December 15, 2008

Revolving door generates power

Filed under: Sustainability,Weird by Branko Collin @ 10:11 am

As if it isn’t bad enough that since they privatized, the national railroad monopolist barely seems to manage to run a train on time, to boot the NS (Dutch Railways) has now resorted to forced labour. Everybody passing through this revolving door helps the Driebergen-Zeist railway station generate a little bit of electricity. According to an enthousiastic manufacturer, Boon Edam, this is the world’s first energy generating revolving door and a breakthrough in “entrance technology.” There’s a word I bet you did not know existed. They estimate the amount of revolutions to be a scientific “gazillion times.”

The electricity thus won is used to illuminate a sign that says how much electricity the door has generated so far.

Link: Forever Geek. Photo Boon Edam.

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December 14, 2008

Dutch pop

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 12:30 pm

Being partly a child of the 1970s I am accustomed to a barren Dutch pop music landscape, and therefore always a little surprised when an act shows up in and from this country that’s worth listening to. The past 18 months I have found myself surprised more than once.

Leaf – Wonderwoman. “Why’s my life so boring? I am up for a little bit more.” And here’s the surprise: in the third act she doesn’t introduce a guy to make it all right.

All Missing Pieces – I want you to know. February this year was a special month for the band, because that’s when the Labour Inspection gave 11-year old bass player Quinten an exemption that will allow the three-year old band to perform more than the 12 times a year the law permits.

De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig – Hollereer. When I see the lyrics I get the creepy feeling I should be glad I don’t understand them.

Which Dutch pop artists do you recommend people listen to?

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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.

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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”

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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.

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December 10, 2008

Blackfaced police officers in sting op

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 4:15 pm
Zwarte Piet

Last weekend the police in Utrecht used decoy men in blackface, so-called ‘Zwarte Pieten’ (Black Petes), to catch rowdy youths who had been taunting real Black Petes with their own candy.

Black Pete is Saint Nicholas’ helper in the Netherlands. His face is black because he is the one who has to climb down the chimney to deliver gifts and bring back up carrots for the horse and any naughty children that he might find. Over the years, the image of Black Pete has made generic, taking the blackface look from the deeply racist USA and multiplying the number of Petes so that they became more like huge Smurfs. We’ve even got the Smurf etymology down pat, naming individual Petes for a single outstanding quality: Fix it Pete, Gift Pete, Horse Pete, and now even Bait Pete.

Usually it’s Black Pete’s prerogative to give nice children candy and to put bad children “in the bag” and take them back to Spain with him (where, as you all know, Saint Nicholas comes from), but I guess the concept of good children turning bad after getting candy was a little too much for the Utrecht Petes, so they called in the cops. Methinks the arrested 10 and 11-year-olds should have an excellent line of defence in court.

UPDATE: We are very aware that many Dutch folks now consider Zwarte Piet a racist stereotype.

(Link and photo: tobysterling.net, via trouw.nl)

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December 9, 2008

HEMA essential brand, followed by 8 o’clock news

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 9:06 am

The Dutch cannot part with their HEMA department stores, a recent EURIB study revealed. Some 81% of the population thinks the cheap retailer with a sense for design is indispensable. The number two and three positions are taken up by Blokker (housewares) and Kruidvat (cosmetics). Among men, NOS Journaal—the state-run TV news show—took the top position (77%), among women HEMA leads (91%), with Pickwick (tea) taking second place.

The researchers determined three factors that could explain the indispensability of a brand:

  1. Consumers see a brand as a part of Dutch culture
  2. Consumers can interact with the brand
  3. Consumers are exposed to a brand on at least a weekly basis

I think HEMA’s perceived indispensability is caused by the fact that nearly everybody buys their underwear there. Ipso facto, the Dutch are an underwear wearing people. Free scientific analysis from the 24 Oranges’ towers, there ya go.

The study (Dutch, PDF) can be downloaded at the EURIB website.

See also:

Via Blik op Nieuws (Dutch). Photo by Hans Vandenbogaerde, some rights reserved.

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December 5, 2008

How to celebrate Sinterklaas

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 3:07 pm

If you were uncertain on whether to put the carrot for the horse in the left or the right shoe, whether to start singing Zie ginds komt de stoomboot or Sinterklaasje Bonne Bonne Bonne first, or whether it is allowed to make veiled references to the thing you had with your best friend’s wife in the poem you wrote for his surprise, fear not, NEN to the rescue! Last year, the Dutch Standards Institute (NEN) published its standards for the celebration of Sinterklaas (PDF, mostly Dutch) so that now we know how all participants should behave during the celebration.

Oh, that poem thing? The rules are defined in a separate document, NTA 0712.

Link: Sargasso. Photo by Aloxe, some rights reserved.

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December 4, 2008

Cruelty to animals used as music video effect

Filed under: Animals,Art,Music by Branko Collin @ 8:51 am

The music video for Amsterdam based rockband zZz’s track Running with the Beast has been pulled by Youtube, according to Omroep Brabant (Dutch). The video apparently shows two roosters fighting. The cocks were smeared with paint before being put into a tiny arena, and were made to fight on top of paper sheets which were later used to produced the artwork for the CD and for posters and so on.

In an elaborate statement (PDF), the band managed to claim that “no animals were injured.” Indeed, “for legal reasons the video was shot in Bangkok, Thailand.”

See also Dozens of hamsters freed from plastic balls for another tale of artists abusing animals for their own personal gain showing the inherent hypocrisy of people who don’t want to be confronted with the maltreatment of animals, but who will for instance gladly enjoy the fruits of factory farming.

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December 2, 2008

John keeps socks on, gets busted

Filed under: Fashion,Weird by Branko Collin @ 8:51 am

A man got arrested last Sunday after he kept his socks on for sex. The prostitute at the Doubletstraat in The Hague whose services he was availing himself of thought his behaviour was strange and asked him about it—she thought maybe he had cold feet. The man admitted that he was carrying a valuable load of drugs in his socks, and even offered to sell some of it to his supplier of sex. Instead the woman called out to two police officers who were passing through the street and who in turn arrested the man and discovered that indeed, he had hidden “229 drug balls, 32 pony packs cocaine and 2 bags of marijuana” in his socks, according to the Telegraaf (Dutch).

Photo by Lauren Weinhold, some rights reserved. Boy is there a lot of sock porn on Flickr.

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