October 5, 2009

Anne Frank film, Miep Gies asteroid

Filed under: Film,General,History,Literature by Orangemaster @ 12:47 pm

“Here you can see Anne Frank leaning out of the window of her house in Amsterdam to get a good look at the bride and groom. It’s the only time Anne Frank has ever been captured on film, according to the Anne Frank House.”

Remember that if the people over at Dutch copyright collection agency Buma Stemra have their way, we won’t be able to show you fun vids anymore because it would cost us thousands of euro a year. Feel free to sign the petition: petitiononline.

Also in Anne Frank news, an asteroid between the Mars and Jupiter has been named Miep Gies last Sunday in honour of the Dutch woman who preserved the diary of Anne Frank. “The International Astronomical Union (IAU) said it wanted to draw attention to the steadfast courage of the now 100-year-old last surviving helper of the Frank family who hid in a building behind a house in Amsterdam during World War II.”

(Link: Presurfer, earthtimes.org)

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September 25, 2009

Women prisoners are sought after mates

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 4:04 pm
Prison

BONJO, a Dutch partnership organisation that defends prisoners’ rights runs a dating site for male and female prisoners. They started about half a year ago with the women by placing contact adverts and apparently it’s a hit: 1,300 adverts for just 450 female prisoners. They say the foreign female inmates are popular with Dutch men, which seems to paint quite a different picture that on the outside.

A dating service for prisoners is not odd, but then there’s a Dutch-language one for vegetarians.

(ad.nl, Photo of Alcatraz prison by Amin Tabrizi some rights reserved.)

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September 23, 2009

KLM personnel to go nameless in style

Filed under: Aviation,Fashion,General by Orangemaster @ 4:07 pm
co-pilots2.jpg

To protect the privacy of stewardesses (and stewards, I imagine), pilots and ground personnel, KLM has decided that they won’t be wearing any nametags anymore as of April 2010. Apparently, there’s no rush to protect them — odd. Their ‘title’ will still be displayed on a pin they’ll have to wear.

KLM personnel will also be getting new uniforms, as the ones stewardesses (and again stewards, I imagine) now wear date from 1990.

Yes, this is a silly picture of two co-pilots in an old DC-9 cockpit.

(Link: at5.nl)

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September 15, 2009

C’est fini: no more cross-border drug buying

Filed under: Film,General by Orangemaster @ 11:04 am
poster1

Next Monday is the premiere of the film ‘C’est Fini’ (It’s over’) in Antwerp, Belgium, a comedy film made by the Dutch cities of Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom near the Belgian border to inform drug tourists about not being able to buy drugs anymore in both cities.

As of tomorrow, coffeeshops in both cities will no longer be allowed to sell soft drugs (hashish and marijuana). Coffeeshops that do sells drugs will be shut down for five years after a first warning. About 90% of all the drugs sold in these cities are to Flemish youth, which adds up to some 25,000 drug tourists.

The film’s plot has three Flemish guys trying to score a joint in the Netherlands. You can catch the trailer here (warning, nasty splash page).

The Dutch could just stop selling soft drugs altogether, some do say, others think that it’s still better to be relaxed about soft drugs in order to dissuade people from taking hard drugs. The current trend is that most people would probably not have the Netherlands known as some sort of coffeeshop and prostituion heaven, but hey, it’s part of the country’s identity at this point and it does attract the right tourists in some places. The jury is defintely still out on this, so to speak.

And don’t ask me why the poster has three languages on it (English = cool, French = cool to the Flemish, Dutch/Flemish = to be understood).

(Link: parool.nl, cestfini.be)

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September 11, 2009

New York birthday celebrations suffer heavy inflation

Filed under: General,History by Branko Collin @ 4:51 pm

new_amsterdamWrites the Washington Post:

Four hundred years ago this month, Henry Hudson sailed on a Dutch ship into what became New York Harbor, a journey that inspired traders from the Netherlands to become the first immigrants to New York and establish a tolerant, motley Dutch settlement called New Amsterdam.

[…] While many New Yorkers are unaware of the festivities […].

Times have changed since previous anniversary celebrations. In 1909, there were two weeks of events, forming what was then the biggest citywide celebration New York had seen with millions of participants.

In 1959, the current queen of the Netherlands, then Princess Beatrix, came to New York for the 350th anniversary of Hudson’s arrival, and celebrated with a ticker tape parade.

