April 22, 2015
Seasoned Arnhem stop motion filmmaker Mascha Halberstad is up for a Berlin Music Video Award 2015 thanks to a video she made for the UK band The Prodigy of their song ‘Wild Frontier’. Frontman Liam Howlett asked her personally to make the video, and according to De Gelderlander, she is a favourite to win the German award.
Featured on the album ‘The Day Is My Enemy’ from February 2015, here’s ‘Wild Frontier’:
(Link: www.gelderlander.nl, Photo of film cans by tallfoot, some rights reserved)
Tags: Arnhem, Berlin, stop motion, video
April 21, 2015
Politely called ‘shortsighted’ on the one hand and ‘racist’ on the other, but mostly referred to as ‘disgusting’, Dutch women’s magazine Viva has started a controversy by publishing an article called ’10 reasons to date a dark man’ full of predictable stereotypes. Dutch news magazine HP/De Tijd made an excellent point: Viva assumes all their readers are white, which represents the ‘eternal status quo’.
According to Viva, a ‘dark man’ has ‘dance moves’, will give you beautiful ‘half-blood’ children, has ‘big lips’, all have family living in ‘warm countries’, have more passion that Dutchmen (because ‘dark men can’t possibly be considered Dutch’ in their world view) and have bigger penises. And I left some stuff out.
Viva have taken the post offline after the editor-in-chief realised that all kinds of people were pissed at the posting and attempted to apologise. The editor-in-chief hadn’t read the posting. Maybe it’s time to double check your work.
(Link: forum.viva.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)
Tags: racism, women's magazines
April 20, 2015
Roomed.nl is giving away three pairs of tickets to the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, which is currently featuring many ‘freaky spring’ exhibitions, including ‘Your Light is My Life’ by Czech artist Krištof Kintera, running until 7 June.
Kintera’s solo exhibition is said to be full of irony, mixed with slapstick and dark humour, as well as some political statements. His sculptures and installations can move, communicate, are dysfunctional, and sometimes just plain absurd.
Also on the menu are the exhibitions ‘200 years of the Kingdom of the Netherlands’, ‘The Furry Adventures of the Cabbit and the Folk’ and enough art to make your visit complete.
(Link: roomed.nl, Photo of Kunsthal by kleiobird/Jaap Vogel, some rights reserved)
April 19, 2015
This week Dutch student Steinar Henskes of the VU University Amsterdam, owner of the Bird Control Group, won Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year, an event held in Washington, D.C. Up against 2,000 students from 38 countries, Henskes took home a cool USD 20,000 (about € 18,500) in prize money.
Bird Control Group provides solutions to keep birds at a safe distance from commercial activities using animal-safe lasers. Founded in 2012, the company operates in 52 countries around the globe including major airports like Schiphol and London Airport. “The products are recognised by the World Wildlife Fund for their innovation, effectiveness and animal friendliness.”
(Link: www.marketwired.com, photo of a lightbulb by Emil Kabanov, some rights reserved)
April 17, 2015
Sightings of the vimba bream (in Dutch, ‘blauwneus’) in the Netherlands are rare, especially really young ones. In early April some 50 volunteers started monitoring and listing fish caught in frame nets in the New Waterway near Maassluis, and the vimba bream stood out. They jump upstream like salmon do.
The vimba bream was originally a Central European species that expanded into Germany to the Rhine Valley when the Main-Danube Canal was being dug. “The first observations of the vimba bream in the Netherlands date back to 1989, when a three-year-old fish was caught in the Lower Rhine.”
(Link: dearkitty1, via natuurbericht.nl, Photo of Vimba bream by zigurdzakis, some rights reserved)
Tags: fish, Maassluis, South Holland
April 15, 2015
Burgers’ Zoo in Arnhem decided to fly a drone over the chimpanzee enclosure as part of films they make to show the world how the animals are doing, but Tushi the chimpanzee was not having any of it. Sitting quietly in a tree, she armed itself with a stick and swatted the sucker to the ground. The whole thing was filmed and so the world can enjoy another coffee break brought to you by the crazy world of animals living in captivity.
