March 29, 2016

Live grenade found in old folks’ home

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:27 am
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World War II grenades pop up on the beach, at flea markets and even in potatoes here in the Netherlands, but this time a grenade was in fact sitting in an old man’s cupboard with its pin out.

A resident of an old folks’ home in Amsterdam East has had a live grenade for years that everybody thought was a fake. Sadly, the man recently passed and when his belongings were collected, the people that found the grenade among his model boats and books had it checked out by the police.

The staff of the home just assumed it was a fake, but once the police checked it out, they realised it was in a fact a live grenade. The bomb squad came and picked it up and had it detonated. All we know is that it was an English grenade that finally came out of the closet, although thankfully not with a bang.

(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl, Photo of grenade by macspite, some rights reserved)

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March 28, 2016

Ukraine bashing is making a comeback

Filed under: Animals by Orangemaster @ 9:33 pm

Last summer we told you about a new law that allowed Dutch citizens to call for a non-binding referendum, in this case to veto Ukraine’s entry to the European Union. On 6 April, the Dutch will vote on a non-binding referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, a vote and campaign that happens to fall at the same time as the Dutch presidency of the European Union — as if they didn’t have enough on their plate already.

One things the Dutch Party for the Animals doesn’t want on their plate is chicken, so they’re encouraging people to vote ‘no’ in the video below. One of the baddies happens to be one of the world’s biggest producer of broiler chickens for starters. As well, a lot of people throw around the word ‘oligarch’ without knowing what it means, now you can learn more about it and hear how horrible it sounds in Dutch.

“According to Transparency International Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe. Ukraine is ruled by oligarchs. Take Myronivsky Hliboproduct (MHP): it is one of the biggest poultry producers in the world and annually slaughters 332 million chickens.”

Long story short, billionaire Yuriy Kosiuk owns it, puts his money in tax havens in Luxembourg and Cyprus, is friends with President Poroshenko and has his fingers in way too many pies. The Dutch Party for the Animals considers him and the Ukrainian government corrupt, and wouldn’t be totally wrong in saying so. MHP’s motto is “if you want something done well, do it yourself”, and that seems to include bullying the government.

Ukraine has always been the doormat doorway to Russia, stuck between maintaining old Soviet relations and sucking up to the European Union. The people of Ukraine are the real losers of any deal, chickens and all.

Dutch companies have a reputation of trashing Ukraine using gross stereotypes like they did during the Euro 2012, which makes any normal dialogue unproductive.

(Links: dearkitty1.wordpress.com, gianalytics.org, european-times.com, Photo of Ukranian woman by my3colors, some rights reserved)

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March 26, 2016

Creating crunchy patterns on modern ceramics

Filed under: Design by Orangemaster @ 9:07 am

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For anyone like me who usually finds ceramics dull, Dutch designer Floris Wubben of Eindhoven has found a way of making ceramics cool. He created a rotating flame-throwing device that makes exciting textures on his ceramic pieces.

A wet ceramic piece is placed on a rotating central stand, where an adjustable semicircular arm holds a blowtorch. The blowtorch then applies a flame directly to object’s surface, creating all kinds of patterns.

Wubben is able to control the flame, the distance and the speed at which the blowtorch hits a ceramic piece, creating cooler patterns than you’d normally see on ceramics. Wubben has produced bowls, pots and cups with different glazes in collaboration with Cor Unum ceramics studio of Den Bosch, Noord-Brabant.

(Link and photo: www.dezeen.com)

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March 24, 2016

Will the Dutch lose their favourite ice lolly?

Filed under: Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 7:07 pm

According to BN De Stem, food giant Unilever is pulling the plug on the longest running ice lolly in the Netherlands, the Raket (‘Rocket’).

BN De Stem suggests the Rocket is too Dutch for its own good. Unilever was only producing them for the Dutch market. The company, operating under the Ola brand in the Netherlands and Wall’s and Algida elsewhere, wants to streamline its production of ice cream flavours by reducing them from 450 to 90. As one observer said: “How much more streamlined than a rocket can you get?”

RTL Z claims that the story is an April Fools’ joke, citing “sources within Unilever”. Unlike any other April Fools’ joke I’ve seen, this one doesn’t refer to April however. The original source talks about May instead. Elle smells a rat, because why would a brand ditch a product that sells so well? So I decided to find out for myself, picked up the phone and called Unilever: turns out, their press department is conveniently unavailable for comment during the four-day Easter weekend.

