November 26, 2009
Dutch jazz virtuoso Pia Beck has died of a hear attack at her home in Torremolinos, Spain. RIP. She was self-taught, couldn’t read sheet music and just, well, jammed it: boogie-woogie, jazz, rock ’n roll, blues, you name it.
Here she is scatting along and singing in French.
(Link: shownu.nl)
Tags: jazz
I bet Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet gets all kinds of questions and this one I just had to share with you.
A woman asked if she could hire a hacker to find out what her husband does on the Internet. In other words, what he does online at home using their shared computer. Surprise, surprise, she thinks he’s mailing (nice euphemism) another woman and wants some confirmation.
Engelfriet explains that in the Netherlands, installing spyware or hacking someone’s password to read their mail is technically ‘ruining their peaceful enjoyment’, which is illegal and cannot be done directly or indirectly.
However, within a (obviously not very healthy) marriage, a computer is common property, unless otherwise specified in a pre-nuptial agreement (not very popular here). Then it’s not a crime to hack your own system, like it’s not a crime to hire someone to break one of your locks.
Of course, it could be considered an invasion of the husband’s privacy. And then Engelfriet gets cocky: “Even in a marriage people have privacy, although not much at all, if you ask me. After all, you got married to share everything with one another.”
My advice to the woman, putting aside the mess of advice to be given about the obvious trust issues, is why not check his mobile phone? Follow him under another name on Twitter, MSN or Facebook. And get some professional help, collectively or otherwise.
(Link: security.nl)
November 25, 2009
Thanks to a new production process, Koen van Dijke of the University of Wageningen has come up with a way of making mayonnaise using less oil, but with the same taste as full on fat mayonnaise. When you make mayonnaise, you need egg yolks or lemon as an emulsifier to stabilise the mixture. To do this right, you need to use a lot of oil, which makes mayonnaise fattening.
Van Dijke developed a microscale system that adds very little oil to a lot of water, producing a stable emulsion. Then this mix is added to more water, producing a new emulsion that is mostly water, but that retains the same taste.
Tags: mayonnaise
November 24, 2009
The Hoerengracht (literally ‘whore canal’) is the clever name of an exhibition by Americans Ed and Nancy Kienholz currently at the National Gallery in London featuring ‘an artistic re-creation of Amsterdam’s red light district’.
Althought the play on words is excellent, this sentence, however, is rubbish: “The Herengracht, or Gentlemen’s Canal, is home to Amsterdam’s prostitutes, who famously sit in windows to ply their trade.”
The Herengracht has beautiful houses, lawyers, offices, a few nice restaurants, but no whores. The nearest girls are on the Spui, roughly two streets down. So much for fact checking.
Someone on television said this exhibition would come to Amsterdam, and I wonder why anyone would bother looking at some artsy-farty rendering of the real thing when we can go, see and even experience the real thing. I could be missing the point, who knows.
(Link: independent.co.uk, Photo is Red Light District of The Hague)
Tags: Amsterdam, London Gallery, prostitution, Red Light District, whores
Oh dear, students are selling their Ritalin online! Six boxes of pills for 150 euro, saving you a trip to the doctor’s with someone’s annoyingly hyperactive child. No wait, they actually prescribe Ritalin to students so they can concentrate better on their exams. And then there’s this famous American telly programme where a mom with four children took her eldest son’s Ritalin to be able to get the household chores done and be the perfect wife and mother. Scary.
Apparently, the party people get off on the similar effect it has to speed or cocaine. I talked to someone younger recently who tried it and said it did help him concentrate better than too much coffee or drinking litres of water, which would explain why students are into Ritalin. Other friends from way back used to just do cocaine with their teachers at university. It was ‘the only way’ to get so many projects done without sleeping.
Healthcare inspectors aim their crackdown efforts on professional sellers of the drug, not students trying to make some extra cash, which they say is a huge problem. I’m saving my last codeine-laced ibuprofen pill for a worthy headache.
