August 25, 2009

Laura Dekker ready to emigrate if she can’t sail

Filed under: Dutch first,General,Sports by Orangemaster @ 12:38 pm

While Britain is anxiously waiting for 17-year-old Mike Perham to sail into Portmouth on 29 August after having sailed around the world, 13-year-old Laura Dekker has had to lawyer up in order to fight for the opportunity to attempt the same feat for the Netherlands.

An English article about Perham ironically starts with “while most teenagers may have been losing sleep over their exam results during the past few days”, while the Dutch courts have called upon Child Services, claiming Dekker’s parents are keeping their child from school because her learning while on the sailboat is ‘nonsense’. If Child Services thinks that the parents are not doing right by Laura, there is talk of removing her from their custody.

To avoid this situation, Laura who has dual citizenship with New Zealand, is ready to emigrate – that’s how much Laura and her parents believe in this sailing journey.

Her lawyer tries to tell the courts about this exceptional teenager. “Laura is not just some girl. She was born on a sailboat and lived the first four years of her life on one at sea. She has all the necessary skills and qualities for this journey.”

He makes another good point as well. If we compare Laura to a 13-year-old gymnast, no one goes and checks to see if the gymnast goes to school or is brought up properly — they get support from an Olympic committee or a sports association.

So, are the Dutch Children’s Services not seeing the big picture or are they seeing it very clearly? Why are boys like Mike Perham and record holder Zac Sunderland of the US praised and encouraged, but Laura discouraged? Is she really too young or is a girl less capable? Stay tuned!

My personal, uneducated take is that the entire family could just skip town to New Zealand for a year. Then New Zealand can claim the world record for solo sailing around the world.

(Links: timesonline.co.uk, depers.nl, Photo of an entirely unrelated boat by the US Navy.)

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August 8, 2009

A Caransa died

Filed under: Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 12:56 pm

Amsterdam real-estate multi-millionaire Maurits Caransa died at age 93 yesterday, Z24 reports. Caransa’s story was one of rags-to-riches, from being the son of a coalman to becoming the owner of most of the major hotels in Amsterdam.

The reason I’m reporting his death here though is that he left a linguistic legacy that few others can lay claim to. Back home, when we wanted to point out that we could not afford something, we would say: “I’m no Caransa,” which in English translates pretty much to “I’m no Rockefeller”.

Unlike Rockefeller, Caransa wasn’t anywhere near being the richest man of the world or even the Netherlands, but he had managed to literally become a household name. His fame may have been based on the fact that in 1977 Caransa was the first famous Dutch person to be kidnapped. He was released for a ransom of 10 million guilders. To this day, it is unknown who the kidnappers were.

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August 4, 2009

Sewer pipes as hotel rooms

Filed under: Architecture,Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 9:30 am

Camping ‘t Buitengewoon Groenhoff in Vriescheloo, Groningen, is using sewer pipes to build a ‘bear hotel,’ although intended to house paying human guests instead of bears.

The ‘caves’ will each have a bed and two chairs, and are meant to house the participants of team-building sessions and similar outings. Apparently, the brainstorm that led to this idea was drenched in beer. Staying a day under these spartan conditions will set one back about 100 euro, a price that includes three meals.

The camping is not the first to use sewer pipes as rooms, a hotel in Austria has done something similar before.

See also: 25 years of wine barrels as hotel rooms.

(Photo: ‘t Buitengewoon Groenhoff. Link: Bright.)

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July 21, 2009

Vote for the next Google Street View target

Filed under: Bicycles,Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 9:16 am

Google has had a tricycle custom built to take photos in locations that Street View cars and vans have difficulty accessing. They already had the trike take pictures in Italy and the United Kingdom, and now it is heading to the Netherlands.

If you like, you can vote which Dutch locations will get the Street View treatment, candidates include the old Parliament buildings, the Efteling theme park, and the Scheveningen boulevard which sports the only pleasure pier of the country.

(Link: Algemeen Dagblad. Photo of an Efteling dragon by Jeroen Kransen, some rights reserved)

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July 7, 2009

Coca leaf liqueur causes a buzz abroad

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 8:46 am

According to Dutch television program Editie NL, this new coca leaf liqueur made in Amsterdam has caused quite a stir in Taiwan and even Germany. Since it is made from coca leaf extract, it has trace amounts of cocaine in it, although the company claims it does not, much like Coca Cola.

Agwa de Bolivia, a kryptonite green, 30% alcohol drink, gives you an uppity kick and is apparently all the rage in the Dutch party scene as an alternative to energy drinks which usually contain caffeine or guarana, the latter containing twice the amount of caffeine usually found in coffee. Agwa de Bolivia was confiscated in Taiwan because it contains cocaine, as if the bottle was full of it and if their Taiwanese television report was properly subtitled. An expert on television said you’d have to drink 100 bottles to get the minimum effect of 10 mg of cocaine and of course nobody can drink that. Germany is trying to ban the drink ‘because it contains cocaine’, which is again not quite true, another odd response for a drink that is perfectly legal throughout the EU and even the US. I say ‘even’ because the war on drugs in the US is a total and utter failure and cocaine is all the rage.

I plan to go out and try it one of these days. So far it’s been said to be refreshing and have a kick much like coffee does. I can’t say drinking green drinks is my thing, but life is short and I do live in Amsterdam.

UPDATE: Since you’re all asking where you can buy this stuff in Amsterdam, the address is Warmoesstraat 32 at the Coca Leaf Experience, the first-ever and only Coca Leaf museum in Amsterdam, not far from Central Station.

