coverage probably because it’s summer and the white leggings have come out in full force.
White capri leggings are usually worn when it’s warm, but not warm enough to go without leggings. Unlike coloured leggings (I gladly wear long black ones), white ones make white legs look fatter and why would anyone want that? Some people call them ‘hospital legs’, as they have a nurse-like quality to them, but not in a good way. Others comment, get over yourselves, live and let live, and that there’s always overalls.
Fashion tip: wear actual capri pants (ideally not white ones), nylons or even knee high socks and skip the capri leggings. Don’t do the knee high socks thing like this either.
(Photo of White leggings by Malingering, some rights reserved)
June 22, 2012
Back in 2008 a concert raised money to develop the laddermill, a sustainable invention by former astronaut Wubbo Ockels (shown here), and today Ockel’s Kite Power research group from the Delft University of Technology will be showcasing a wind energy system using kites at the Maasvlakte 2 shore in South Holland.
The Kite Power Team explains that Kite Power is a type of wind energy where a radiographically controlled kite generates electricity. A single cable attached to the kite is pulled and released from the base station every two minutes, spinning a drum that in turn powers a generator. Pulling the kite takes energy, but less than it is generated. The kite can fly up to 900 metres and be used to generate electricity fully automatically, which is its major asset.
(Link: home.tudelft.nl, Photo of Wubbo Ockels courtesy of Emmanuelle)
Tags: Delft University of Technology, electricity, Maasvlakte, Wubbo Ockels
