December 29, 2010

Favourite 24oranges facts of 2010

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 3:02 pm

I noticed a few neat things this year while working on 24oranges and I want to share them you:

– Our most used Flickr photos are by Peter de Wit, aka FaceMePLS. He has great everyday Dutch stuff that we just can’t seem to get enough of.

– Our most popular Flickr photos are Red thumbtack and Red thumbtack 2, followed by Old books. The message seems to be that simple, everyday objects are what people really like. Co-blogger Branko has taken most of the pictures, he has a fancy DSLR camera while I go through life with a small pocket thingy.

– Our most popular tag is ‘Amsterdam’ because that is where we live, followed by ‘Rotterdam’ and a tie for third place: ‘Groningen’, ‘football’ and ‘law’.

– We’ve added some categories this year (or late last year): ‘photography’, ‘bicycles’ and ‘sustainability’, three topics that come up often.

– We started a Facebook group that has news other than on the blog, with a few exceptions. A big thank you to the 140 members for joining!

– We had our best month yet in November 2010 with 23,562 unique visitors. A big thanks to Global Post and many other sites for linking to us.

Our resolutions include more of our own pictures, a new header (we need sun and oranges at the same time), more videos, (join our 24OrangesTV channel) and one day hopefully more co-bloggers.

Thanks to everyone who submitted and forwarded stories, and took the time to comment on our postings, you make us want to keep going. Cheers!

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December 27, 2010

KLM spies on its passengers to give them gifts

Filed under: Aviation by Orangemaster @ 3:56 pm

“First job, find KLM passengers who have checked into their flight via one of KLM’s Foursquare locations or left a message through Twitter. Second job, search their social profiles, get to know them in a, er, discreet manner, to think of a personalised gift.”

Free stuff is nice and I guess this is an interesting marketing campiagn, but it does make me feel uncomfortable and I don’t see the use of it. Of course, if you tweet what you do or tell people on Foursquare where you are, you can expect anyone to be able to read it. However, wouldn’t it be better if KLM or any airline for that matter could just serve you better in general?

Although the goal was to see how happiness spreads, all I can think of is all the hundreds of people that were stranded at Schiphol airport recently. No gift can make up for that.

(Link: aboutfoursquare)

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December 24, 2010

Holiday food and skating fever news

Filed under: General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 2:35 pm

Here it is again, the tree I found in the trash a few years ago that adorns the office. The 24oranges crew has enough food and drinks to fill a bunker, and so pics will surely follow.

There are rumours that the Elfstedentocht (‘Eleven Cities Tour’), the outdoor Frisian skating marathon will possibly be on this year, the last one of which took place in 1997. Not only will we write about if it happens, but we plan on attending and taking pictures.

Read more about the Elfstedentocht on 24oranges:

Elfstedentocht stronger brand than Olympic Games

Winter fever Dutch style and time off

He brought a piece of his toe to the reunion

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December 23, 2010

The reality of artist Karel Appel

Filed under: Art,Music by Orangemaster @ 1:02 pm

While 24oranges crew is slowly getting ready for the holidays (traditional food and poker with people of five nationalities and three continents), enjoy this 14-minute legendary documentary from 1962 about artist Karel Appel entitled ‘De werkelijkheid van Karel Appel’ ‘(The reality of Karel Appel’) by Dutch journalist and filmmaker Jan Vrijman.

It was filmed in France and has some French in it at the beginning, with Dutch commentary by Karel Appel himself and an English translation. It also features music by Appel himself and Dizzy Gillespie.

(Link: trendbeheer.com)

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December 22, 2010

Free beer for girls in Limburg town

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,Religion by Orangemaster @ 12:28 pm

The owners of a few pubs in Weert, Limburg have decided to give free beer, wine and even kir (how classy) on the house to girls, so that boys stay away from those illegal beer-serving non-pubs called ‘zuipketens‘, modern-day Dutch speakeasies that have apparently increased in popularity since the smoking ban. By stay away I do mean come to their pubs instead because they have tipsy girls in them.

Free drinks are sure to get a few more girls into the pub, but at a cost and not on the long run. And then there’s the morally questionable idea of getting girls to drink more, knowing they get drunk more quickly, and all that jazz. The drinking age in the Netherlands is 16, an age when kids are not legally responsbile adults, which is also a major problem in smaller communities where there’s not much to do but drink — like in Weert, Limburg.

