March 18, 2009
The two fat guys in the picture are both me at a client’s where the photographer,
Michele Boccamazzo, is working as a Web 2.0 guru. He has started a Flickr pool where all can play, so please don’t let me hold the world hostage for One Million Dollars all by myself!. [Insert obligatory “Muhahaha!” here.]
Tags: Internet
My very talented friend Frances, part of the organisation of the Concours de la Chanson de l’Alliance Française (French Song Contest of the Alliance Française) here in the Netherlands was at the hairdresser’s this week and grabbed a tabloid while she was waiting.
Claude Francis, a Belgian singer who apparently sings international musical numbers in French, claims that he’ll win the above-mentioned song contest because he’s better than all the silly Dutch folk who know squat about French music. It may not read this way word for word in Dutch, but the repeated phone calls Frances received from this man pleading to be entered into the contest in order to win it kinda point that way.
What’s the big deal? It’s a Dutch contest and so you have to live in the Netherlands to enter it. He claims to have a girlfriend in a Dutch town and so he’s often in Netherlands, and he thinks that’s good enough.
Already claming to win a contest you can’t enter is just stupid — unless he was misquoted. Time to get a manager who can communicate, methinks.
(Photo: Privé, 11 March 2009)
Tags: Alliance Française, French, Netherlands, song contest
March 17, 2009
Way back in August and December 2007, we posted about a Tilburg pastor who rang his church bells way too early and who got fined for doing so.
And since I love a good trinity, the city council has now ruled that the bells can only be rung after 7:30 am.
Priest Harm Schilder claimed the right to call the faithful to prayer as part of religious freedom. OK, but city council thinks the neighbours have a right to be woken up with their own alarm clocks at a time of their choice.
(Link: dutchnews.nl, Photo: bells, Valkenburg, Limburg)
I caught a glimpse of Dutch speed skater Sven Kramer on telly who the orange-clad audience in the stands were basically waiting for to win as expected at the World Speed Skating Championships in Vancouver, Canada last weekend. I was happy to hear that they spoke French at the event (it’s not the plague anymore), so I kept watching.
There were adverts from Dutch utility Essent that read ‘Svencouver’. If you read it in Dutch, the ‘Sven’ rhymes with ‘Van’ and it’s very cute. Essent wants to get customers to sign up with Essent under the name ‘Svencouver’ so they can get a discount depending on how many gold medals Kramer wins, which apparently is just a question of time. Problem is, they’re not an official Olympic sponsor.
In true Dutch uncle style, the Dutch Olympic committee asked Essent to lose their excellent slogan because it sounds too much like Vancouver. And that’s apparently not good because Vancouver is supposed to be synonymous with the Olympics, the five coloured rings and all, but not Essent or our man Sven.
Luckily for Essent, they also had a back up — ‘Svenergy’. In fact, Essent has no legal obligation to stop using ‘Svencouver’, but are literally being sports about it.
What bugs me is the Dutch Olympic Committee publically reprimanding a good sponsor in times of crisis.
(Link: sportwereld.nl)
Tags: Essent, skating, Sven Kramer, Vancouver
March 16, 2009
Sculptor Shinkichi Tajiri died a Dutchman in his home town of Baarlo in Limburg last Saturday, reports NOS Journaal (Dutch). The artist of Japanese-American descent who escaped the WWII concentration camps in the US by joining the army, left for Europe in 1948, disgusted that even a decorated hero like him was still considered just a Jap in his own country. However, he never renounced his nationality, feeling that he could only rightfully criticize America as an American. For most of his life he lived in Baarlo, Limburg, where he befriended my parents, and where last year he finally obtained Dutch citizenship.
Tajiri is perhaps best known for his large statues of knots, but one of my earliest memories were paintings and drawings of fantastic contraptions that could either be guns or cameras, preparing me for what nowadays is called steampunk. Sketches for some of these drawings can be found on Tajiri’s website under Drawings 1963 – 1968.
In his later years, Tajiri returned to these violent images, and a few years ago, he built four metal guardians that watch over the bridge between Blerick and Venlo, my birth town. Kunst in de Regio has a well illustrated story (Dutch) about the building of these statues.
To Ogendicht he explained his art (Dutch):
My warriors are attempts to suppress those fears, to cast off demons and to deal with nightmares. Only a small part of the 442 Regimental Combat Team, of which I was a part, survived the war. Many talented young people died on the battlefield, sometimes right next to me. That affected me deeply, along with the shootings, explosions and bayonet fights. For the past 60 years I have tried to provide shape to the psychological scars that all these impressive experiences have left.
Photo of a Tajiri knot by Marja van Bochove, some rights reserved.
