July 14, 2011

Mice running amok in Amsterdam hospital

Filed under: Animals,General,Health by Orangemaster @ 4:34 pm
consult

No, not the lab rats, but actually little grey mice that are not a symbol of hygiene in Dutch folklore. The VU medical centre is being overrun by mice. They’ve always had some mice, but now there are a lot more. The hospital blames the nearby construction, which sounds plausible. “They are digging, and the mice flee and find somewhere else to hide.”

Other gripes include the hospital’s pneumatic tube system that carries patient files get stuck, and when that happens, patients waiting for an operation are at risk. A doctor even said that, ”sometimes, the system works so poorly that a blood sample gets broken and blood pours out when we retreive the post.”

All of Amsterdam, those cute houses on the canals, and apparently hospitals, have mice.

(Link: spitsnieuws.nl)

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July 13, 2011

No more ‘no-blow zones’ for Amsterdam

Filed under: Architecture,General,Health,Weird by Orangemaster @ 2:20 pm

The city of Amsterdam has been told today by the Council of State (no more appeals can be made) that it is breaking the Opium Law by putting up signs that designate certain places as ‘no-blow’ zones (‘blowen’ in Dutch is smoking pot). The first ever area of Amsterdam was around a public place called Mercatorplein, 800 metres from my place.

Mercatorplein is notorious for being regularly overhauled (love the last job, with a play fountain and trendy restaurant) and having been designed by famous artist H.P Berlage (with a tower that was broken down in 1961 and rebuilt in 1995). In recent times, it has been the backdrop for a riot between the Dutch Moroccan community and the police, as well as a hit and run where the driver ran over a known female cabaret artist, but the licence plate of his car fell off.

Way back some residents in the East of the city asked for the ban to keep their kids’ playground clean. They actually didn’t get the ban, only because the city thought it was a bit harsh.

In the Netherlands and contrary to all the tourist websites, soft drugs are illegal, as stated in the Opium Law. But yes, we go to the coffee shops and buy pre-rolled joints just like you buy a pack of smokes at the shop. The law is simply ignored and soft drugs are ‘tolerated’.

The crazy logic is because soft drugs are forbidden, you don’t need a sign to forbid them again. Of course, this is not in tune with reality, but then again neither is the Opium Law.

(Link: blikopnieuws.nl, Photo of No-blow (and no drinking) sign by Erik Joling, some rights reserved)

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July 12, 2011

World’s first hydrogen-based formula race car

Filed under: Automobiles,Dutch first,Science,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 3:34 pm

The Forze IV, the first formula race car in the world that runs on hydrogen fuel cells was unveiled on 9 July by Delft University of Technology in The Hague for everyone to see.

The Forze IV is lightweight with two electric motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells and can do 0 to 100 km in 5 seconds. The one downside for the people who watched the unveiling is that the motor doesn’t go vroooooom.

Today the Forze team will be at the UK’s Silverstone race track for the Formula Student Championship where young engineers from around the world compete with their sustainable and innovative creations. On 16 August the Forze IV will attempt to break the world’s speed record for hydrogen fuel cell powered car on the Prinses Beatrixlaan in Delft.

(Link: formulazero.tudelft.nl, Photo of the roll-out of the Forze IV at the Spuiplein in The Hague by Richard van het Hof)

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July 11, 2011

Two insects die on license plate every 10 kilometres

Filed under: Automobiles,Nature,Weird by Branko Collin @ 11:02 am

An ongoing study by the University of Wageningen has registered 17,000 insects splattered on license plates so far. The researchers made use of 250 volunteer car drivers who counted the number of dead bugs on their plates during 385 trips, De Pers reports today.

Drivers sent in their reports through the website splashteller.nl. Trips that started or ended in the provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Zeeland yielded the most dead insects, whereas Gelderland turned out to have the smallest number of dead bugs.

In total 133 billion insects die on cars every month, though not just on license plates. Train locomotives are pretty much covered in them.

(Link: www.natuurbericht.nl)

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July 9, 2011

Dutch ‘Worst Driver’ contestant crashes into TV host

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 2:19 pm

A contestant of a TV show called ‘De Slechtste Chauffeur van Nederland’ (The Worst Driver of the Netherlands) has proven his inability to drive a car by hitting the programme’s host Ruben Nicolai and an unnamed cameraman with his car.

The show was broadcast last Tuesday. The segment shown in the clip was recorded on 12 April 2011 at Twente Airport. A hospital intern leaked the news of Nicolai’s ‘accident’ via Twitter, and was suspended for a short time, Tubantia reports. Nicolai and his colleague sustained only minor injuries.

The contestant who showed the most progress won a car, but the guy who hit Nicolai got his license cut in half by the host.

The show’s final was partially recorded in Paris, where contestants had to kill or maim as few French people as possible on the public road to win it.

Link: Autoblog. Video: Youtube / BNN.

