April 6, 2012

Farmer threatens dog owners with ‘coldness’

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 3:01 pm

An angry cattle farmer in Hengelo put up a sign on his property that reads: ‘No dogs in the meadow, or I will ice your dog.’ (‘Geen honden in de wei, anders maar ik uw hondje koud.’) In Dutch, the last part literally translates as ‘I will make your dog cold’, which usually means to kill or ice, but not everyone agrees that’s what the farmer means. He put the sign up because he doesn’t want dog poo making his cows sick, and chances are, he’s pretty fed up at this point.

You could make a dog cold by spraying it with water, the police told the neighbours who let their dogs out in the meadow and removed the sign, assuming their dogs would get shot. The cops told the neighbours they were the ones committing an illegal act by removing a sign on private property.

In true Dutch ‘let’s talk it out’ fashion, the cops will get the sign back from the neighbours or fine them, and they’ll probably have coffee and biscuits, the farmer will give them a speech about how he doesn’t want dogs on his property full stop and the neighbours will promise not to do so. Then, the dog owners will ignore him, saying they pay enough dog tax to do what they want, and the cops will be by again, and so on.

Someone should spray them all with water.

(Link: Parool, photo by E. Dronkert, some rights reserved)

Tags: , , , ,

April 5, 2012

Love padlock bridge spotted in Amsterdam

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 1:35 pm

In Paris, the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine is well known for its huge collection of padlocks that adorn the sides of the bridge, left by couples in love as an urban equivalent of carving your initials into a tree. And since international trends usually find their way to Amsterdam, a bridge on the Kloveniersburgwal downtown has started its own collection of love padlocks.

Unfortunately, many trends are not always adopted with the same spirit in which they came. What could be a lovely, new local tradition has already hit newspaper Metro as a tolerated public annoyance at best. “If those padlocks get in the way, we’ll take the necessary measures to remove them”, a spokesperson for the city told the paper. It wouldn’t be the first time cities around the world have threatened to remove padlocks, as they probably do damage metal, look awful in some places and clash with their surroundings in others. However, a bit like love, the cities often cave in to public opinion.

Love padlocks and wish padlocks have been around for a while, and have no definite origin. It’s probably one of those trends that started simultaneously in several countries because we’re all human after all.

UPDATE: In May 2012 all the padlocks had been removed.

Tags: , , ,

April 4, 2012

Dutch authorities make identity theft easy

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 2:19 pm

As of late, many journalists have turned finding out how badly privacy is protected by government institutions into a kind of sport.

Reinier Vermeer, a journalist from Webwereld, rang up the Employee Insurance Agency (UWV) to find out about the data they had on him, and a few days later he got a letter from them with all the details of his neighbours.

The letter contained the complete names, dates of birth and social insurance numbers of his next-door neighbours, all of which is enough to ask for an online ID code, for doing taxes and even request a new passport using your own picture. It’s like Christmas for identity thieves and it goes against everything the Data Protection Law stands for.

And if said journalist was a real baddie, he could run around for a long time posing as his neighbour and commit all kinds of atrocities. The police in the journalist’s area are currently trying out a system where if you lose your passport, you don’t need to file a report with the police anymore, you just show up at some municipal office and file for a new passport. And unless his neighbour recently ordered a new biometric passport, there is no way of checking whether the journalist is who he says he is. And imagine the neighbour’s fun of trying to prove he is who he is.

So you’re a a hardcore baddie (think terrorist), you have a proper though technically illegal European passport, and the Dutch authorities would probably investigate the neighbour’s claim of having had his identity stolen for months before you’d get caught for anything, all because some stupid employee at the Employee Insurance Agency is too stupid/lazy/unmotivated to follow the rules or even learn them.

