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
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 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)
January 31, 2011
The Court of Appeal in Den Bosch has recently ruled that the public prosecutor must start a case against broadcaster BNN reporters Sophie Hilbrand and Filemon Wesselink for spying on TV presenter Albert Verlinde and his husband, Onno Hoes.
Ironically, Albert Verlinde is one of the presenters of TV gossip programme RTL Boulevard, and Onno Hoes is the Mayor of Maastricht—between them they must have committed more privacy violations than all the hidden cameras in girls’ locker rooms the world over combined.
Volkskrant reports that reporters Sophie Hilbrand and Philemon Wesselink installed audio recording equipment in an award they presented to Verlinde, the ‘Golden Ear”, with which they successfully recorded a discussion Verlinde and Hoes had in the car on their way home. The public prosecutor had already fined the reporters, so that they now get punished for the same offence twice. For the record, double jeopardy—or ne bis in idem as it is called here—is illegal in the Netherlands.
(Photo of Albert Verlinde by Thomas van de Weerd, some rights reserved)
January 30, 2011
Trouw reports that the SRR220A RFID card reader is sold out in at least one webshop after word got out that hacking the Dutch transport card is both cheap and easy. The card reader will let you top up the card without paying.
Volkskrant adds that another online store, i-Pos, has sold hundreds. “It’s a mad house here, the orders are coming in day and night,” General Manager Dirk van der Heijden told the paper.
Meanwhile, Trans Link Systems (TLS), the besieged company behind the ill-fated Dutch transport card, refuses to warn users who forgot to swipe the card on check-out, Webwereld reports. The result is that many travellers are ‘fined’ 4, 10 or 20 euro every time they forget to check out—the amount depends on the deposit the transport company charges when you check in.
Dutch parliament told TLS that it has to send forgetful passengers an e-mail upon detecting the error. According to TLS, detecting the problem is a “technological impossibility”. Webwereld readers were quick to point out that just a few days ago TLS was boasting about how easy it is to detect use of a fraudulently topped-up public transport chip card.
Asking for a restitution seems to be an arduous task as well. Only in 1 in 18 passengers go through the trouble.
According to Dutchnews.nl, the province of Zuid-Holland has delayed the abandonment of paper bus tickets (the so-called Strippenkaart) due to the current problems with the transport card.
See also: Right to public transport refunds finite.
Tags: fraud, OV Chipkaart, public transport, RFID
January 29, 2011
Cycling videographer Mark Wagenbuur has released another doozy. His video shows traffic in early 20th century Amsterdam, with — you guessed it — a focus on bicycles.
I can’t help but notice that after a century:
What’s changed: there are no more horse, dog, or man-drawn carts for transport. Compare it to this vid which starts at the exact same spot on the Leidsestraat.
(Video: YouTube / Mark Wagenbuur)
Tags: Amsterdam, dogs, ferries, infrastructure, Mark Wagenbuur, roads
January 28, 2011
The local government of Urk has banned all strippers from the fundamentalist Christian ex-island, RTL Nieuws reports. If a bar breaks the new law, it has to close shop temporarily.
Last year a bar hired a female stripper who went the full monty, which apparently prompted this bout of legislation. Urk is the town with the highest concentration of fishermen in the country. Until 1939 it was an island–Urkers still say ‘on Urk’ instead of ‘in Urk’, according to Wikipedia.
(Photo of American burlesque performer Lola Bel Aire by Michael Albov, some rights reserved)
Tags: bars, fishing, islands, politics, Protestantism, sex industry, Urk