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July 8, 2011

Retro Friday: Donna Summer on Dutch disco show

Filed under: Music by Orangemaster @ 5:09 pm

A Dutch friend showed me a YT video of some weird Dutch show called Sjef van Oekels Discohoek (Sjef van Oekel’s Disco corner) that had a young Donna Summer sing ‘The Hostage’. Let’s call this like they call it in Dutch, one from the old box.

Her record company didn’t like it at all, she loved it though at the end host Dolf Brouwers says something like “next time when you’re inviting guests… please take the phone off the hook to avoid interruption!”

I like the way she says ‘Guten Tag’ (Good day German) instead of ‘Goedendag’ (Dutch).

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July 7, 2011

Lady Gaga goes Dutch design

Filed under: Design,Fashion,Music by Orangemaster @ 1:24 pm

Bart Hess, 27, from Eindhoven was asked to design a ‘slime dress’ (pic) for Lady Gaga. “I was given free reignrein. It had to have something to do with the album title ‘Born This Way’. The trick was to make sure that the colours were perfect and that it would also stay in place that way.” He went to New York to the photoshoot to slime Gaga into her dress.

Lady Gaga is also rumoured to have been asked to open an exhibition about her at the Groninger Museum, Groningen. Museum director Kees van Twist managed to get singer Bono of U2 to open the exhibition of work by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, so I bet he’s confident he can pull that trick off again.

(Link: ed.nl, Photo of Lady Gaga by TJ Sengel, some rights reserved.)

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‘Flemish cookbook is Greek to the Dutch’

Filed under: Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 8:00 am

When I occasionally zap to Jeroen Meus’ cooking show on Belgian TV in the evening, I could play a drinking game and get very messed up by drinking every time he uses Flemish diminutives like ‘evenkes’ (a while) and ‘boske’ (small bunch). As a foreigner who learnt Dutch on the street and who has Flemish friends, I can understand him. So why is a food journalist claiming that the Dutch can’t make out what he’s saying? Because they favour their own words and can’t be bothered to do a little research.

The Dutch journalist said it would be best to translate Meus’ cookbook from Flemish into Dutch, which is a touchy subject. But once the journalist claimed that the cookbook was ‘as good as useless’, it got media attention. It’s a ‘hellish job’ to figure out what the Flemish words mean in the recipes. Really? And all those English/Australian/American variants on products and measurements the Dutch all know by heart? Get real and broaden your horizons already.

(Link: standaard.be, Photo: my easy to understand and make banana muffins, available in normal and vegan variants)

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July 6, 2011

Hustling yourself a job with Twitter

Filed under: General,IT by Orangemaster @ 9:45 am

My only memory of someone being creative to get a job is some guy in my hometown of Montréal who carved his CV in ice and made sure the employer he was trying to win over saw it– and it worked.

“This ‘Job Hustle’ film by Bas van der Poel and Daan van Dam speaks for itself. They wanted a job and got one at Boondoggle by using Twitter in an unorthodox way. It’s on target, inventive and effective. They used technology to get a message across, not just to show they are geeks.”

(Link: amsterdamadblog.com)

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July 4, 2011

Zone 5300, awards and subsidies

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 11:19 am

On May 1, 2009, the major Dutch state fund for the visual arts, BKVB, did something remarkable. They appointed a champion for comics. This champion, Gert Jan Pos, seemed well chosen, because he took a large bag of shiny golden coins, and has been roaming the land with it since, handing out money to whatever comics artists struck his fancy.

The summer edition of Zone 5300 introduces you to a couple of the recipients, either because they felt like it or because by now Pos has saturated the Dutch comics landscape.

Robert van der Raffe (illustration) received a ‘working budget’ from the fund for a 120 pager he is working on, though he has yet to find a publisher. Zone 5300 publishes a light autobiographical comic about the traumatic experience of being graded in art school, in which Raffe is the good guy and all the others are either losers or bad guys.

Jeroen Funke (illustration) won the Jan Hanlo Media Essay Award 2011, and his award winning story is in this issue. The award was given to the winner of a competition for essays in comics form about sensory perception. Funke has his regular heroes Victor and Vishnu discuss how growing up adds filters to our senses that prevent us from seeing (and feeling, smelling, tasting) what’s really there.

Peter Pontiac (illustration), an underground comics giant from the 1970s who went mainstream-ish with his autobiographical Kraut (about a father who worked for the wrong side during the war), received the Marten Toonder Award 2011 for his entire body of work. In this issue he fills the two pages of The Sketchbook Of, a recurring feature.

Awards? Awards?! Eindhoven Design Academy graduate Tim Enthoven (illustration) apparently needs no stinkin’ awards (yet; although he won one for his debut album Binnenskamers – Indoors – before it had been even published). Zone 5300 calls him the jeune premier of Dutch comics, and says of his work that it is “shifting boundaries”. For Zone he wrote and drew a story about his uncle Jos who has lost the ability to read after a traumatic experience. Since the uncle did not want the nephew to write that story, the nephew has hidden the text in the scenery.

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