February 9, 2011
On Monday I saw this bicycle sticking out of a wall in the Westerpark neighbourhood of Amsterdam to indicate that the shop below sells and repairs bikes. Later that day I saw that another entrepreneur in De Pijp neighbourhood had come up with more or less the same idea, except in this case to confusingly signal the presence of a hotel.
Granted, it was a bicycle hotel.
Tags: Amsterdam, commerce, hotels, Pijp, shop signs, signs, Westerpark
De Telegraaf reports that universities in Flemish-speaking Belgium fear an influx of Dutch students once tuition fees in the Netherlands go up for ‘lazy students’.
State secretary for Education Halbe Zijlstra wants to crank up tuition for these students to about 5,000 euro, while studying in Flanders costs a mere 557 euro a year and is of comparable, if not sometimes better quality.
“Dutch students in Flanders already have a bad reputation: at the University of Antwerp Dutch students are twice as likely as Belgians to drop out and the failure rate at the University of Ghent is also very high.”
Under European law, universities are not allowed to discriminate against students from other Member States, and Flemish Minister of Education Peter Smit is keeping his eye on the border crossing. Sounds a bit much? It apparently happened to French-speaking Belgium (aka Wallonia) with an ‘invasion’ of French students some time ago.
And then using the word ‘lazy’ is something Zijlstra himself uses on telly as of late. He feels that someone who takes 7 years to complete a university degree has issues. Then again, stories like having sick parents, having been in an accident and ‘I chose the wrong study programme’ are often heard as responses.
(I took 5 years to finish my 3-year Bachelor’s in Québec because I did two years part-time (had to work part-time to pay for it) and had to do one year over when I switched universities because an entire year was refused by my new university. Laziness was not an issue! Oh and I graduated cum laude.)
February 8, 2011
From the small village of Heiligerlee, Groningen comes a young man, Jan Boelo Drenth, 22, who is in the process of hitting the Dutch fashion world by storm, straight out of school.
Just being good is not enough, you need connections. Jan Boelo had met Dutch icon Edgar Vos (who died a month ago), got inspired by his passion and left to study Fashion Design at the Utrecht School of Art. Already in secondary school he won an annual art competition organised for a few schools schools in the area with a dress he had designed. The rest is history in the making.
Jan Boelo started his own label in 2010 and has been dressing Dutch celebs such as Victoria Koblenko, Carice van Houten and Ellen ten Damme. His style mixes rock and gothic elements with sexy and original modern elements. All I really know is that we want to be able to say ‘I told you so’ when he’s hugely popular.
(Link: rtvnoord, Photo: janboelo.com)
February 7, 2011
Diederik Willemsen has put up a page outlining how to get rid of being labelled a church member. Apparently, it’s not as easy as one would think. You need to convince the following organisations to stop counting you as a church member:
Willemsen believes it’s important that the number of registered members reflects the actual number of members, because churches apparently enjoy certain benefits for having many members.
Recently, 23,000 people have cancelled their membership to the Roman Catholic church in protest of its child abuse practices, NOS Headlines reports. Statistics Netherlands shows that in recent years the number of people that call themselves religious is in decline. This appears to be a function of age—the older age groups are more religious, and as their members die the percentage of religious people decreases.
(Photo by Johan Wieland, some rights reserved)
Tags: statistics
February 6, 2011
This is what you get if you dangle a camera off a kite over something like a vineyard or a tree nursery. Says BLDG|BLOG:
Dutch photographer Gerco de Ruijter recently got in touch with an extraordinary series of aerial photographs called Baumschule—some of which, he explains, were taken using a camera mounted on a fishing rod.
The series features “32 photographs of tree nurseries and grid forests in the Netherlands.”
De Ruijter first tried to find geometric patterns in natural landscapes, but later switched to “the hyper-artificial landscapes of tree farms and nurseries in the Netherlands”.
De Ruijter’s work is currently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
Photo: BLDG|BLOG/Gerco de Ruijter.
Tags: landscapes, tree nurseries, trees
February 5, 2011
Tombstones will remain the property of those who bought them in the first place, Minister of the Interior Piet Hein Donner announced last Monday. Until now, cemeteries would assume ownership once the stone was placed on the grave.
Cemeteries, Uitvaart.nl reports, now have to contact the survivors once the grave rights run out. Survivors can then opt to collect the tombstone.
Grave rights in the Netherlands typically last 10 or 20 years. The new regulation enters in force on 1 March, having already been in force since 1 January 2010 for new graves.
Tags: cemeteries, graves, tombstones
February 4, 2011
In 2012, the town of Krommenie, North of Amsterdam, will have cool bike paths made up of solar panels. And there’ll be roads with solar panels as well.
Developed by the Province of North Holland, the Ooms Avenhorn Group and Imtech, the solar bike path will be constructed with a concrete base, topped with a 1 cm thick layer of crystalline silicon solar cells. The solar cells will then be protected by a thick, heavy-duty glass surface strong enough to drive a truck over it. The SolaRoad is estimated to generate 50 kw hours of electricity per square meter per year which will be used to power street lights, traffic systems, and perhaps even households along the SolaRoad system.
(Links and photo (thanks Jay!): metaefficient.com, tno)
Tags: Krommenie, solar panels
February 3, 2011
Ah yes, trying to stop smoking. I’ve heard that’s really tough.
And now there’s trying to stop smoking 2.0 using a Facebook app, created for the Dutch anti-smoking council, called ‘Blackmail yourself’. And before you go ‘pfff’, think of all adverts in your country making people feel guilty by showing blackened lungs and yellow teeth, or teenagers trying to act cool and all those ads that never ever worked.
I have a problem with the video’s narration, telling you to pick a controller (friend) and “giving him permission to post your picture if he ever spots you with a cigarette again.” I don’t understand why such a presumably important message is in English (speaking of trying to be cool) and assumes everyone is a ‘he’, as women smoke too and probably also want to quit.
I dare to suggest that there is no such thing as an anti-smoking campaign that works. In recent years banning smoking in public places and in bars and cafés in the Netherlands seemed to be the only thing that has had some effect.
(Link: amsterdamadblog)
February 2, 2011
Brench? Banch? Be your inner Mowgli without falling out of a tree.
Or as creator Floris Wubben writes, all business like:
This bench is made of polypropylene, wood and lacquered metal. The wavy polypropylene is attached to the wooden branch with metal rods. As a consequence, the shape of the polypropylene is given by the shape of the branch.
There’s also a video explaining how to sit on it. It’s not clear whether his designs are actually being produced.
Link: Floris Wubben, no. 3 bench. Photo: Floris Wubben. Via a BoingBoing story about Wubben’s willow stool.
Tags: benches, Den Bosch, Floris Wubben, furniture
February 1, 2011
The past years these depictions of angry gnomes have been popping up all over Utrecht, and now people are comparing the artist’s work to that of the Keith Haring.
The artist goes by the name KBTR, ‘kabouter’ with the vowels taken out. Kabouters are a type of gnome typical for the Netherlands which look like garden gnomes or like original depictions of leprechauns, i.e. fellows with pointy hats and long flowing beards but not to be confused with “hipsters” or “freds”.
As the video shows, one guy managed to get two private kabouters by leaving a couple of crates of beer and a mention of when he would be away on holiday at a local bike shop. More of KBTR’s work can be seen at streetfiles.org. To me, the kabouters of KBTR have a distinct likeness to Belgium’s angry cartoon gnome Kabouter Wesley.
(Photo by Aarnoot, some rights reserved)