“The world then was a different world,” Dutch Ambassador Renée Jones-Bos said. “Now there are far more countries. You have to work harder as a country to show what you can do and raise your profile.”

(Image: Castello Plan of the tip of Manhattan)

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September 10, 2009

Surprise, the high-speed train is terribly noisy

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:16 pm
Picture 10

This story has all the trappings of an ‘I told you so’, but the testing of the high-speed train has “turned the town of Berkel en Rodenrijs [South Holland] upside down” and “makes a huge racket everytime it goes by,” according to my good Dutch friends whose newly built house is about 250 metres from the track (see the streets on the left, near the tracks).

When I visit my mates in Berkel en Rodenrijs, I see this clean and quiet new track just waiting to one day get my derrière from Amsterdam to Paris in three hours instead of five, scheduled to start this December. In May this year when I took the French high-speed train (Thalys) from Amsterdam to Paris, the train still has to wait until Brussels-Midi to finally cruise at 300 km/h instead of the standard 90-140 km, in a train that as the Dutch say, ‘stops at every big tree’.

And now that my dream train trip draws nearer, the initial testing of the train has received 1,600 complaints from the people living between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, including Berkel en Rodenrijs. The actually start of the Dutch train services is secheduled for September 2011, but if these tests are an indication of what’s to come, the Netherlands will have yet another national headache on their hands.

(Links: telegraaf.nl, eenvandaag.nl, image: Google Maps)

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September 9, 2009

Netherlands has highest train suicide rate in EU

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:51 am

Of all the 27 countries of the European Union, the Netherlands takes first place when it comes to railway suicides. The Netherlands has racked up 1,4 deaths per million kilometres of train trips made in a year, while the much sparser tracks in Germany gets 0,6 and Belgium, also a country with much track, scores 0,9.

Although some 190 people in the Netherlands killed themselves by jumping in front of trains in 2006 and some 193 in 2007, the figure was down to 164 in 2008, but was not included in the report of the European Railway Agency on this topic.

One of the possible explanations for the amount of suicides is the fact that people live very close to the tracks. In other countries people who are suicidal probably chose a different method.

(Link: dutchnews, Volkskrant)

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September 7, 2009

World record for watching telly now a Dutch record

Filed under: Dutch first,General by Orangemaster @ 11:46 am

Last weekend, the world record for watching television was broken by Efraim van Oeverenzondag, a 28-year-old student from Tilburg. He watched a whopping 86 hours of television in the building of media archive Beeld en Geluid in Hilversum and he only got 45 minutes of sleep. Since April of this year, the world record for watching television was held at 80 hours by a man from New Delhi.

(Link: destentor.nl)

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Hotel offers baby bonus to attract tourists

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:56 am
coins1

According to a press release issued by the Westin Resort on the island of Aruba (part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands), the hotel is offering couples a 210 euro cheque (300 USD) for conceiving babies at their establishment.

“Couples who were inspired by Aruba’s coral mating ritual during their fall getaway (September 1 – December 19, 2009), and can prove they conceived during their stay [by way of a doctor’s note], will receive a $300 ‘Conception Credit’ towards a return visit to the resort in 2010. With all the stress of preparing for a new arrival, the expecting parents will surely be in need of a pre-baby Caribbean retreat.”

Just remember that Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, the guy who allegedly kidnapped and killed American Natalee Holloway pretty much ruined any kind of tourism on the island for a very long time. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures.

(Links: bizz, frommers)

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September 6, 2009

Nearly 2,000 phones tapped daily

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 8:30 am
nokia1

In 2008, the Dutch police tapped an average of 1,946 phones on a daily basis, according to a letter written to parliament by Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin. “In 2008, a warrant for tapping was issued by the Public Prosecutor’s Office (OM) for 26,425 phone numbers, of which 90% were taps on mobile phones and 10% landline phones.”

Hirsch Ballin made a comparison of the Dutch figures with those of other countries. In France, 26,000 tapping warrants were issued in 2008, about the same as in the Netherlands. “In the US, the number of tapping warrants totalled 2,208 in 2007,” the minister reported. “In the UK, 1,881 warrants were issued, while Belgium had 3,603 tapping measures carried out in 2007. In Germany, 39,200 mobile phones and 5,078 landline phones were tapped in 2007.

Hirsch Ballin believes one cannot draw conclusions because the legal system differs in each country. However, it’s still interesting to point out that some European countries tap 10 times more phones than the US.

(Link: crossroadsmag)

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