See also: Man harassed by police for 13 years after identity theft

Tags: , , , , ,

April 3, 2012

The PAL-V finally makes its maiden flight

Filed under: Automobiles,Aviation,Technology by Orangemaster @ 7:00 am

Way back in 2007 we had already posted on the flying car, announced by Dutch company PAL-V, and in 2009 we posted about PAL-V finally demoing it and it didn’t fly.

Earlier this year [2009] Pal-V promised a demonstration of its technology, it disappointed the collected international press by showing a gyroscope and a Carver, but not the hybrid that everybody has been waiting for these past years.

And since third time’s the charm, here below is the video of the flying car, uploaded just yesterday. The PAL-V can be used in road traffic as well as in the air, offering a choice of driving or flying. It can reach speeds of up to 180 km/h on land and in the air, and should have a normal petrol version and biofuel version. I wonder about licenses, insurances, pundits, and the rest of the fallout, but one thing at a time.

Tags: ,

April 2, 2012

Automated Lego robotic lab

Filed under: General,Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:15 am

Anika Brandsma (17) from the Netherlands built this automated Lego robolab by combining the Lego Friends’ Olivia’s invention workshop set with Lego Mindstorms NXT.

Also check out her flying Lego, and her Lego duck, which quacks, walks and lays eggs. The entire Brandsma family is into Lego, and uses the pseudonym Vuurzoon Family (it’s a pun—Vuurzoon means ‘fire son’, and Brandsma means ‘fire mother’).

Lego Friends is Lego marketed purely at girls. This makes the hitherto gender neutral other Lego suddenly appear ‘boys only’, or so some people fear. That is why it is interesting to see kids, or in this case teenagers, just mix and match them.

Link: Wired.

Tags:

April 1, 2012

The Kyteman Orchestra

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 1:49 pm

Kyteman, a.k.a. flugelhorn player Colin Benders, has started a new project called The Kyteman Orchestra, which released an album of the same name last Friday.

So far only one or two reviews have appeared on the web, but I could no longer withhold giving you the opportunity to listen to the following track, which was released by the Kytopia studios on YouTube:

We wrote about Kyteman’s previous project, Kyteman’s Hip Hop Orchestra. Since then he has moved from dreary Overvecht (although the place does have a nice slide these days) to the buildings of the former Jongeneel saw mill on the Zeedijk in Utrecht, where he built Kytopia, a complex of recording studios, a theatre and apartments.

For the orchestra some of the MCs were dropped, but an entire choir was added. The album was recorded on analog equipment, HP De Tijd writes.

De Volkskrant thinks the fans will be taken aback:

The lines between pop and bombastic classical music are blurred [on this album]. While I Was Away, Day One, pop rarely approached Richard Wagner so closely. Preaching to the Choir is top heavy opera. Impressive? Well made? Good? Yes, but some of the energy and spirit that made The Hermit Sessions so irresistible was lost along the way.

This is heavy duty stuff, also lyrically. Titles such as Angry At The World and The Mushroom Cloud set the tone, judgement day is just around the corner.

(Photo by Oxfam Novib / Marielle van Uitert, some rights reserved. Video: Youtube / Kytopia.)

Tags:

March 31, 2012

Hamburger ad uses make-up to seduce

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 8:43 pm

According to Jezebel this is a Dutch advertisement for the Burger King hamburger chain. Unfortunately I have been unable to confirm this, or to find out who the makers of this ad are.

I remember when the only hamburger joint in town was Wimpy, and they weren’t very popular. Back in the day fast food in the Netherlands tended to be french fries served in snack bars with a side order of frikandel or croquette. The introduction of McDonald’s in the Netherlands in the 1970s changed the landscape a little, although today there are only 200-something McDonald’s establishments and still over 4,000 snack bars.

Tags:

March 30, 2012

Paralysed athlete could walk after all

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

Last year Monique van der Vorst became an international example of what perseverance can do. Paraplegia cost her the use of her legs at age 13 (or so we reported, and everybody else), but she fought hard and won medals at the 2008 Paralympics in cycling events. Then a car accident allegedly gave her back the use of her legs, and Rabobank hired her for their regular bicycle racing team.

