October 16, 2012

Police arrest gardener in rich area because he’s African

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 1:00 pm

A 32-year-old Ghanaian man was recently arrested by the alien police in Aerdenhout, a rich villa-clad and predominately Caucasian town near Haarlem purely because he didn’t have the ‘right skin colour’ to actually be working there legally. The alien police figured he was working illegally, asked for his papers and arrested him solely on the basis of his skin colour.

The court judged that what the police had done was illegal and let the man go. Not long ago again in Aerdenhout African women were arrested by the alien police on their way to clean houses, with the same result: the cops were in the wrong.

It is totally illegal to arrest anyone based on their looks to then check and see if their are illegally living and working in the Netherlands, but apparently the police, mostly white Dutch men, are too blind with racism to get it. No wonder nobody trusts them.

Dutch ‘left-wing’ blog Joop.nl used the N-word albeit to emphasise what many inhabitants of the Netherlands still think about Africans and other people fitting the n-word description.

(Links: www.waarmaarraar.nl, www.joop.nl)

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October 15, 2012

2012 winners of the Royal Awards for Modern Painting

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 12:51 pm

Four young painters were presented with the Royal Award for Modern Painting last Friday by Queen Beatrix at the royal palace in Amsterdam: Frank Ammerlaan, Jasper Hagenaar, Keetje Mans and Evi Vingerling (illustration, left to right).

The annual award was instituted in 1871 by King Willem III. It consists of a 6,500 euro prize (after taxes). The exhibition of the nominated paintings will run until November 5.

Trendbeheer went and rubbed shoulders with the winners at the palace. Jeroen Bosch’s conclusion: “The lion’s share is traditional, thoroughbred art, i.e. big, using paint, and depicting something.”

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October 14, 2012

Croquette merger cancelled

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 8:00 pm

The merger between two of the giants of the croquette industry has failed, Z24 reports.

Manufacturers Ad van Geloven and Royaan failed to come to an agreement. This means a new lease of life for the famous Van Dobben brand.

As we reported in November last year, two of the largest manufacturers of the deep-fried Dutch delicacy called croquette or kroket were to “form a company with a combined turnover of 246 million euro and almost 1,100 employees”. Ad van Geloven is behind the Mora brand, and Royaan behind Kwekkeboom and Van Dobben.

The Dutch agency that tries to keep competition in markets fair, the NMa, had given its blessing to the merger last month on the condition that the Van Dobben brand would disappear altogether from supermarket freezers.

(Photo by Omid Tavallai, some rights reserved)

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October 13, 2012

Public broadcaster closes off websites to privacy fans

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:05 pm

Screenshot of uitzendinggemist.nl with the cookie dialogue.

The website that the public broadcasters of the Netherlands use to display videos of programmes that have already been broadcast, Uitzending Gemist, has been locked down for visitors who refuse to accept Internet cookies.

A recent law stipulates that website owners must ask every visitor permission to store cookies. (Cookies are a web browser technology for storing small bits of data about a visitor.) The law does not say what a website owner should do if a visitor refuses cookies. Two options that spring to mind are to show a simplified website (typically without advertising) or to show no website at all.

Volkskrant quotes a spokes person of NPO, the organization running Uitzending Gemist, saying: “We are legally obliged to report how many people we reach, and cookies are important to this goal. This is why our websites and on-line videos can only be made accessible to those who accept cookies.”

The public broadcasters are paid from general taxes. OPTA, the government watchdog for telecom issues, has been leaning heavy on the owners of publicly funded websites lately. The agency stated that government organisations have to set the right example.

One commenter at Arnoud Engelfriet’s blog said (and in my opinion he or she is right): “A law that was enacted to protect consumers is now being used to hijack consumers. […] In my opinion the law was set up to give people an actual choice—to allow cookies or not. Forcing visitors to allow cookies (or else the site cannot be visited) is absurd.”

See also:

Disclaimer: 24 Oranges has yet to determine how to apply the cookie law without inconveniencing its visitors.

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October 12, 2012

Dutch whizz kid rules as WWII Lego specialist

Filed under: Design by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

Dutch 14-year-old Stijn Oom has taken his Lego blocks up a few levels and made some fantastic WWII creations without using pre-existing Lego kits. He started building serious models when he was just five and hasn’t stopped since.

Flickr has helped him connect with enthusiasts and surely helped boost his ever-increasing popularity. “When I discovered Flickr, I found out that there was a HUGE Lego community going on! Reactions on builds, comments, favorites! It was the perfect system for every young builder.” Flickr is used by Lego fans to share their creations and they like it because they can annotate their images.

Why doesn’t Lego make military sets like there? Because it’s part of the company’s policy to not make anything military, with the exception of the Star Wars kits.

(Links: gizmodo.com, fooyoh.com, Photo of Lego by tiptoe, some rights reserved)

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October 10, 2012

Urinals designed by Dutch artist removed in Australia

Filed under: Design,Food & Drink,Music by Orangemaster @ 11:27 am

Some Australians were so pissed at a urinal design by Dutch artist Meike van Schijndel that they have been removed just three weeks after an establishment opened.

A trendy restaurant in Sydney had to remove the urinals shaped like the Rolling Stones’ logo because they were considered offensive to many patrons of the Ananas Bar and Brasserie. Unfortunately, many people feel that these lips are female and have been offended by the idea of peeing into a woman’s mouth.