(Photo: Bevmo)

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July 2, 2009

Stedelijk Museum gets American woman as director

Filed under: Art,Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 9:22 am
sted

Only because the word ‘director’ doesn’t cover gender in English, did I use the word ‘woman’. In Dutch, ‘directrice’ (female director) is seen as a lesser choice of ‘directeur’ (male director) and not appreciated, while the French ‘directrice’, where the Dutch word comes from, is perfectly fine. And now, the news.

Ann Goldstein, an American, will be the first foreigner and first woman to head the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in its 114 year history when it will reopen in the spring of 2010. Goldstein is currently the senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCa) in Los Angeles where she has worked for 25 years.

Gys van Tuyl, the current artistic director of the Stedelijk Museum says that the MoCa is a model institute that feels closer to the Stedelijk than the MoMA in New York. He also mentions that the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) has shown many of Goldstein’s touring exhibitions, which “says a lot, because the MoMA basically doesn’t take shows from others.”

Read more about all the bits of the Stedelijk Museum being exhibited throughout the city in the meantime.

(Link: rnw.nl, Photo: designboom.com)

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July 1, 2009

World’s first mobile Augmented Reality browser

Filed under: Dutch first,Gadgets,Online by Orangemaster @ 10:19 am

Mobile phone Augmented Reality browser Layar, designed by Amsterdam’s Sprx Mobile has been the talk of the Dutch IT town on Twitter (we’re all friends in this neck of the woods) and just about everywhere else for some two weeks.

Layar is an application that can find everything using a mobile phone with a compass, although for now it can only be used with Android and soon the iPhone 3G S as well. As the name implies, the application provides extra ‘layers’ to reality. “You don’t have to browse on the Internet, you can see your immediate environment using Layar,” Sprx Mobile Director Raimo van der Klein explains.

For more cool developments, follow Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald (@dutchcowboy) on Twitter. He twitters in English as well, and his wife Lori Lens-Fitzgerald (@lorilens) already made this blog with her photo book about world famous restaurant El Bulli.

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June 30, 2009

Folding cargo containers save space and energy

Filed under: Design,Dutch first,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 11:59 am
cargoshell1

Rotterdam businessman Rene Giesbers dreamed up, helped design and launched an innovative container concept called Cargoshell, a fully foldable container made from composite that significantly reduces the amount of space empty containers take up on ships and trains. In fact, acccording to the report on Dutch television (RTL 4) yesterday, some 20% of all containers on ships and some 30% of all containers on trucks are just ’empties’ requiring much fuel to transport. According to a Dutch article earlier this year, some 20 billion euro is lost every year just transporting empty containers.

When the Cargoshell is folded, it takes up 25% of its actual size. It can be folded by one person and a forklift in just 30 seconds.

The Dutch often use foldable and obviously re-usable shopping crates, which I had never seen in North America, that look like this:

krat

This crate was what inspired Giesbers to do the same for containers.

Sometimes innovation is really just staring at us in the face.

(Photo: cargoshell.com)

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June 21, 2009

Teenager breaks water rocket shooting record

Filed under: Dutch first,Science by Orangemaster @ 12:09 pm

We wrote about Boyan Slat, the water rocket obssessed teenager (that’s what his mom called him on telly recently) who shot off some 101 rocket simultaneously last year on 20 June. This year, with the help of students from the Delft University of Technology and sponsoring from the university, he launched 213 rockets, which earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

(Dear Dutch press: you’ve never spelled ‘Guinness’ properly as far as I can remember. Please learn to spell it with 2 nn and 2 ss. It’s that simple, think of a car with four wheels.)

Somehow, as I said last year, this kid is probably going to go to the Delft University of Technology when he grows up.

Since then, Slat’s modest website wetenschapvoordummies (Science for dummies) has been replaced by a much slicker site called gottalaunch with all kinds of pictures, videos and cool stuff.

(Link: nu.nl, Photo: ad.nl)

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June 18, 2009

Dutch missionary produces Malawian dictionary

Filed under: Dutch first,Literature,Religion by Orangemaster @ 10:24 am
malawi-flag

Theologist and missionary Steven Paas has put together an English-Chichewa and Chichewa-English dictionary, which is currently being published and will soon be distributed in Malawi, an African country where language is a huge barrier. The dictionary has some 35,000 words and is hand-bound by local women. The first run will have 5,000 copies of this 750-page dictionary, then another 10,000 in August and ideally some 100,000 copies in the end. About 90% of these dictionaries will be distributed to secondary schools and the rest will be sold to finance more copies.

When Paas was preparing himself to leave for Malawi back in 1997 he realised that there were very few reference books in Malawi’s native language, Chichewa. He started making lists of words, which eventually turned into an English-Chichewa dictionary, the first edition of which was published in 2003. Then in 2004, the Chichewa-English dictionary was published, and now the time has come to put the two together.

Although the official language of Malawi is English, most people speak Chichewa, a ‘language problem’ this book wants to help alleviate. Of course, the not so hidden agenda is to help the people understand the Bible better and all that, which has concepts that clash with Malawian society. Nonetheless, Malawians apparently do not speak English well, which hinders their chances at a better life. Once Malawi became an independent state in 1964, English became the language of education, media, politics and justice, while 50% of the entire polupation cannot read or write.

(Link: refdag.nl, via taalpost)

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