May 4, 2010
Last month, unknown burglars stole televisions sets from prison cells in Hoorn — twice. The prisoners of Het Keern were on leave, and the second time around the burglars seem to have disabled the alarm.
The justice department suspects an inside job, Telegraaf writes.
Het Keern is a low security prison for inmates who are about to be released.
(Photo by Ken Mayer, some rights reserved)
May 2, 2010
Hr.Ms. Johan de Witt has captured two so-called whalers off the Somali coast last week. Whalers are “pirate motherships,” as Radio Netherlands says they are called, forward operating bases from which other pirate vessels are launched.
By using the troop transporter Johan de Witt, the Dutch navy is mimicking the pirates’ tactics: using a forward operating base from which to launch small vessels, in this case landing craft.
(Note the Obama flash light on the pirate vessel.)
By the way, what do you think of the ‘new’ logo (2000) of the Ministry of Defence (right)? On the one hand I feel it is boldly modern, on the other hand it doesn’t have the don’t-mess-with-us quality that the lions, eagles, swords and shields of yesteryear had. Bold, in other words, but the wrong kind of bold.
(Source photo: Ministry of Defence. In the photo one of the whalers is brought in by a landing craft.)
April 30, 2010
Rail traffic around Amsterdam was halted this afternoon because party-goers were walking on the tracks, presumably because authorities decided to vacate Amsterdam Sloterdijk station for unclear reasons. Today is the Netherlands’ national holiday, Queen’s Day.
More Queen’s Day reporting tomorrow.
Tags: Queen's Day, trains
April 26, 2010
File sharing in the Netherlands shares a strange dichotomy with selling marijuana: acquiring the stuff is completely above board, but distributing it is illegal.
The collecting society for composers and performing artists, Buma/Stemra, has therefore come up with a plan to make uploading music legal, for a small fee paid through Internet providers of course. The society told Telegraaf that research shows users are willing to pay a fee of between 5 and 10 euro a month.
Response to Buma/Stemra’s plans has been varied according to an article by Webwereld. Access providers and representative organisations of consumers and record companies all saw positive sides to the proposal. The only group that has reservations (based on my reading visitor comments at the Webwereld and Telegraaf websites) are listeners themselves.
See also:
Tags: brein, BUMA, file sharing, providers
April 25, 2010
The coin to the left was issued in 1681 by the states of Holland and Friesland, of the Dutch Republic. It was a silver guilder design sporting the lion from the coat of arms of Holland. The coin to the right was issued by the Netherlands in 1973, and was I believe the penultimate design.
The last design had a 1980-ish look with grids and layers. It was replaced in 2002 by the euro.
April 24, 2010
Toni Bienemann from Arnhem is an avid collector of vintage cars, but having acquired about 40 automobiles he decided it was time for a change. And so he bought an old rail bridge in Germany—only to find out that this particular bridge is a symbol of German reunification. The Germans would get very upset, for instance, if he were to strip the thing for scrap metal.
Bienneman told Duitslandweb:
I had expected perhaps a small article in a local news paper, but not this much attention. Spiegel, ORF, Berliner Zeiting, they all called me to ask me why I bought the bridge. So I told them a story which I had made up afterwards. Originally, the bridge just seemed a nice symbol for my company, Dutchi Motors.
The Dömitz rail bridge (1873) used to be one of the longest bridges in Germany. It spanned the river Elbe, and was bombed by the alies in World War II. Afterwards, one side of the bridge became East German territory and was scrapped.
Wendland-net faithfully reproduces some of Bienneman’s spin:
“It would have been a pity if such a symbolic bridge had fallen into the wrongs hands.” This is the fear that drove Toni Bienemann […] to buy the historic construction for 305,000 euro from Deutsche Bahn in an auction.
Bienemann has now proposed the Germans come up with suggestions on how he could use the bridge in such a way that its symbolic value won’t get lost. He doesn’t need to make much profit right away, according to Duitslandweb, but if running the bridge is going to take him too much time, he will sell or lease it. Some of his own suggestions are to turn it into a bicycle bridge and run an ice-cream stand from it.
(Link: Sargasso. Photo by R. Kirchner, some rights reserved.)
April 20, 2010
AT5 reports that seven fans of Amsterdam’s Ajax football club have been arrested for wearing shirts that sported the number 1312 before the match against Heracles last Sunday.
Police officers apparently were insulted by numbers, as they seem to believe the outcome of 1312 is “all cops are bastards.”
Football blog footballculture.nl—presumably fearing that if the police keep up their censoring ways, fans will have to go naked at this rate—came up with a completely innocuous T-shirt (photo) sporting an apple, some kind of citrus fruit, a member of the Ananas family, and a banana (Dutch names: appel, citroen, ananas, banaan).
See also:
Tags: Ajax, censorship, Heracles, police
April 19, 2010
Team Daisy, made up of Elsbeth Geukers and Nicole de Bakker, has won the 2010 Philips Innovation Award with a diagnostic technique that should drastically reduce the amount of operations required to treat strabismus (aka “cross-eyed”) in young children.
One of the problems that apparently plague doctors when trying to measure the angle of ‘crossed’ eyes is that young children do not sit still enough for an accurate measurement. Sprout.nl claims that this can lead to a failure rate of the operations of up to 50%.
The technique developed by the TU Delft students will simply measure from different angles simultaneously.
Earlier this year Geukers and De Bakker proved not only to be successful inventors but also promising businesswomen, when they won first prize (1500 euro) in the Writing a Business Plan course at their university.
(Photo by Flickr user net_efekt, some rights reserved)
Tags: awards, entrepeneurs, eyes, strabismus, TU Delft
April 18, 2010
The Anne Frank House is called Het Achterhuis in Dutch, the apartment in the back, simply because that is what it was. The andereachterhuizen.nl website has collected 30 stories of other hiding places of Jewish refugees in World War II.
For instance, the story of Johan Sanders, who was separated from his parents and sisters. When he once met his sisters on the street, naturally he smiled. The other kids, not knowing the real deal, yelled that “ha ha, Johan van den Berk is in love with Lenie Vissermans.”
“That had a real impact on me.”
The people in these stories were hiding at one of 42 addresses. They received warmth or beatings. They were in the city or the countryside, alone or with others. They were in hiding or were not. They had to pay a lot, or nothing at all. They were treated like equals or as slaves. They were betrayed or not.
(The site is entirely in Dutch. Via Trendbeheer)
Tags: holocaust, websites, World War II
April 17, 2010
A 18-year-old man from The Hague staged a robbery two weeks ago in order to impress his ex-girlfriend with his heroic intervention and win her back that way.
A friend in a white ski mask pulled a knife on the 17-year-old girl on the Grote Markt and demanded her purse, only to see his ‘robbery’ thwarted by the ex-boyfriend who ‘happened’ to be on the scene. After studying security camera footage (the girl reported the attempted robbery to the police), the police concluded the ‘robber’ and the ex-boyfriend were in cahoots.
Both conspirators were arrested.
According to De Volkskrant, the ploy did not have the desired effect.
Tags: balaclavas, crime, criminals, Den Haag