The urinals are a commonly used European design piece from female Dutch artist Meike van Schijndel. Our female designer saw one in a shopfront in Paris when she was there on an inspiration trip for Ananas and felt it referenced the Rolling Stones logo which is based on Mick Jagger’s lips rather than a woman’s lips. She felt it would be a great way to bring a slice of Paris’s risqué nightlife to Sydney. We acknowledge that other people have interpreted it differently and have therefore removed them.

It’s one thing to mistake the Rolling Stones logo for women’s lips (and certainly a good argument), but to wash your hands in a urinal at a festival is just wrong yet funny. Watch Man mistakes urinal for sink.

(Link: www.volkskrant.nl, Photo of Marcel Duchamp’s famous ‘urinoir’ taken at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, in August 2008 by Orangemaster)

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October 9, 2012

‘Two strikes and the government will make you homeless’

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:23 pm

While everybody has been distracted by other news, the Dutch Senate quietly passed two laws that allow the government to enter into people’s homes on suspicion on fraud without having a shred of proof. The second law states that anybody caught committing fraud for the second time will see their entire income automagically disappear for five whole years.

Anybody on benefits of any kind is ‘at risk’ of having a pencil pusher at their door at any time now. As well, anybody who receives money in the form of a government allocation (kids, housing, etc.) is also a candidate for a pencil pusher’s visit. Old people and parents are not amused.

All kinds of organisations are saying it’s disproportionate and highly controversial. Sure, the government wants to crack down on fraud, but this seems to go too far, even legally. If someone were to commit fraud twice and get caught, they’d have no benefits anymore to live on and will be forced to find a job, is the ‘logic’ behind the law.

I think they’ll force people into crime and poverty, and the media is going to have fun compiling the sob stories.

(www.ed.nl)

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October 8, 2012

Governments mislead citizens into sending digital information to wrong address

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:01 pm

The Dutch national government has put a lot of work into its digital identification system, as DigID is pretty much obligatory for most people these days. For instance, most people cannot file tax returns without one.

However, the government would not be the government if it had not found ways to mess up its own system. The latest howler is reported by WebWereld which writes that a lot of municipalities refer citizens to an ad agency called Digi-D (note the hyphen).

The ad agency existed before the government came up with the name DigiD. The agency claims it has already received sensitive data from 10,000 mistaken citizens, and it has tried to get the government to mend its ways, so far to no avail. Being an ad agency they have now started a campaign to do what the government should have done in the first place, namely point citizens to the right address. The slogan: ‘be careful with your DigiD!’

WebWereld lists several official government documents that refer citizens to the wrong organisation.

Apparently local governments have a checklist that tells them to pay attention to the correct spelling of the name DigiD, among other things.

(Photo by Mystic Mabel, some rights reserved)

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October 7, 2012

A hot tub that you can take sailing

Filed under: Design by Branko Collin @ 1:48 pm

This is the HotTug, a boat that doubles as a (you guessed it) hot tub.

The boat is built from wood and fibreglass. A wood stove heats the water inside, and an electric engine propels the boat for about 2.5 hours (but there is also an 8 hour version). The entire contraption functions as a regular boat regardless of whether you fill the tub with water.

A version with stove or engine costs about 15,000 euro, but a version stripped of these accessories can be had for as little as 9,000 euro. Werf IJlst in Friesland rents out these babies for 300 euro per half a day.

The HotTug was designed and built by Supergoed from Rotterdam, the design studio behind the ‘bicycle tunnel as racetrack‘.

(Link: AmsterdamNews.net. Photo: hottug.nl)

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October 6, 2012

Artist Tinkebell reports snails stolen by activist reporter

Filed under: Animals,Architecture by Branko Collin @ 3:57 pm

Controversial artist Tinkebell has announced she will report a theft with the police after a TV Rijnmond reporter took two snails from an exhibit with him. TV Rijnmond handed over the snails to Dierenbescherming (‘Animal Protection’, an association with 200,000 members and 31 local chapters) for further study.

Tinkebell is currently exhibiting some 1,000 live snails with beads glued to them as part of a larger exhibition at the Villa Zebra children’s museum called Ah, wat lief! (‘So sweet’). The exhibition is supposed to explore and challenge how children look at animals—which ones do they find cute, and which ones do they find horrid.

Earlier Tinkebell exhibits centered around exposing the hypocrisy of animal lovers by doing the exact same thing they do to animals, but within a completely different context. In one instance she made a leather purse, with the leather from her own cat. She also let hamsters run around a showroom while they were imprisoned in tiny plastic balls she had purchased at a pet store, something for which she was prosecuted but ultimately acquited.

In an article on left-wing blog Joop.nl Tinkebell explains how she got the idea of adorning snails with beads in the first place:

I have been painting all the snails I find in my own garden for years. [One day I spotted my neighbour salting his garden to kill snails and] I began to wonder where the snails came from, where they were going and how old they would get. In order to answer my own questions as well as try to change my neighbour’s mind, I started to paint numbers on the snails in my garden. There were many of them…

A year later and much to my surprise I saw that the snails were still moving through my garden, numbers and all. Wow! So then I numbered the unmarked copies in a different colour.

Another year passed and now three generations of painted snails were moving among my plants, and the year after I started with a new ‘tactic’, that of ‘beautifying’. I added glitter, flowers and little paintings. Each year my snails looked different, and that is how I kept track of different generations.

(Photo by Helen Cook, some rights reserved)

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