We had another great drone fail that went viral a while back, the ‘My first day with my drone’ film, which also goes great with coffee and boredom.
(Link: www.ad.nl, Photo of Drone by Karen Axelrad, some rights reserved)
April 14, 2015
Breda-based Dutch design studio Moooi is launching a new company called Moooi Carpets with an inaugural collection of photo-realistic designs by Studio Job, Ross Lovegrove, Neri & Hu (as shown above) and many more.
Moooi Carpets explains that it uses advanced technology to print designs directly onto carpet at a higher definition than ever before. Its printing plant will be able to print everything from rugs to full-width fitted carpet as well as one-off designs. “It’s the reinvention of the carpet,” says Moooi CEO Casper Vissers.
“The carpets are produced using a giant machine that measures 100 metres long. Its size allows it to print designs up to four metres wide in unlimited colours, without having to change the dye injectors in its Chromojet printer.”
(Link and photo: www.dezeen.com)
April 13, 2015
Having a drone deliver asparagus to your restaurant to ring in the new season on 1 April was a novel idea and a great publicity stunt for restaurant De Zwaan in Etten-Leur, Noord-Brabant, but it didn’t go exactly as planned.
Plan B was landing the drone nearby in case of wind and then taking a walk to pick up the asparagus, but that didn’t pan out either, as the drone went with Plan C, which resulting in a crash-and-burn scenario.
The drone made a stop along the way to change batteries, which went well, but the takeoff afterwards eventually turned into a nose dive and a pile of flambé white asparagus.
I’m already curious as to what delivery method they are going to try next year.
(Link: www.omroepbrabant.nl, Photo of asparagus by Stephan Mosel, some rights reserved)
April 10, 2015
Last year a friend asked me to check a series of fines he received from France in French (in error), stating he had to pay the maximum fine for speeding even though he never got the original fines, which were for a lot less. Although an administrative mess, at least French speed cameras can read Dutch license plates. It took the Netherlands until sometime last year to be able to properly read French license plates on speed cameras and stop being the laughing stock of French speed freaks.
However, we’re still laughing stock to anyone that doesn’t have a Dutch, French, Swiss, German or Belgian license plate: the software in Dutch speed cameras can’t read anything else. The Dutch government keeps making lame excuses, while other European countries seem to have figured out how speed camera software works.
This also means that Dutch speed cameras don’t fine the notoriously fast driving Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians and Latvians who probably know all this and not suffer the consequences. It also attracts comments about the Dutch ‘paying for everybody’s mistakes’, as it is easier to nail locals for speeding that trying to decipher a Polish or Latvian address and registration that cannot be easily checked on the side of the road.
Speeding is dangerous, and apparently the Dutch government doesn’t feel that road safety is a priority.
(Link: www.flitsservice.nl, Photo by Heiloo Online, some rights reserved)
Tags: fines, France, license plate, speed camera, speeding
April 9, 2015
After a few cities in Canada, it’s now the turn of the United States to embrace the building of a ‘woonerf’, a typical Dutch construct from the 1930s, an area where drivers, cyclists and pedestrians have to share the same space, but where pedestrians always have the right of way.
Ithaca, New York is building what they call a ‘living yard’ (‘woonerf’), with a low speed limit of no more than 10 or 12 mph (16 km/h to 19.2 km/h). Today in the Netherlands the woonerf speed limit is 15 km/h, although a few years ago it was still referred to as ‘stapvoets’, which is a old term from when people rode horses at a slow pace, which would be 6Â km/h if it was really a horse, but not actually possible by car or bike without consequences. However, 15 km/h is still slower than what Ithaca has decided, which to me sounds too fast.
“The whole point is to encourage human interaction; those who use the space are forced to be aware of others around them, make eye contact and engage in person-to-person interactions.” As a North American, the car is always king of the road, but the woonerf forces drivers to realise that it’s not always their space just because there’s a road, which I think is a good thing to learn.
(Link: ithacavoice.com, Photo by Payton Chung, some rights reserved)