Everybody agrees that if this really is an April Fool’s joke, it’s one of the lamest ever.

If Unilever is really abandoning the Rocket, then you’re in luck. Cheap knock-offs are still being made by competing brands as Z24 helpfully pointed out two years ago .

The news that Unilever is going to discontinue its traditional Dutch treat follows recent news that two major ‘bitterball’ manufacturers, Mora and Van Geloven, are now in foreign hands, and news from 2014 that aniseed cubes were discontinued by De Ruijter because the machine that made them could no longer be kept in repair.

See also:

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March 23, 2016

Robot falcon wins Tech Transfer award in Ljubljana

Filed under: Animals,Sustainability,Technology by Branko Collin @ 5:02 pm

geese-don-deboldA mechanic peregrine falcon was named the best innovation of the year at the European Robotics Forum in Ljubljana this week, Tubantia reports.

The winning robot is called Robird and is made by Clear Flight Solutions from Enschede, a spin-off of the University of Twente. It mimics the flight of the peregrine falcon and is used to keep the air space near airports clear from birds such as geese.

In an interview in 2014 with RTV Noord Holland (see below), CEO Nico Nijenhuis said that real falcons will only hunt when hungry. They also tire quickly. “Once [a peregrine falcon] has made two flights in a row, it’s really tired. [Our robot] on the other hand keeps going. You swap out a battery and it’s good to go.”

Clear Flight Solutions received 1.6 million euro in funding from the Cottonwood Technology Fund last week and is in talks with Schiphol Airport for a pilot project [pun unavoidable]. Nijenhuis told RTL Nieuws last week: “Dutch rules are very strict, but we expect to have our paperwork in order within six weeks.”

See also: Scaring off seagulls with drones in Haarlem

(Photo of geese flying by Don DeBold, some rights reserved)

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March 21, 2016

Drones take your order and bring you drinks

Filed under: Food & Drink,Technology by Orangemaster @ 10:20 am

During the Dream and Dare festival on April 22 through 24 at the Eindhoven University of Technology to celebrate their 60th anniversary, they’ll be tech, innovation and debates as well as art, music and food. The food part will have drones acting as waiters, happily combining tech and drinks.

At the drone café, visitors will be able to order drinks from one drone while its drone colleague brings the drinks to you. It sounds way easier than it is to have drones flying indoors instead of outdoors. They need to fly much more accurately, they need to make way less noise and they need to not clip off any fingers when you grab your drinks from their talons. As well, the drones can only handle 300 grams of weight at a time.

Tessie Hartjes, of the student workgroup Blue Jay Eindhoven, says the combination of navigating and grasping is a big deal. She explains that although the drones use speech recognition software (and I’m assuming it only understands Dutch), the café is too noisy for that to work properly so you can order from the bar, old school. The drones also fly a certain route that you cannot walk into for fear of causing an accident. You can also pay to the drone, and tipping them might actually make them tip. I’m kidding.

(Link: www.tue.nl, www.bright.nl, Photo of Drone by Karen Axelrad, some rights reserved)

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March 19, 2016

Denim obsessed brothers make their own jeans

Filed under: Fashion by Orangemaster @ 9:21 pm

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They say the Dutch are really big on denim, with big Dutch names such as G-Star, Denham, Scotch & Soda and Kuyichi competing with the rest of the world on the jeans front. Even American brand Tommy Hilfiger, which also makes jeans, has its international headquarters in Amsterdam.

The Dutch can dress quite informally at work as compared to the rest of Europe, making denim a common occurrence at the office for both men and women. There’s no need for casual Friday over here.

A new small-scale jeans brand from Chèvremont, Limburg called Grivec Bros could very well be a brand to watch out for. Twin brothers Marcel and Roger, 44, are huge denim fans and owners of Jeanpaleis in Kerkrade, Limburg, which they inherited at age 18 from their parents when they got divorced. Even though Amsterdam can claim to be the ‘jeans capital of the world’, the brothers explain that the first jeans were sold to mine workers in their mining area way back when, linking Limburg to the US as far as jeans go.

Grivec Bros jeans are made in Portugal and cost 209 euro, with names like ‘Cool Pete’ (above) and ‘Hower’. They just started selling them in their shop, and they will be available online soon. Marcel says he can’t wait to see someone with his name on their ass. Their motto is “we eat, breathe and shit denim!”

