May 9, 2012

Dutch world radio service goes off the air

Filed under: General,History by Orangemaster @ 2:04 pm

Some 65 years after it all started, Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s Dutch service will go off the air this week on Friday 11 May. To mark the shut down, it will feature a 24-hour live radio marathon starting on Thursday 10 May at 8 pm UTC (10 pm local time) and run until Friday 11 May at 8 pm UTC (10 pm local time).

Hosts Karin van den Boogaert, Anouk Tijssen and Wim Vriezen will talk about the station’s beginnings, playing wartime audio from Radio Oranje and many RNW newscasts of important events in Dutch and world history. They’ll also touch upon special programmes on culture and language as well as shows aimed at expats, seafarers and truck drivers.

Although the Dutch service is signing off for good, they’ll also talk about the future of Radio Netherlands Worldwide, promoting free speech in places where freedom of the press is under threat. Basically, this is what they are being ask to push after the budgets cuts, making the best of a bad situation.

RNW is going off the air due to huge budget cuts, losing some 70% of their usual funding. Tons of people will lose or have already lost their job, while Editor-in-Chief Rik Rensen and his second in command Ardi Bouwers, quit in April over the cuts. RIP.

(Links: www.rnw.nl, www.rnw.nl – cuts)

Tags: ,

May 8, 2012

The top 10 ugliest places in the country

Filed under: Architecture,General by Orangemaster @ 10:43 am

On 14 May, a Dutch television show will let viewers vote for the ugliest place (shopping mall, train station, etc.) in the Netherlands. The short list includes Zoetermeer’s Central Station, shopping mall passage way Brinkman in Haarlem and shopping mall Stokhorst in Enschede. They will be the top three in whatever order, while the 4th to 10th place have already been chosen.

Co-blogger Branko gets to see Zoetemeer Central Station often enough (is it that bad?), while I’ve had the pleasure of seeing 5th place winner Bos en Lommerplein in Amsterdam with a caved in parking lot that took months to fix and put people out of their homes. The entire place is also a wind tunnel.

Other ‘winners’ also seem to have been plagued with problems: the Scheringa museum (shown here) in 7th place was never finished, has had legal problems, and is up for sale.

(Link and photos: www.welingelichtekringen.nl, Photo of Scheringa museum by Karavaan, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

May 4, 2012

Site sells legal news photos for use on social media

Filed under: Online,Photography by Orangemaster @ 1:59 pm

The Netherlands’ two biggest photo agencies, ANP and Hollandse Hoogte, have set up the website Eerlijke Foto (‘Fair Photo’) allowing people to legally download their news photos for use on social media sites at reasonable prices.

The idea behind the site is a lot like the one behind music sites like Spotify and iTunes: if people can pay a fair price (a couple of euro) as opposed to an exuberant one, they’d be more inclined to buy than to steal. Yes, even though many of us collectively post pictures we have no legal right or permission to use on the Internet, it’s legally and technically stealing, whether you get caught or not.

It’s one thing and a lot of hard work to try and sue all the people that use your photos illegally both agencies say, so they are making their photo database available to others all while stepping up the nailing of anyone who uses their photos illegally. In fact, as 24oranges found out once, they are even baddies (copyright trolls) who will try and represent copyright owners illegally, try to sue you and scare you into giving them large sums of cash.

(Link: www.z24)

Tags:

May 3, 2012

‘Ban on fries around high schools until 2 pm’

Filed under: Food & Drink,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:13 pm
fries1

As if there weren’t enough weird bans and rules in Amsterdam, the Labour Party is seriously considering talking to snack bars and asking them not to sell fries to high school children. Some party member was shocked to find out that on a day to celebrate healthy foods at school, some school in the Nieuw West district was serving kebabs and Turkish pizzas, in other words, unhealthy food.

The Nieuw-West district has many children of ethnic origin that are overweight according to the telly. There is even a school in that district where 42% of the children are overweight, many of which eat junk food every day, and their parents thinks that’s fine.