After reporting on Van der Vorst, daily newspaper De Pers was inundated with letters from doctors and handicapped athletes. People asked if the paper believed in fairy tales. Witnesses reported that they had seen Van der Vorst walk after races, stowing away her wheelchair by herself in her car, or showering while standing. Doctors said that she should not be able to control a hand bike if she had paraplegia, because the handicap would also disturb her balance.

De Pers’ reporter Thijs Zonneveld (himself a former professional bicycle racer, and the initiator of the Dutch mountain) asked Van der Vorst what the deal was:

I have only realised myself since yesterday what is going on, when I started digging through my personal archive. […]

Nobody understood me. Doctors diagnosed me with incomplete paraplegia, without explaining what they meant. Others treated me like I was crazy. I really did have some sort of paralysis. Not because of problems in my spine, but because of the way my brain controlled my body. My current physician compares it to a car. My engine wasn’t broken, but I had forgotten how to drive. Sometimes the paralysis would be gone, and then I could stand for a while, or walk, but never for long. […]

I did not lie, but I never found the right words.

The professional racer attributes her mentally induced paralysis to a trauma caused by a difficult birth and the accidents she was in.

Zonneveld concludes: “Maybe we the press should have asked better questions. Van der Vorst gave hundreds of interviews, but nobody managed to unearth the truth. That was her fault, but also our own. We turned her story into a fairy tale. But Monique van der Vorst is no miracle. She is a human being with her own story that is perhaps more complex than we all wanted to believe.”

De Pers probably won’t give Zonneveld another chance to add to that story because the free daily will quit after today. In the past five years it has failed to make a regular profit, and the publisher is no longer willing to operate at a loss.

NOS Nieuws reports that the Rabobank team is still looking into what to do about its recent hire: “We gave her a contract to give her a chance as a professional bicycle racer, and we gave her that contract on the basis of her performances, not because of her history.”

In 2007 Rabobank fired its Tour de France race leader Michael Rasmussen on the spot over unproven doping allegations. The Dane successfully took the bank to court and won 700,000 euro in damages for unlawful dismissal.

Tags: , , , ,

March 29, 2012

Disabled Dutchman in Paris makes a film about love and getting around

Filed under: Film by Orangemaster @ 7:48 am

“I got the idea for this film from a trip I made in my wheelchair through Europe a few years ago. And I noticed that Paris really stuck out as a ‘wheelchair enemy’.”

Ironically called ‘Rue des Invalides’, named after a street in Paris (well OK, boulevard) or the metro station of the same name, which in turn refers to a hotel that houses war invalids, this clip features Mari Sanders who wants to make a film about a guy in a wheelchair falling in love in Paris, with a good dose of humour.

In fact, besides pointing out that they have no budget whatsoever, watch Mari try and get up stairs for real with more energy than most non invalid people have. We’re not used to seeing this, but I know I want to see his film already, regardless. Thanks Mari for reminding us that we take strolling around Paris for granted.

I always thought Amsterdam was wheelchair unfriendly – let’s be honest, all of Europe was never built for cars or anyone in a wheelchair – but I had never stopped to think how bad Paris is.

(Link: www.geenstijl.nl)

Tags: , ,

March 28, 2012

Solar panels on concert hall roof for that green effect

Filed under: Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 9:28 pm

While the Amsterdam Municipal Theatre has bees on its roof, Amsterdam concert hall Muziektheater now boasts the largest solar panel installation on one single roof in Amsterdam and in the Netherlands. Some 350 solar panels cover approximately 1,000 square metres of the building’s roof and will generate as much electricity as would normally be used by 30 Amsterdam households. The solar panels generate 85,000 kWh of power a year, reducing CO2 emissions by 52 tons a year.

(Link: www.amsterdam.nl, Photo of Muziektheater by Alberto Alvarez-Perea, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,