(Links: www.limburger.nl, www.euromonitor.com, Photo: Grivec Bros)

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March 18, 2016

Anne Frank themed escape room in Valkenswaard

Filed under: General,History,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:39 am

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Noord-Brabant, one of the Dutch provinces that unwillingly served as a doormat for invading troops during WWII, now has its very own Anne Frank themed escape room advertised with “Hide before the Germans find you!”.

Located in an old WWII bunker, ‘Het Achterhuis’ (‘the shed’ or ‘back room’ and also the original Dutch title of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’) is the theme of this espace room, and its 19-year-old owner Thijs Verberne swears it has an educational purpose. The Valkenswaard escape room lets you ‘walk in Anne Frank’s shoes’ and fuelled by fear of being sent to the camps you need to find a way to get out of it that I bet doesn’t involve writing in your diary.

On Facebook there’s people totally into it and there’s a lot of disgusted folks as well. The espace room apparently looks like the Anne Frank’s house, the original of which is about 87 kilometres away in Amsterdam, although there are others around the country.

The city of Valkenswaard, which was always planning to do something with the bunker, will make sure the escape room is being run properly, although this sounds like something you would say to the media. The Anne Frank Foundation has not yet made any statements about the escape room.

UPDATE: The Anne Frank Foundation is not amused in the slightest.

(Link:www.ed.nl)

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March 16, 2016

Women in Amsterdam council told what to wear

Filed under: General,Weird by Orangemaster @ 9:52 am

An e-mail written by the team leader of the district council of Nieuw-West in Amsterdam has told women they cannot wear ‘skirts/dresses above the knee’ and ‘knee-high boots’ if they work at the council office counter, where citizens come and get municipal permits and documents. By extension, if this were to be applied, they might have to fear for their jobs. And a happy belated International Women’s Day to you, too.

Assuming the team leader is a man, although their identity is currently being investigated, he has no power to tell women or anyone else what to wear, which clearly goes against the regulations of the city of Amsterdam as a whole. Questions are being asked by local politicians we know personally about these ‘absurd’ rules that target women. The assumption being made is that Nieuw-West, a district with a large Muslim population, is trying to spare them the view of decadent Western women as spring approaches, but nobody asked their opinion. Assumption number three is that the team leader saw a short skirt with knee-high boots that ‘bothered’ him, to use 1920s parlance, and so he decided to attack all women and offend a lot of men in the process.

Why fill in an entire group’s opinion without asking them? Not a single letter of complaint can be found at the offices, either. Sadly, Nieuw-West is the butt of many jokes, despite having a vibrantly diverse community. If it had more bars and wasn’t so far from the city centre, it could be my kind of ‘hood. It’s cheaper that most places, has big green parks, world-class street art, and food markets that makes you feel like you’re not in Amsterdam. But it takes one absurd e-mail to give the Dutch Internet a reason to trash Nieuw-West and attack its Muslim community.

Maybe this team leader needs to take a course on how to deal with his 1950s view on women in the workplace and not try and change the world around him to suit his backwards views.

UPDATE: The team leader was actually a woman who saw a colleague wearing a skirt she found too short, but instead of communicating with her one on one like a normal person, she felt an email that would cause an unnecessary stir was the way to go.

(Link: www.nu.nl, Photo of wilted tulip by Graham Keen, some rights reserved)

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March 15, 2016

Dutch cities do well as drug capitals

Filed under: General,Health by Orangemaster @ 8:55 pm

Testing waste water for drugs has again put Amsterdam at the top of the list of European drug capitals: it scored top marks for MDMA, the main ingredient of XTC, and cannabis. While London nabbed first place for cocaine with 737,3 milligrams per 1000 residents per day, Amsterdam is not far behind with 716,4 milligrams per 1000 residents per day. Amsterdam usually makes this list no matter what’s in the water, and that also seems to go for Utrecht and Eindhoven.

Number two for cannabis is Barcelona with 165,7 milligrams per 1000 residents per day, but apparently it doesn’t even come close to Amsterdam that has 469,4 milligrams per 1000 residents per day. The top 5 in cannabis also includes Utrecht and Eindhoven respectively fourth and fifth, with Antwerp in third place.

Scandinavian cities are still more into speed, but the top city in Europe for speed is Antwerp. In the Netherlands, Amsterdam is the speed capital, while Eindhoven is second in Europe after Antwerp.

(Link: www.binnenlandsbestuur.nl, nos.nl, Photo: DEA)

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