Although Dutch children are also quite healthy compared to other European and North American countries, they drink too much soda and do not eat enough fruit. They are in the middle range in terms of exercise and sports.

And then I still love this picture about healthy eating with utter crap in the vending machine. Some adult doesn’t know right from wrong here either. The breakfast ginger cake the kid is eating in the picture has acrylamide in it, a cancer-causing agent that isn’t even mentioned on the packaging and eight different kinds of sugar.

To get back to the ban: banning won’t help, it will hurt business and annoy ordinary citizens.

Stop protecting uneducated people from themselves and educate them about food. Stop the nannyism already.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl)

Tags:

May 2, 2012

British RAF pilots cycle to the Netherlands for memorial

Filed under: Aviation,Bicycles,History by Orangemaster @ 10:28 pm

A group of nine pilots from the 99th RAF Squadron arrived in Landsmeer near Amsterdam today after four days of cycling from the UK. They were welcomed with a fanfare by the mayor like heroes. Every year they go to the monument to commemorate their deceased Squadron members. And since the British army is cutting back on expenses, the nine men couldn’t fly over and so they decided in true Dutch style to bike 750 kilometres.

The first question RTVNH (Radio and Television North Holland) had for one of them in true British understatement style was “how are your buttocks?”.

(Link: www.rtvnh.nl, Photo of Memorial by Bjorn V., some rights reserved)

Tags: ,

May 1, 2012

Remembrance of the Dead gets controversial

Filed under: History,Literature by Orangemaster @ 11:29 pm

First, there was the banning of a poem about a teenage boy’s SS uncle deemed inappropriate to be read at the annual Amsterdam ceremony, now the town of Vorden, Gelderland, which has one of the only graves in the Netherlands with German soldiers buried in it that wants to commemorate them. Basically, it’s fashionable to blur the lines between victim and perpetrator: it’s cool to be on the wrong side of things. And there’s so much bad taste going around these days, you need to pick your battles.

The Remembrance of the Dead on 4 May is to commemorate civilians and soldiers of all kinds who died in WWII, Dutch or foreign, but since the 1960s it has also included other wars and major conflicts. The boy’s poem was also meant to commemorate a Dutch volunteer who ended up on the wrong side of things, but after much commotion from Jewish organisations and the public at large, it was pulled. The teenager did well in winning a contest with his poem, but it’s too bad he’s being dragged in the mud for it. Only one line of the poem points to the man being on the German side, it’s not a big pro-Nazi rant or anything.

However, paying tribute to German soldiers flat out is losing the plot in my opinion. Or amnesia. Or dementia.

Tags: , , ,

April 27, 2012

Weed pass kicks in 1 May, for NL residents only

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 3:41 pm

Some 19 coffee shops and several interest groups went to court to fight the government’s plan to introduce a ‘weed pass’ to prevent foreigners (actually, non-residents of the Netherlands) to buy marijuana at coffee shops and lost. The weed pass will come into force on 1 May in the southern provinces and eventually be rolled out throughout the country. The lawyers representing the coffee shops plan to appeal the decision, and even the Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard Van der Laan is opposed to the pass and wants to work out a compromise.

Besides the fact that coffee shops in big cities are major tourist attractions, they felt they were being forced to discriminate against certain clients, as a weed pass can only be obtained in the city where one resides. Collecting personal information about clients brings up a lot of privacy issues as well.

The original plan was to stop drug tourism in border regions like in Maastricht, but that doesn’t apply at all to cities like Amsterdam. Coffee shops will basically become private clubs with membership open only to Dutch residents and limited to 2,000 per shop.

Discriminating between EU citizens on the basis of where they live is apparently illegal, making coffee shop owners responsible for drug enforcement sound like a burden, and who’s to stop me for going into a coffee shop and buying joints for somebody else? I don’t see the point of this, besides the government owning a database of people who smoke marijuana. I think drug dealers will make a small fortune selling bad quality weed to tourists and I don’t see how that looks like stopping criminality.

