December 28, 2008

Holiday stress and some story telling relief

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:48 pm

First, a very simple yet stressful film of how a cute little shopping street (Haarlemmerdijk) in Amsterdam can turn into a holiday nightmare for trucks, cars (big Volvo station wagons), bikes and pedestrians. Hook yourself up to a stress machine, and I am sure you will score higher that usual. And remember that everybody always does their last food Christmas shopping at the last minute, which this film captures.

Second, to avoid all that stress and having been invited to an exclusive birthday party, I ran off to Munich where 24orange’s third lesser known blogger lives, beautifully situated across from the Olympic stadium of 1972. The morning has so far been spent fixing a washing machine because a small, plastic “sombrero” broke off.

The German machine, which was bought in the Netherlands and moved to Germany, broke down in Germany. The part could not be ordered in Germany (!) and was ordered in the Netherlands. The part was picked up in the Netherlands, on holiday from Germany. Hopefully, it can be fixed today.

UPDATEThe washing machine was fixed the next day.

washing machine

Tomorow get ready for Branko’s annual picks of fav 24o postings. Prosit!

(Link: amsterdamcentraal.nl)

Tags: , ,

December 26, 2008

Coalition mayor smokes in bar, breaks own party’s law

Filed under: General,Health by Branko Collin @ 7:09 pm

Last Tuesday the mayor of Deurne in Noord Brabant was questioned by the city council about his smoking in a public bar. Since July of this year smoking has been banned in bars in the Netherlands. The ban has met with a lot of resistance, and many smokers openly defy the law. As far as I am aware this is the first time that a public official was caught red-handed breaking the anti-smoking law. A salient detail is that mayor Gerard Daandels of Deurne is a member of CDA, the Christian party that is in the vanguard of the Jihad against fun: it was CDA minister Klink that proposed the smoking ban.

Daandels response: “You can hold me responsible for everything in matters of enforcement, but not for this unenforceable measure. […] I went to three bars where people were smoking. If a hundred people are smoking, you no longer give an example by not smoking.”

The Department of Public Health commented: “Even mayors are bound by the law.”

Link: Brabants Dagblad. Via Jong Nieuws. Depiction of the Deurne coat of arms by Wikipedia user Tibor, distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

Tags: , , , , ,

December 21, 2008

Guy in ad switches from English to Dutch to order pea soup

Filed under: Food & Drink,General by Branko Collin @ 2:22 pm

Dunglish.nl, one of Orangemaster’s many ventures, posted this brilliant ad for Unox pea soup a while ago. In it, you see some sort of sales manager walk through a company cafeteria while holding a bluetooth-enabled phone conversation in that lingua franca of the Dutch business world, English with sprinklings of Dutch. When it matters though — that is, when he wishes to order pea soup — he switches to all-Dutch.

Tags: , , , , , , ,

December 20, 2008

Tour company profits from financial crisis

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:49 pm

Tour company Amsterdam Excursies has decided to profit from the financial crisis by organizing themed guided tours of the financial history of Amsterdam. It’s Crisis Tour starts at the Zeedijk, where the first share in the world was traded in 1606, and ends on the Spuistraat at De Keuken van 1870, the oldest and only still extant soup kitchen of the city. Other crises touched upon during the tour are the collapse of Tulip Mania in 1637, and the end of the Dutch Golden Age.

Via the print edition of NL20. Photo of the VOC HQ (East India Company) by Josh, distributed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

December 18, 2008

The best Dutch word of 2008 is penis swinging

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 9:08 am

We at 24 oranges always want to know what the youth is up to, and the winner of the best Dutch word for 2008 comes straight out of youth culture to teach us a new verb: swaffelen, conveniently spelled and pronounced the same in English and said to be an English word with Dutch and German roots.

The urban legend origin of the word comes from some boy, who during a school trip to India, “swaffeled” against the Taj Mahal, which is more than just bad etiquette. Basically, he swung his penis so that it touched the holy building and the film of this incident is rumoured to be floating around the Internet. Somehow I don’t need visual confirmation.

The second place winner was “wiien”, a verb about playing the Wii, while third place went to “bankendomino”, (“bank domino”), which refers to banks falling like dominoes as of late.

(Link: depers.nl)

Tags: , ,

December 17, 2008

‘Vegetarian’ star eats chicken

Filed under: Animals,Design,General by Orangemaster @ 8:14 am
Jan Vayne Unox

While I’m looking forward to a special get together this week with a bunch of local musicians where I was asked to bring a vegetarian dish (a refreshing change), some self-proclaimed vegetarians apparently ‘omit details’ about their chosen eating patterns when it suits them. Jan Vayne, a celebrity who plugs Unox smoked sausage on television but who does not eat it, was not only nominated as one of the sexiest vegetarians of the Netherlands, but he does eat chicken every once in a while, as apparently shown on television. As far as I can read, he is not a vegetarian. He also claims not to take the ‘election’ seriously, which is obviously a good thing. I voted for columnist Leon Verdonschot; the difference is plain to see. The activists at Wakker Dier were ready to let the smoked sausage thing slip, but eating chicken and saying ‘mmm, delicious’ on television has got their forums buzzing.

