July 18, 2011

Uncovering the treasures of a Dutch auction site

Filed under: Art,Design by Branko Collin @ 10:03 am

Julien Rademaker scours the largest online marketplace of the Netherlands, marktplaats.nl, for the rare and the well designed so that you don’t have to.

He puts his finds, dozens per day, up at gevondenopmarktplaats.nl for everyone to see. In an interview with Bright he says he does this because “I want to show people that there is a world beyond Ikea or Leen Bakker. Perhaps people are afraid they’ll buy the wrong thing, or they don’t know where to look. I try to help those people.”


Tokyo Pop lounge chair.


Cor Unum set.

(Illustrations: gevondenopmarktplaats.nl)

Tags:

July 17, 2011

Roller derby scrimmage in Rotterdam

Filed under: Sports by Branko Collin @ 2:45 pm

Derby girls from all over the Netherlands and Belgium came together yesterday in Rotterdam for a scrimmage, an unofficial bout. Our very own Orangemaster was there to block for the white team, and I sat in the suicide seats and took pictures.

For those who do not know anything about the sport, here is a short, illustrated explanation. Two teams of five women race around a track, dressed both to impress and so you can tell them apart (in this case one white and one black team). The only men allowed on the track are the referees who dress in black and white stripes.
(more…)

Tags: , , ,

July 16, 2011

Summer Expo 2011, bringing the Pepsi Challenge to art

Filed under: Art by Branko Collin @ 2:06 pm

The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is hosting Zomer Expo 2011, an exhibition of 250 paintings—portraits, landscapes and still lifes—that were picked anonymously by a jury of art connoisseurs.

Artists, both professionals and amateurs, got to enter their works in three rounds. The works were then anonymised and the jurors subsequently had less than a minute to decide whether a work would be admitted.

Trendbeheer visited the show and was pleasantly surprised—even though Jeroen Bosch’s own works weren’t on display (it doesn’t say whether he had entered). The exhibition will continue until August 21.

If you cannot make it to The Hague in time, there is also an online exhibition (the yellow dots signify a work that’s on display in The Hague). The Summer Expo 2011 was inspired by the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in London and the Canvas Collection in Belgium.

(Image: Be-spiegelingen by Annemieke Alberts, one of the paintings on display at the Gemeentemuseum, source Summer Expo 2011 website)

Tags: ,

July 11, 2011

Two insects die on license plate every 10 kilometres

Filed under: Automobiles,Nature,Weird by Branko Collin @ 11:02 am

An ongoing study by the University of Wageningen has registered 17,000 insects splattered on license plates so far. The researchers made use of 250 volunteer car drivers who counted the number of dead bugs on their plates during 385 trips, De Pers reports today.

Drivers sent in their reports through the website splashteller.nl. Trips that started or ended in the provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Zeeland yielded the most dead insects, whereas Gelderland turned out to have the smallest number of dead bugs.

In total 133 billion insects die on cars every month, though not just on license plates. Train locomotives are pretty much covered in them.

(Link: www.natuurbericht.nl)

Tags: ,

July 9, 2011

Dutch ‘Worst Driver’ contestant crashes into TV host

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 2:19 pm

A contestant of a TV show called ‘De Slechtste Chauffeur van Nederland’ (The Worst Driver of the Netherlands) has proven his inability to drive a car by hitting the programme’s host Ruben Nicolai and an unnamed cameraman with his car.

The show was broadcast last Tuesday. The segment shown in the clip was recorded on 12 April 2011 at Twente Airport. A hospital intern leaked the news of Nicolai’s ‘accident’ via Twitter, and was suspended for a short time, Tubantia reports. Nicolai and his colleague sustained only minor injuries.

The contestant who showed the most progress won a car, but the guy who hit Nicolai got his license cut in half by the host.

The show’s final was partially recorded in Paris, where contestants had to kill or maim as few French people as possible on the public road to win it.

Link: Autoblog. Video: Youtube / BNN.

Tags: , ,

July 4, 2011

Zone 5300, awards and subsidies

Filed under: Comics by Branko Collin @ 11:19 am

On May 1, 2009, the major Dutch state fund for the visual arts, BKVB, did something remarkable. They appointed a champion for comics. This champion, Gert Jan Pos, seemed well chosen, because he took a large bag of shiny golden coins, and has been roaming the land with it since, handing out money to whatever comics artists struck his fancy.

The summer edition of Zone 5300 introduces you to a couple of the recipients, either because they felt like it or because by now Pos has saturated the Dutch comics landscape.

Robert van der Raffe (illustration) received a ‘working budget’ from the fund for a 120 pager he is working on, though he has yet to find a publisher. Zone 5300 publishes a light autobiographical comic about the traumatic experience of being graded in art school, in which Raffe is the good guy and all the others are either losers or bad guys.

