Coming to a theatre near us: On 1 July, surgeons of Amsterdam’s Slotervaart hospital are going to perform a laparoscopic gastric bypass, a stomach operation that is done through small incisions, and project it live in the capital’s Pathé Tuschinski theatre. The operation is a big matinee from 8:30 to 11:30 and will be performed on someone who is obese and needs the operation to survive. According to the hospital, it is a ‘very difficult operation that is only performed by a few Dutch hospitals’.
The audience will be able to ask questions about the operation to a doctor in the room who will then ask the surgeons performing the surgery.
Tickets are free, scroll down here to Gastric Bypass to send an e-mail and score some tickets.
The town of Limmen, North Holland got 1800 volunteers with loads of free time to build the highest tower ever made of Lego blocks. The tower is made up of 700,000 Lego pieces and is 30,52 metres high, breaking the old Guinness Book of Records record by a mere 30 cm (see pic), set by the city of Oslo, Norway.
In the video, the dustbin in question can be opened with any card that has a magnetic strip, even without a chip in it.
Big hairy deal? Well, if you lose your dustbin pass, you have to pay some 20-30 euro to get a new one, one of the guys in the video explains. You also need to pay money to actually get extra ones for your household. The point is to pay to put out your trash, as some municipalities let people pay this way instead of collecting taxes for rubbish. In Nijmegen we used to have to buy special bags at one guilder (pre-euro currency) a pop to use for rubbish, otherwise we could have been fined.
And the fun doesn’t stop there. A few days before this video, Amsterdam telly station AT5 also shot a nice video of a five-year-old working some dustbin pass magic, using a discarded public transport chip card. The whole point of the Amsterdam North district installing these dustbins was so that the locals could dump their trash in it and not just anybody. In this video, which was more about the privacy issues surrounding the public transport chip card, you’ll see that someone managed to order a legit card using a foto of Osama Ben Laden.
The little boy sums it up well: ‘It just crazy that it can be opened that way.”
Amsterdam designer Dinand Stufkens and his recycled bag company Kazmok makes bags by recycling transport belts from manufacturing plants. Every belt is different, as is every bag since only 10 or 20 bags can be made with one belt.
First, there was The Principal, based on the traditional leather school bag. There’s also The Tutor with various accessories like laptop sleeves and belts. A totally different model is the Bulkcarrier, which fits in a milk crate that is usually the front basket of a Dutch city bike.
Filed under: Nature,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:45 pm
Wim Hof (aka the Ice Man) holds many records, including being able to ‘chill’ in ice for 1 hour and 13 minutes. Last week, two Dutch scientists tried to measure his bodily responses to cold and concluded that what he can do “is medically impossible”. The more I read up on this, the more I realise that crediting Tummo-meditaion for his talent is just a freaky coincidence.
Professor Maria Hopman explains that Hof is apparently able to influence his nervous system, which is supposed to be impossible. Hof also appears to be able to consciously open and close his blood vessels. Professor Mihai Netea has shown that Hof’s blood cells react differently than normal blood cells even after six days.
In 2009, Wim completed a full marathon of 42,195 kilometres above the polar circle in Finland in temperatures close to -20 degrees. Watch the video.
Tulpfietsen.nl sells sturdy city bikes online that clients can design themselves, like mix and match outfits. (Here, just a picture of a totally unrelated cute, pink bike). The bikes are delivered within one week and are put together at your place, live. Tulpfietsen will also give you a free tune-up after four months.
For every bike sold Tulpfietsen will donate 2 euro to the 1WE Rickshaw Project, which offers rickshaw drivers in Bangladesh the opportunity to buy a fixed-up rickshaw with a microcredit.
On 29 March 2010 we finished work on the latest favela painting and our first part of ‘O Morro’: Praça Cantão. It is central square at the foot of the community of Santa Marta, a favela in the heart of Rio de Janeiro.
Livening up slums in Brazil is a project by Haas & Hahn – Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn. They once filmed a documentary on hip hop in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo for MTV, after which they decided to bring funky works of art to unexpected places, starting with painting enormous murals in the slums of Brazil together with the local youth.
The goal is to have the ‘O Morro’ project sponsored by a community of supporters who will finance the infrastructure, materials and people needed to complete the work. You can donate through their site in a number of ways, including one text message every month for just 3 euro a pop.
I already called the Dutch Eurovision entry for 2010 cultural suicide, but as the big day approaches, the plot thickens. There’s been some accusations of plagiarism against song writer Pierre Kartner and Sieneke has had some voice problems. Luckily, she’s OK. However, Sieneke is currently ranked 36 out of 39 with ‘zéro points’ (pronounced in French, eh).
The big favourite this year is Lena from Germany with a dance number featuring some really lame lyrics I couldn’t get through (I heard the word ‘underwear’). Her voice has a quality resembling Iceland’s Björk, which probably helps and yes, she’s pretty. Georgia is a close second with Sofia Nizharadze and some love ballad with the name ‘Shine’ (ironically the name of the Dutch entry in 2009) that I didn’t get through, also with a very pretty woman. In third place, Sweden with a pretty blonde named Anna Begendahl accompanying herself on the guitar and some serious tremelo in her voice that’s not my thing.
But back to Sieneke: she’s friendly and warm on stage by Dutch standards, but she’s just not pretty. And it does matter. Dutch celebrity gossip show (RTL Boulevard) went around Oslo about two weeks ago, showed people a video of Sieneke and asked people to guess how old she was. I heard 32 and ‘not bad for 36’. Sieneke just turned 18. Ouch. The gay side-kick of the show politely said, “I think she needs a stylist”. Sieneke is the younger version of famous Dutch star Marianne Weber whose Wikipedia page isn’t even in English, the point being that outside of the Dutch speaking world, no one has a clue who she is.
Watching this year’s Eurovision Song Contest will be like watching a slow train wreck and I can’t wait, sorry Sieneke.
Let’s go back to the Dutch winner of 1957, the lovely Corry Brokken with ‘Net als toen’ ‘(Just like then’).
Some street-wise, pop-up furniture designed by Carmela Bogman and Rogier Martens was installed in Utrecht on 17 May 2010. The residents can pump up the furniture themselves (se pic) and when then are finished using it, it lowers itself down again.
It looks nice, I want to try it too, but I have to admit, the comments I read on the French site I got this news from needs to be addressed. Yes, it screams unhygienic. I mean, people walk on this furniture with dog pooh and who knows what under their shoes and then the idea would be to sit down and, what, have a sandwich on the table surface? Ick.
I can’t really get an idea of how fast the furniture goes back down and I can imagine not wanting to get my foot stuck, never mind a small child getting any of their limbs stuck under it.
As my Dutch friends say, the idea is nice, but the execution, well, kinda sucks.
Filed under: Music,Online by Orangemaster @ 2:18 pm
Online music service Spotify is now available as of today in the Netherlands. Instead of continuously having to go to YouTube and weed through bad mobile phone recordings of your favourites artists or be subjected to everything that sounds like the band you like but never the actual band from Last.fm, it could be time to try Spotify.
“With Spotify, there are no limits to the amount of music you could listen to. Just help yourself to whatever you want, whenever you want it.” Even Blip.fm, and Zonga get their songs from YouTube, while Spotify is what everyone wanted and nobody was getting: that one song you needed, right away.
They claim to have eight million songs, including a specially recorded track by duo Guus Meeuwis and Marco Borsato, teaming up for a song called ‘Schouder aan Schouder’ (‘Shoulder to shoulder’) available exclusively on Spotify.