And don’t get me started on the all-year-round vegetarians except at Christmas when they shove all that turkey, chicken and pâté down their gizzards gullets, claiming their loved ones didn’t want to cook separate dishes just for them and what not – you’re lying too. And there’s always fish if you want to bring your guilt down a notch or two.

(Link: vleesmagazine.nl)

Tags: , ,

December 13, 2008

Postman fired over warning customers about fraudulent bills

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:31 pm

When a postman from Rotterdam warned his customers about fake Chamber of Commerce bills following a recent spate of them, he got fired by his employer Sandd, according to Dutchnews. Having read about the fraudulent bills in the paper, he recognized them on his daily route:

“I told my delivery manager, but the reply I got was that we only deliver the mail, and that we cannot and may not check the contents,” postman Rick Timmer (51) told Parool (Dutch). Timmer then went on to warn the companies along his route of his own initiative, sometimes even putting warning stickers on letters to people he could not reach in person.

Sandd thinks Timmer has violated the secrecy of correspondence, a legal right that’s enshrined in the constitution and that holds that letters may not be read while being delivered. In this light the support that Timmer got is a bit shocking: Sandd competitor TNT even offered him a new job, according to Telegraaf. Does this mean that TNT does read our letters? Because that is in my opinion the message they are now sending. Telegraaf mentions that Timmer did not open the letters.

Photo by Hans Vink, some rights reserved.

Tags: , , , , ,

December 12, 2008

Adoption case with DVD for adoptive parents

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am
Adoption kit

In the Gelderse Vallei hospital in Ede, Gelderland, babies that get put up for adoption also come with an adoption case complete with a DVD of the first few days, toys and a diary written by the attending nurse. Of the 20 to 40 adopted babies every year in the Netherlands, five of them are born at the Gelderse Vallei hospital. Since the first few days are so important, as adoptive children rarely have any photos or information about that time in their lives, the hospital thought a nice case full of memories and practical things, such as a blanket and some clothes, was a good idea. On television, there was also talk of the biological mother leaving a note and whether nurses had time to write something in the diary for the future parents.

(Link and photo: deweekkrant.nl, via Editie NL)

Tags: , ,

December 11, 2008

Googling for Google

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:00 pm

“The Dutch don’t know how to Google,” Bright.nl thinks (Dutch). Google has recently published its Zeitgeist 2008, a list of the things people have been googling for this year. The Dutch top 5:

  1. hyves
  2. youtube
  3. marktplaats
  4. google
  5. weer

(Emphasis mine. Marktplaats is the Dutch eBay, “weer” means weather.)

Yes, that’s right, the Dutch google “Google” to get to Google. Don’t gloat yet, as the lists for other countries look surprisingly similar, with the names of typical Dutch sites replaced by local favourites. As Bright points out, these results likely have more to do with “the bankruptcy of the address bar” than with a sudden dumbing down of society.

Here’s a clip from hit British series The IT Crowd called “Never Ever Type Google Into Google”

Tags: , , ,

Tell-a-friend systems now legal in the Netherlands

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:49 am

An unholy alliance of the telecom and privacy authorities (OPTA and CBP respectively) has declared tell-a-friend systems legal, reports Arnoud Engelfriet (Dutch). The two agencies that were most likely to fine you for spamming your visitors’ friends made up a list of sensible sounding rules though:

  • The website is not allowed to offer incentives to visitors for using the tell-a-friend system,
  • The recipient should be fully aware which friend decided to spam him,
  • The iniator should know exactly what’s being sent on their behalf before the e-mail is sent, and
  • The site may not collect the e-mail addresses of either the initiator or the recipients.

If you don’t know what a tell-a-friend system is: these are forms on a third-party’s web site that will let you notify a friend of something interesting on that site. So what if you want to tell a friend about a 24 Oranges posting? Our preferred way is the one depicted in the photo to the left (by Mind on Fire, some rights reserved). You don’t have a friend handy and cannot just walk over? Well, we’re using the WordPress blogging system, which uses extremely user-friendly URLs. Just copy and paste the URL in an e-mail message and send it to a friend.

Organizations that would still be labeled spammers and privacy hounds under these new, laxer rules are such venerable institutions as the army and the police. I guess they’re just too busy harassing foreign looking people to read up on the law.

Tags: ,