Back in 2008 we wrote about beer confiscation in Urk, a very religious town in Flevoland whose youth is drinking their youth away because there’s nothing to do there.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, Photo: me at Oktoberfest. If the Telegraaf can use a German picture for a Dutch article, so can we.)

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December 21, 2010

Dutch foot stickers by Nike instead of shoes

Filed under: Design,Fashion,Sports by Orangemaster @ 2:47 pm

Dutch designer Frieke Severs has come up with ‘Footstickers’ for Nike. She’s probably better known for her FiveFingers made by Vibram, but either way, her footware looks pretty cool to me. Footstickers are made of a flexible material and a unique shape are are meant for activities such as yoga and cardio excercises.

I can’t help but add two cultural comments for the non-Dutch speaking crowd. First, in Dutch, gloves are called ‘handschoenen’, which literally translates to ‘hand shoes’. Second, ‘halve zolen’ (singular, ‘halve zool’), two words in the title of the link below, means ‘idiot’ in Dutch. I love a good linguistic coincidence.

(Link and image: idealize)

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December 16, 2010

Needle and wool invention wins spot in Time Magazine

Filed under: Art,Design,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 10:33 am

Amsterdam designer Heleen Klopper who won the Doen Materiaalprijs back in 2009 for her system of mending holes in wool called ‘Wolplamuur’ (‘Wool hole filler’) has recently been included in Time Magazine’s The Best 50 Inventions of 2010. She had no idea she would be included and found out because people told her.

Watch the video with Heleen showing you how it works. It’s basically about filling up a hole with extra wool fibres using a special needle. I could use this product because I recently found a hole in a green wool skirt I really like.

(Link: dezeen.com)

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December 15, 2010

Dutch word of 2010 qualifies unusual minority government

Filed under: General,Literature by Orangemaster @ 10:07 am

The Dutch word of the year, according to Dutch dictionary Van Dale (a Dutch-Belgian joint publication), is ‘gedoogregering’, a government (‘-regering’) (albeit it a minority government this time) with silent support (‘gedoog-‘ means ‘tolerated’). The silent support comes from one of the three political parties who agrees to everything the other two parties want in exchange for deals made beforehand in an ‘gedoogakkoord’, or a ‘silent party agreement’. The Dutch have not had a minority government since WWII and is also dealing with a right-wing party that is anything but silent.

The runner-up word of the year is something the English-speaking world may know from Jamaican dancehall music and was described on Dutch telly very politely as ‘an erotic dance’: ‘daggeren’ (‘daggering’). It’s basically pretending to have jack-rabbit like sex on the dance floor (dry humping), usually to the beat of the music. Lucky for us, some white trash reality show apparently features this often.

The number one Dutch word in Belgium also has to do with sex: ‘tentsletje’ (‘tent slut’), a girl that sleeps with lots of different guys (goes from tent to tent) at those big summer festivals.

(Link: woordvanhetjaar.vandale.nl)

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December 10, 2010

O Christmas Tree on Grolsch beer bottles

Filed under: Food & Drink,Music by Orangemaster @ 10:39 am

Dutch beer brand Grolsch jams out Christmas music with the Swingtop Philharmonic Orchestra, a troupe made up of some of the world’s leading musicians and sound engineers who play exclusively on instruments made from Grolsch Swingtop bottles.

A re-imagined version of the Christmas favourite by Ernst Anschütz has been arranged by composer Ross Power and is led by conductor Thomas Blunt, seven percussionists, woodwind players and a timpanist.

‘O Christmas Tree’ is the English translation of the German ‘O Tannebaum’.

(Link: christmasagogo)

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December 9, 2010

Life lessons from Elvis at military personnel conference

Filed under: Film,Music,Religion,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:52 am

In mid January next year, a chaplan and a priest, both Elvis fans, will be holding a unique two-day conference in Huis ter Heide near Utrecht just for military personnel called ‘I Did It My Way,’ featuring life lessons from the King himself. Lessons will be learned from songs such as “Suspicious Minds”, “Where could I go but to the Lord” and “How Great Thou Art”. Using film and documentaries featuring Elvis, parallels will be drawn with daily life. Oh, and “participation is open to non-fans as well”. Just mentioning that gives me the creeps.

I knew Elvis was a religion for many people after a friend of mine went down to Graceland and saw people crying over Elvis’ grave as if he had been Jesus Christ. We know that there are people obssessed with Elvis, but this is just weird.

(Link: elvismatters, Photo: drbristol.wordpress.com)

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