The link (pic) shown here has been removed, but the Internet has a good memory.
(Link: ad.nl)
Tags: Ritalin
November 23, 2009
Picking a wine if you have no idea what you are doing can be a painful process, especially if you have only the bottle’s label to go by. To reduce ‘choice stress’, 94wines.com has taken every last bit of confusing information from the bottle and put a number in its place. If you liked the 51 last time, you know you should buy it again. If you didn’t, you know to leave that number alone the next time.
I am sure true wine connoisseurs will be outraged by the idea of objectifying wine, but hey, it’s the naughties, baby, at least for one more month.
A short online wine test should help to get you underway for the first purchase by determining the basic flavours you want. Young marketing buffs Lucas Tieleman and Sander de Jonge came up with the whole concept.
(Source photo: 94wines.com. Link: De Pers.)
Tags: wine
November 22, 2009
A rotonde is a roundabout in Dutch, so when Tijs van den Boomen and Peter Jonker set out to create a website about roundabouts and the often ugly art that is in their centres, they of course called it rotondologie.nl. (The Flemish say rondpunt.)
Rotondologie.nl has pictures, videos and stories about roundabouts from all over the world, but you can hardly blame them for paying extra attention to the Netherlands. The website is clunky at times—rather than showing you a whole story at once you get little Javascript arrows with which to scroll, even if there is nothing to scroll towards—but if you click the big Collectie button, you get a nice big site map listed by country, province and so on.
Trendbeheer unearthed a quote from the site about a Doesburg roundabout that exemplifies the wrongness of moral rights (a part of copyright):
“I thank God that [the centre piece] is not art,” alderman Fred Jansen told De Gelderlander. “If it had been, we would not have been allowed to touch it for sixty years. Everybody thought it was garbage, citizens, entrepreneurs and visitors.”
(Photo of a roundabout in Venray by Google Streetview, immortalised because this is presumably the location where the Streetview car made an infraction that caused a police car to stop it two blocks further)
Tags: roads, roundabouts, Streetview, traffic
November 21, 2009
I just got back from the Onze Taal (‘Our Language’) congress in Utrecht, where the word ‘twitteren’ was elected Word of the Year 2009.
The word, which simply means ‘to twitter,’ was chosen over Koninginnedagdrama, the deeply racist kopvoddentax, Mexicaanse griep and vuvuzela by 600 of the attendants. Another candidate was mama appelsap, for a misheard lyric. Mama appelsap literally means “mother apple juice,” but is Michael Jackson’s misheard lyric “Mama-se, mama-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa.”
The 27th congress featured talks about language by Princess Laurentien, writer Kristien Hemmerechts, and performances by comedians Paulien Cornelisse and Kees Torn.
Tags: comedians, congresses, language, Twitter
Last week a team of 89 ‘builders’ broke the world record for toppling dominoes in one long chain reaction.
In total, 4.491.863 stones of the 4.8 million that were originally set up, fell over at the WTC Expo in Leeuwarden for this year’s Domino Day. Almost three million Dutch viewers watched the show live on television, which was a record for the annual programme.
Source video: Associated Press. Link: Geo TV, Nieuws.nl.
November 20, 2009
If you can stomach it, have a look at x-rays showing a whole bunch of cutlery eaten by 52-year-old Margaret Daalman, a Dutch woman with an eating disorder called pica (I think it’s pica; oddly no one mentions it), which is an urge to eat non-food items. She ate 78 different items of cutlery and went to the hospital in Rotterdam with stomach pain. Although this happened some 30 years ago, the x-rays were apparently published for the first time this week in a Dutch medical magazine.
One of the most famous entertainers with pica (or just plain bonkers) was Michael Lotito aka Monsieur Mangetout (‘Mr Eat-it All’), a Frenchman who holds the Guinness Book of World Records for eating undigestables.
He apparently had the ability to consume 900 g of metal a day. Since 1966, he had consumed 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, a pair of skis, a computer, and a Cessna light aircraft. He died of natural causes in 2007.