March 15, 2009
Fitness First, a global health club chain, fitted a bus stop at the Weena in Rotterdam with scales and a display that shows you your weight. The big question buzzing around the Web is, is this a funny gimmick or an unacceptable shaming device? The campaign was designed by ad agency N=5, and the video report is by NOS Headlines.
Tags: buses, dieting, public transport, Rotterdam, shaming, weight
March 14, 2009
A 56-year-old Dutch woman, Anna B. as she calls herself, was caught smuggling 8 kilos of “very good Dutch weed” into Italy, two years ago. Her lawyer managed to make it so that after a few months she could spend the rest of her 3 year 4 month sentence under house arrest. Friends got her an apartment in what appears to be a very idyllic village in Lombardia, and another stroke of luck made it so that she got two hours a day to go to the supermarket, time she uses to go hiking.
What does one do the rest of the day? Blogging (Dutch), taking pictures, making music, living on the Internet.
The lawyer called to tell me that next Monday, March 5, is the court date where we’ll again try and get me freedom of movement within the province between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.
That’s quite a lot.
I really only wanted to sail a boat to the horizon for once. Or walk until I am tired. Or eat the daily special at the daily special restaurant at the top of the hill. Hmmm, nice.
Anna got her extra bit of freedom last week (Dutch).
Photo of Lake Como by ezioman, some rights reserved.
Tags: blogging, courts, gaol, Italy, marijuana, prison, smuggling
March 13, 2009
Judge J.H. Huijzer has ordered in what must be one of the silliest court findings of recent times that companies whose employees bring iPods to work, must pay copyright collectives for the music.
In practice that means you’re going to pay several times for the music you listen to. Imagine you’re listening to the radio on your Digital Audio Player. First, the radio station had to pay for buying the medium. Then they have to pay for broadcasting the song. If they burn a back-up to CD, they have to pay for that too. If you bought your DAP in Germany you paid a copyright fee on the hard disk, and now when you listen to the radio at work your boss has to cough up some extra cash.
I wonder why people download their music so often instead of buying the CD. Hm…
The court’s very tortuous reasoning goes like this (Dutch):
4.3. The judge finds that the mere fact that employees are allowed to listen to music during working hours, even on an iPod or mobile phone, means that Suplacon [the defendant – Branko] has an interest in its employees listening to music. After all, happy employees work harder. This means that publication of music as defined in article 12 of the Auteurswet has taken place.
(The Dutch copyright law, Auteurswet, distinguishes between publication and copying, both acts forbidden by the law unless you have the author’s permission or unless you cross the palm of copyright collectives with some silver.)
BUMA, the rights organisation that brought the case, says (Dutch): don’t cry, the judge did not mean it like that, and we’re not going to collect money from companies where employees listen to their iPods. If the judge didn’t mean it like that, then why did he say it like that?
I imagine the next Eddy Murphy movie to be called The Nutty Judge, based on true events. Eddy, let your people call my people, I can have this peach of a script ready in no-time. All I ask is that you pay me upfront, and then when the movie is shown in theaters, and then when it is brought out on DVD, and then just because I feel like it, and then when it’s a Monday, and then when I see three pigeons in a day, and so on and on and on and on.
Via Iusmentis (Dutch) and others. Photo: Universal.
Tags: BUMA, copyrights, labour, law
March 12, 2009
The headline may be a little misleading, because when the police stopped Simon de Bruin at an unknown date in Amstelveen and fined him 150 euro, it was for sticking a finger in his own ear. To be even more precise, the police thought he was making a phone call while driving a car which is only allowed if you do it hands-free. When De Bruin protested that he had just showered, that he was merely removing the last bit of water from his ear and that the police could check his phone logs, the officers were unimpressed and uninterested. “Tell it to the judge,” they told De Bruin.
Somehow this bit of news managed to crawl all the way to De Telegraaf (Dutch), where it doesn’t say whether De Bruin will indeed “tell it to the judge.” The only reason we found it is because we run a side-business turning the bones of old news into glue.
March 11, 2009
Tom Claassen made this rubber rhinoceros in 2004 and put it in a sluice in Amsterdam’s newest neighbourhood, IJburg (reclaimed in true Dutch fashion from the water—the neighbourhood that is, not the rhino). Several questions spring to mind, such as “wha?” and “brrr?” and I wish I had thought of it. Amsterdam.nl provides some answers (English), such as “first public art in the neighbourhood” and “visibility depends on the water level.”
Photo: Tom Claassen. Here’s what IJburg looked like in 2004 (Wikipedia). Via Trendbeheer (Dutch).
Tags: IJburg, rhinoceroses
