Filed under: Literature by Branko Collin @ 3:29 pm
On December 22 Centraal Boekhuis, the distributor for most books in the Netherlands opened up its ISBN register, “after consultation with several stakeholders in the book business.” Let me paraphrase that for them: “people started suing us.”
Centraal Boekhuis has a curious monopoly. It distributes books for the publishers to the stores. But since shelf space is expensive, it regularly pretends the backlist doesn’t exists, says Eamelje. A Stichting Auteursdomein sued them for abusing their monopoly position. The foundation lost on the curious grounds that since it’s pioneering a business model in the Netherlands, its situation is so unique that damages are hard to determine. Stichting Auteursdomein is an on-demand publisher for books from established authors where those books have disappeared from the shelves. The goal of the lawsuit was to have Centraal Boekhuis open up their ISBN database, and that’s what happened in the end.
Filed under: General,Health by Branko Collin @ 7:09 pm
Last Tuesday the mayor of Deurne in Noord Brabant was questioned by the city council about his smoking in a public bar. Since July of this year smoking has been banned in bars in the Netherlands. The ban has met with a lot of resistance, and many smokers openly defy the law. As far as I am aware this is the first time that a public official was caught red-handed breaking the anti-smoking law. A salient detail is that mayor Gerard Daandels of Deurne is a member of CDA, the Christian party that is in the vanguard of the Jihad against fun: it was CDA minister Klink that proposed the smoking ban.
Daandels response: “You can hold me responsible for everything in matters of enforcement, but not for this unenforceable measure. […] I went to three bars where people were smoking. If a hundred people are smoking, you no longer give an example by not smoking.”
The Department of Public Health commented: “Even mayors are bound by the law.”
This protest video/Christmas song by Ampzing “Koude Kalkoen en rode wijn” (“Cold turkey and red wine” – nice pun!), a ‘cover’ of “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” is by no means brilliant, but the message definitely hits the mark with the Dutch: enough with all those English Christmas songs already! This could explain why many of my friends sneer at me when I say I’m looking forward to Christmas and the Christmas music. The songs at my place are mostly in French, often translations of the English versions as well as traditional French Canadian fiddle music, so no Wham or Mariah Carey. The Dutch radio is basically only cranking out English hits though, as I step into the shops to buy something. It doesn’t work for me at all.
I feel sorry for anyone who really digs the Christmas spirit, but is annoyed by the Americanised, Anglo-Saxon version of it. Remember one thing though: your fellow countrymen are the ones doing this to you and that’s the really scary part.
Utrecht based ad agency Spranq made a font environmentally friendly by making holes in the glyphs. The result is called Ecofont, and according to an article by NPR, this will save its users up to 15% in ink. The idea is that you set this font, a free download, as the standard font for printing drafts and e-mails and such. Ecofont is based on the liberally licensed Bitstream Vera font.
The players of the SVU Volleyball Club in Amstelveen, a student club part of the VU University Amsterdam, broke the world record for volleyball by playing 60 hours in a row. They broke the old record of 55 hours and 3 minutes, landing them a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The last bit was apparently very tough. “It was barely volleyball. They could barely move anymore,” a spokesperson for the team said. The team started on Saturday 20 December at 8 am with 24 players. Two people had to leave the field: one player was exhausted, while the other one had a knee injury. The players could not be replaced.
Amsterdam’s rhythm & tunes band The Spinshots have just released a new video called “Désirs Mutuels”, a French version of their ballad “Mutual Desires”. I proudly attended the video release party not only to talk to some very cool musicians, but because they had asked me to translate and adapt the French lyrics, a labour of love that took me just three days. Oh and here’s a nice picture of the show they did to launch the video at the recently renovated Winston Kingdom in Amsterdam.
I also got to meet the woman who shot the video. She told me it was all done in one take and took a mere 1.5 hours to shoot. When budget is an issue, creativity is a must. That’s why I like this video. I also heard it was shot in a secret location. I can imagine that someone warning any authority about guys in turbans with equipment could be scary. Hats’ off to the Dutch singer who has a knack for languages and really does the French justice.
And the will to do something in French is part of an odd trend floating around the city whose main Dutch figure, good friend DJ Guuzbourg and his girl-ridden French compilations has something to do with. May this trend continue on in 2009.
Dunglish.nl, one of Orangemaster’s many ventures, posted this brilliant ad for Unox pea soup a while ago. In it, you see some sort of sales manager walk through a company cafeteria while holding a bluetooth-enabled phone conversation in that lingua franca of the Dutch business world, English with sprinklings of Dutch. When it matters though — that is, when he wishes to order pea soup — he switches to all-Dutch.
Tour company Amsterdam Excursies has decided to profit from the financial crisis by organizing themed guided tours of the financial history of Amsterdam. It’s Crisis Tour starts at the Zeedijk, where the first share in the world was traded in 1606, and ends on the Spuistraat at De Keuken van 1870, the oldest and only still extant soup kitchen of the city. Other crises touched upon during the tour are the collapse of Tulip Mania in 1637, and the end of the Dutch Golden Age.
Bauke Knottnerus came up with these colorful, arm-thick threads for creating “interior products,” “knitted or not,” and calls ’em Phat Knits. Cory Doctorow loves this stuff and says it’s “like being miniaturized and set loose on a chunky sweater.”
Knottnerus is one of the 2008 graduates of the Design Academy Eindhoven, a prolific bunch (see here and here and here for instance).
We at 24 oranges always want to know what the youth is up to, and the winner of the best Dutch word for 2008 comes straight out of youth culture to teach us a new verb: swaffelen, conveniently spelled and pronounced the same in English and said to be an English word with Dutch and German roots.
The urban legend origin of the word comes from some boy, who during a school trip to India, “swaffeled” against the Taj Mahal, which is more than just bad etiquette. Basically, he swung his penis so that it touched the holy building and the film of this incident is rumoured to be floating around the Internet. Somehow I don’t need visual confirmation.
The second place winner was “wiien”, a verb about playing the Wii, while third place went to “bankendomino”, (“bank domino”), which refers to banks falling like dominoes as of late.
On December 22 Centraal Boekhuis, the distributor for most books in the Netherlands opened up its ISBN register, “after consultation with several stakeholders in the book business.” Let me paraphrase that for them: “people started suing us.” 
Last Tuesday the mayor of Deurne in Noord Brabant was questioned by the city council about his smoking in a public bar. Since July of this year smoking has been banned in bars in the Netherlands. The ban has met with a lot of resistance, and many smokers openly defy the law. As far as I am aware this is the first time that a public official was caught red-handed breaking the anti-smoking law. A salient detail is that mayor Gerard Daandels of Deurne is a member of CDA, the Christian party that is in the vanguard of the Jihad against fun: it was CDA minister Klink that proposed the smoking ban. 
Utrecht based ad agency Spranq made a font environmentally friendly by making holes in the glyphs. The result is called Ecofont, and according to an 
Tour company Amsterdam Excursies has decided to profit from the financial crisis by organizing themed guided tours of the financial history of Amsterdam. It’s 
