April 4, 2011
Hot on the heels of the announcement of Apple’s latest toy comes this wooden cover for the iPad 2 by Dutch manufacturer Miniot. It works like Apple’s own Smart Cover, as it uses magnets that attach to the tablet, and the cover can be rolled up to function as a stand.
The Schagen, Noord Holland based company sells them or 50 euro or more. There’s a video that shows you how it works.
(Link: 9 to 5 mac. Photo: Miniot.)
Tags: Apple, iPad, Noord Holland, wood
April 3, 2011
At least that is the conceit that some of the YouTube commenters and Autoblog are taking a stab at:
Welcome to the Netherlands, where the houses are all perfect – almost to a Truman Show level of creepiness – and everyone, without exception, drives a Ferrari. Most people seem to own at least two. At least, that’s what the Netherlands looks like when a Ferrari club rents a bunch of vacation bungalows for a group gathering.
The video was published in 2009.
(Source video: YouTube user Hans308GT4)
Tags: Ferrari, vacationing
April 2, 2011
This football table by GRO, a collective of British designers in Eindhoven, takes 12 weeks to build and 48,500 euro to purchase. It’s called 11 The Game (or just ’11’), and you can see it in action at Vimeo.
(Photos: 11thegame.com. Link: Engadget.)
Tags: GRO, table football
April 1, 2011
Schoolchildren from the John F. Kennedy school in Arnhem have been chosen to sing the children’s chorus in Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit ‘Another Brick in the Wall Part 2’ live and on stage with Roger Waters on Friday 8 April at a sold out GelreDome, Arnhem.
Waters has been taking on schoolchildren to sing this chorus from around the world ever since the tour started in Toronto, Canada. Next week the kids finally get to meet the rock legend they had never heard of before they started practising. Their teacher says in the video they practice almost every school day. After all they have to dance a bit, and the song is in English.
I was exactly their age when the song was a hit on the radio, and I totally didn’t understand the complexity of Pink Floyd’s famous concept album until I saw the movie in 1984. At the time, it was the first movie made to fit an album, as opposed to a soundtrack being made to fit a movie. Being Canadian I also had no working understanding of the British school system with uniforms and headmasters or why the rock star (Bob Geldof) was so zonked and didn’t move. You could say it was part of my education.
(Link: gelderlander.nl)
Tags: Arnhem, Pink Floyd, Roger Waters
March 31, 2011
The Dick Bruna House in Utrecht is celebrating its fifth anniversary on 1 April, offering free admission from 1 April to 3 April, as it is also National Museum Week. Dick Burna is the creator of Miffy (‘Nijntje’), one of the Netherlands’ biggest export products.
For the occasion Miffy will be dressed by top designers from the Netherlands and abroad, including Saskia van Drimmelen, Claes Iversen, Jan Taminiau, Britian’s Boudicca and Japan’s Minä Perhonen. The dress will be fitted on a 40 cm statue of Miffy and can be admired as of 1 April in the Dick Bruna House.
(Link: depers.nl, image: nijntje.nl)
Tags: Dick Bruna, Miffy, Nijntje, Utrecht
March 30, 2011
Photographer Hans van der Meer wanted to express how football players feigning injuries all look alike:
The look of grown men on the football pitch often takes the form of little theatre pieces, lying down ‘injured’ being a remarkable sub-category of this art. […] The way we ‘died’ as children playing Cowboys and Indians is how we now see our heroes in the Champions League go down on TV. […] When somebody has actually been injured they usually keep pretty still.
To that effect Van der Meer took photographs of football players acting injured, and these photos now adorn the pitch of ASV Arsenal in Amsterdam, near the old Olympic Stadium. They are part of an art project for the club called Terreinwinst, involving 11 artists and which is still in the process of being finished.
I am a great admirer of Van der Meers earlier series of European and Dutch football pitches, in which the football field was shown in its sometimes adverse surroundings. The strength of his new work, Ten Ways to Lie Down Injured, is that it paves the way for amateur photographers to add context themselves. My tip: bring a telephoto lens, as the photos are all mounted across the field.
(Submitted by Nienke van Beers)
Tags: acting, Amsterdam, football, football players, Hans van der Meer
March 29, 2011
Yesterday, scuba diving club De Waterman in Oss, Brabant got 173 divers together to break the World Record Underwater Ironing. The former world record was held by a Polish scuba diving club with 130 divers. De Waterman said they worked really hard, right up to the last minute to find enough divers and enough ironing gear.
De Waterman can now proudly be included in the Guinness Book of Records just in time for the club’s 40th anniversary.
(Link: depers.nl, Photo Photo of Underwater ironing by BlueBeyond, some rights reserved)
Tags: Brabant, Guinness Book of Records, ironing, Oss, scuba diving
March 28, 2011
It took a trip to the Dutch supreme court, but reality show contestant Natasia Blank finally got the unemployment benefits she wanted, Elsevier reports.
Last Friday the judges confirmed the verdict of a lower court. The court felt that since Blank was paid to appear on the show, and she paid unemployment insurance, what she did—even if it was just loafing about all day—counted as real work.
Blank participated in a show called De Gouden Kooi (The Golden Cage) in 2006. Her appearance was heavily criticized at the time, even leading to questions in parliament, because she had left two young children in order to participate.
(Illustration: Photo by Wikimedia user Producer, some rights reserved. Press release Supreme Court.)
Tags: Big Brother, unemployment, unemployment benefits, working
March 27, 2011
April 1 marks the tenth anniversary of gay marriage in the Netherlands. In that period some 15,000 same-sex couples got hitched here, making 1 in 5 same-sex couples married. Four in five heterosexual couples are married, AD reports.
Jan Latten of Statistics Netherlands told the paper that gays marry for the same reasons as straights—love, children and security—, that the relative number of divorces between the groups are virtually the same, and that both groups have the same preferences for wedding months: “spring and summer”.
See also:
(Photo by CarbonNYC, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
Tags: gay marriage, marriage, statistics, traits
March 25, 2011
“The way Americans follow Holland in the news, that’s how Europeans follow the Middle East.”
Just before that, he mentions that us peeps in the Netherlands are all stoned and visit whores because that’s what the media shows you. We laugh at that, but that’s his point: so many people think it’s reality.
Joris Luyendijk: ‘The old model of journalism is broken’
How can journalism meet the challenges of the Internet age? Former reporter Joris Luyendijk is looking for new ways to tell stories.Watch a 5 min interview with Joris Luyendijk from The Guardian. (warning, it starts up automatically)
My dream would be if he’d explain to Dutch journalists to stop using terms like ‘black and white schools’, where white equals Dutch and black equals anything not white, which is totally inaccurate and painful to write about. Can we also do away with ‘ambitious women’, implying we’re not by definition and lose ‘good fathers’ (ouch to my friends with children) and even ‘luxury sandwiches’? The more you stick an adjective in front of a word, the less the noun has meaning on its own. Sometimes it makes it better, but not in the press, as Luyendijk explains.
(Tip: Thanks Sueli!)
Tags: Joris Luyendijk, journalism