Jeroen Funke (illustration) won the Jan Hanlo Media Essay Award 2011, and his award winning story is in this issue. The award was given to the winner of a competition for essays in comics form about sensory perception. Funke has his regular heroes Victor and Vishnu discuss how growing up adds filters to our senses that prevent us from seeing (and feeling, smelling, tasting) what’s really there.

Peter Pontiac (illustration), an underground comics giant from the 1970s who went mainstream-ish with his autobiographical Kraut (about a father who worked for the wrong side during the war), received the Marten Toonder Award 2011 for his entire body of work. In this issue he fills the two pages of The Sketchbook Of, a recurring feature.

Awards? Awards?! Eindhoven Design Academy graduate Tim Enthoven (illustration) apparently needs no stinkin’ awards (yet; although he won one for his debut album Binnenskamers – Indoors – before it had been even published). Zone 5300 calls him the jeune premier of Dutch comics, and says of his work that it is “shifting boundaries”. For Zone he wrote and drew a story about his uncle Jos who has lost the ability to read after a traumatic experience. Since the uncle did not want the nephew to write that story, the nephew has hidden the text in the scenery.

Tags: ,

July 3, 2011

Amsterdam parking rates slashed

Filed under: Automobiles by Branko Collin @ 12:29 pm

Amsterdam is the most expensive city in the world to park in. The city’s policy of driving car owners away from the centre by making their stay too expensive seems to be so successful that now an operator of private car parks has started slashing its rates.

In a bid to lure customers away from the competition P1 Parking has lowered its daily rate from 55 euro to 20 euro. The only snag is that you have to make reservations at least two in days in advance.

Competitor Q-Park and others are studying their options. Bloodthirsty financial news site Z24 is already announcing a price war.

Tags: ,

July 2, 2011

Dutch parodies of famous album covers

Filed under: Music by Branko Collin @ 7:36 pm

As you may have read, after the Rutte government attacked “entarte Kunst” it is now promoting “Blut und Boden” music. Dutchnews reported yesterday that “MPs on Thursday evening voted in favour of a quota for Dutch language music on Radio 2, the public broadcaster which focuses on popular music. The motion, drawn up by Martin Bosma from the anti-Islam PVV, requires programmers to make sure 35% of the music played on Radio 2 between 07.00 and 19.00 hours was produced in the Netherlands.”

The folks at the Amazing Retecool blog have used their regular Photo Fuck Friday to try and imagine what famous record covers would look like if all music had to be in Dutch. Shown here are Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the Netherlands by Ohjajoh and Foreigner’s Double Passport by Gelul.

Meanwhile, Radio 2 have announced that they have no intention of adhering to any quotas, NRC reports. Two weeks ago minister Marja van Bijsterveldt announced that public broadcasters will have to take cuts of up to 127 million euro.

Tags: , , ,

June 29, 2011

Six things you should know about the Dutch cookie law

Filed under: IT by Branko Collin @ 8:12 am

There seems to be a lot of misinformation going around about the fresh Dutch (Internet) cookie law, so Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet set out to dispel the myths in a few excellent articles.

1. First this. The Dutch call their cookie law ‘cookiewet’ instead of ‘koekjeswet’ in spite of the Dutch origins of the English word. (The oo sound is spelled oe in Dutch.)

Says Arnoud (and I paraphrase):

2. Other ways than invasive pop-ups are OK to ask permission to plant cookies. A checkbox on a profile page, a central register, and even browser settings can be used to get and store permission. You are even allowed to use cookies for which you did not ask permission to store the fact that you got permission for other cookies.

(more…)

Tags: , ,

June 26, 2011

Following your competitor’s Twitter followers is now legal

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 3:52 pm

Two weeks ago the court in Amsterdam held that trying to get your competitor’s Twitter followers to follow you is indeed perfectly legal.

Mediavacature.nl (which means ‘mediajob.nl’) had asked the court to stop mediavacatures.nl from abusing their trademark. The court ruled that trying to hijack your competitor’s followers is not illegal per se (PDF, Dutch):

4.10 Twitter

The defendants admit that the Twitter account @mediavacatures is being used to follow customers of the plaintiff on Twitter. Twitter is all about following and being followed. Furthermore all data on Twitter are public. Following the followers of a competitor can therefore not be seen as an illegal act per se. What is more, profiting of somebody else’s product, effort, knowledge or insight is not illegal by itself, even if this harms the other party. This only becomes illegal if a Twitter user (intentionally or otherwise) causes confusion with the general public.

Unsurprisingly the court ended up finding for the plaintiff, but the defendant did not have to turn over their Twitter account, domain name and brand, as they were no longer allowed to keep using them anyway. The defendants call themselves MV Jobs Media now.

At Arnoud Engelfriet’s blog somebody claiming to work for Media Vacature (plaintiff) pointed out that the Twitter claim was just a small part of their set of claims.

(Illustration: Twitter logo. Link: De Pers.)

Tags: , , , ,