In the mean time, the people who can’t be bothered to get a pass down south will buy their drugs up north or start growing more of their own, which is perfectly OK as long as it’s limited to a few plants.

And for the record, smoking marijuana is illegal in the Netherlands, but it is tolerated.

Here’s a famous Dutch song about ‘nederwiet’ (Dutch weed) by megastars Doe Maar:

(Links: www.coffeeshopnieuws.nl, www.nu.nl, Photo of Joint by Torben Bjørn Hansen, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , ,

April 26, 2012

Lottery stops giving away bikes, man stops dumping bikes

Filed under: Bicycles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:06 pm

A year ago, a town won 2,000 bicycles from a national lottery that picks its winners based on their postal codes.

Bike shops were not happy, as they claimed they lost business. This year, the national lottery stopped giving away bikes for that exact reason: they kill local cycle shop business.

The lottery used to award 1,000 bikes to winners who lived in the same postcode area. But several cycle shop owners said this was wiping out their business – particularly if the prize fell in a small village.

In other weird bicycle-related news, a ‘mentally disturbed’ man from Friesland was caught dumping 60 stolen bikes in a canal. Onlookers fished out a dozen bikes out of the water, and the local police helped fish out the rest. The man is apparently getting professional help for his problem.

(Links: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl, www.dutchnews.nl)

Tags:

April 25, 2012

Trashing Ukraine for profit leading up to Euro 2012

Filed under: Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:00 pm

Insiders will tell you that Dutch energy firm Nederlandse Energie Maatschappij has been accused of bad advertising before and even of questionable business practices, and don’t have a good reputation. This time, they’ve really outdone themselves: they’ve trashed a country, subjected another to gender stereotypes and told everyone not to go to the Euro 2012 in Ukraine (yes, partially being held in Poland).

The website with porno posing ‘shopped Ukrainian women is actually online as part of this media strategy and basically says ‘keep him [your guy] at home’. You keep him at home, away from the mail order porno brides by switching energy firms and receiving a home beer tap that’s all pimped up in Dutch team colours. Ukrainian women are sluts, Dutch women need to worry about not being so chunky and keeping their stupid football crazed men at home using beer.

I’m a ref and I am holding up a red card right now.

Imagine if the makers had picked on Polish women, considering the recent wave of Poland bashing some Dutch politicians have inflicted on the rest of us. Picking on Ukraine was probably the only culturally sensitive thing this company did.

UPDATE: Adversing blog Adformatie quotes the makers of the advert as ‘reflecting pure reality’ because Ukraine gladly profiles itself as having beautiful women. I never thought fake pictures looked anything like reality.

(Link: www.dutchnews.nl, Photo of Ukranian woman by my3colors, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , ,

April 24, 2012

Dutch to cast monster bell for London Olympics

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 6:52 am

A huge 23 tonne bell, to be the largest in Europe, will be cast by Eijsbouts in Asten, North Brabant for the Olympic Games in London this summer. The British media is miffed because the contract was supposed to be handled by the British company Whitechapel, but they subcontracted it to Eijsbouts yesterday. The reason given was “the bell was sent overseas because it [Whitechapel] lacked the facilities to cast it here.” To me this reads as ‘we couldn’t do the job, but we wanted to score the contract’ and sounds weird because another British company, Taylor’s, claims it could have done the job in the UK. And part of the London 2012 specifications was insisting that the bell is cast in this country.

So why did the Dutch get the order? Enter complaints about losing work in Britain and about foreigners making the Brits look bad. Then again, the organisers are the same brilliant people who wanted to have The Who’s deceased drummer Keith Moon play at the opening ceremonies. He died way back in 1978. I can only deduce that subcontracting was cheaper, cheap enough to ignore specifications.

We know the bell could have been made in the UK by Taylor’s, the largest bell foundry in the world, but Eijsbouts is making it, a company that also claims to be the largest bell foundry in the world.

(Links: nos.nl, www.mirror.co.uk, www.loughboroughecho.net)

Tags: , , ,