During construction along the railroad in Naarden-Bussum, North Holland workers dug up some bombs, which according to ProRail, are most probably from WWII. I can’t imagine from wat other war they could be from, since the Dutch weren’t really involved in WWI. I say this as someone who recommends reading The Art of Staying Neutral: The Netherlands in the First World War, 1914-1918. When the Dutch mention ‘the war’, they always mean WWII.

The bombs will be exploded somewhere safe, as it is done here when they find bombs, which is quite regularly. It’s not sure whether this will delay the works along the railway or not, which are already planned to go on for three weeks.

Here are some of our past stories related to finding bombs and grenades:

Planned bomb detonation interrupts trains to and from Venlo

Live grenade found in old folks’ home

A hand grenade pops up in potatoes

(Link: rtvutrecht.nl, Photo of a 1000-pounder in Bunnik by the Ministry of Defense, some rights reserved)

Rotterdam architectural firm Kraaijvanger has built the new city hall in Venlo, which claims to have the greenest façade in the world measuring two thousand square metres.

A greenhouse above the building purifies the air and can deliver heat to the entire building. The green façade purifies air from the nearby road and railway. According to Kraaijvanger, tests in labs of the Eindhoven University of Technology have proven that the façade filters 30% of nitrogen and carbon dioxide from the air.

As well, the building has applied many sustainable techniques such as using the parking garage to either warm up the air or cool it down, depending on the weather. It also catches and filters rainwater before flowing back into the Maas river and makes optimal use of daylight.

Venlo’s new city hall is entirely energy neutral and has been built following the cradle-to-cradle design concept.

(Link: www.binnenlandsbestuur.nl, Photo: Kraaijvanger)

A work by Dutch artist Jan Schoonhoven stolen from the Museum van Bommel van Dam in Venlo last March was auctioned off by London auction house Sotheby’s in what the Dutch media has called the ‘gaffe of the century’.

Sotheby’s auctioned a white relief made from papier-maché and latex paint for close to 214, 000 euro despite a warning from the Art Loss Register, a London databank of stolen artwork.

And if that isn’t sloppy enough, the Sotheby’s catalogue had the work printed under a false name and the picture of the work was rotated 90 degrees. Two art traders, one British and one Dutch, recognised the stolen work, pointed it out, and only then did Sotheby’s decide to inform the police.

(Link: www.nieuws.nl)

Every year, municipalities hold a ceremony to hand out decorations of the Order of Orange-Nassau. However, this year municipalities won’t receive any personal information about the recipients due to privacy issues, which could lead to embarrassing situations, according to the city of Venlo, Limburg.

What if someone has died? City officials won’t know and still have to send a letter to find out the hard way. What if a person has moved? Officials won’t know either and the recipients won’t get their decoration. The mayor of Venlo, Antoin Scholten, has a point.

(Link: www.limburger.nl)

Frans Pollux from Venlo translated 12 Bruce Springsteen songs to the Venloish dialect.

Are the Boss’ songs uniquely tied to New Jersey or can they also be about the roads of Blerick in Limburg (just across The River, the Meuse that is, from Venlo)? The 12 track CD Pollux Duit Springsteen tries to answer the question, or at least to entertain you. The title means Pollux Does Springsteen.

Mefite Martin Wisse thinks: “Perhaps surprisingly, it works.”

The CD cover was designed by Fred Honig, also from Venlo.

Limburgs Museum in Venlo has an exhibit of Roman Empire household goods with a twist. All the items on display are replicas, and are for sale as part of an exhibit that tries to mimic IKEA down to the smallest detail, including the familiar blue floor map in Latin.

Gadling.com writes:

There’s the blue and yellow logo, the shop-by-room concept, and a cheap Roman meatball lunch in the café. Best of all are the exhibit’s housewares, all of them labelled with Latin names and all available for purchase. You can pick up a “Romulus” toy wooden sword, a “Secundus” wine goblet, or a bust of Emperor Hadrian. Furniture available for online ordering include lounges, tables, and storage cabinets modelled after items found in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum.

The furniture was built by Drias in Tilburg based on charred remains found in Pompeji and Herculaneum, on frescos from those same cities, and on an illustrated coffin from Simpelveld (Limburg).

The exhibit/store runs until 6 January, 2012. The web shop is in Dutch, but also delivers abroad.

(Photo: Limburgs Museum)

Slow news day, so I thought I’d try something different. Here is a list of (short form) given names from my city of birth, Venlo, and their translations into Dutch, English, German and French, where possible.

Pronunciations between parentheses. I used the SAMPA alphabet for readability. Like IPA it’s a phonetic alphabet, but unlike IPA it only uses Latin symbols). I used the SAMPA English phonetic alphabet though, so the pronunciations listed here are the closest approximations—in my humble opinion. But note, for instance, that ‘a’ (as in Jan) and ‘aa’ (as in Sjaak) have completely different pronounciations in Dutch. (In Dutch long vowels are typically spelled with a double letter, and short vowels with a single letter. Exceptions abound.)

Other Limburgish dialects may use the same names as Venloish, or have wildly differing variants. The Dutch word for the short form of a given name is roepnaam by the way. I have no idea of its etymology, and it could mean either ‘handy version of a name for shouting’ or ‘name one is known by’.

Any additions and corrections are welcome.

*) Recent or regional.
**) If this were Dutch it woud mean “shush, crazy”.
***) From Italian Antonio.

Last Thursday a cartoon depicting an altar boy raped with a crucifix was stolen from the Limburgs Museum in Venlo, Limburg.

According to Nieuwsblad, the thief took the drawing and just walked out.

The cartoon was made by Peter van Straaten for Vrij Nederland magazine, and netted the artist the Inkspotprijs 2010 award for best political cartoon of that year. It was part of an exhibition on cartoons, and was to be shown in Utrecht in October.

Meanwhile Toby Sterling reports that a priest of the Roman Catholic Salesian order was discovered to have been a board member of the Martijn Foundation, which tries to promote child abuse [1]. The priest’s membership was known to his superiors, who did not think it a big deal. Predictably the Catholic Church claimed “the church utterly rejects pedophilia”. “Dutch Catholic Church spokesman Pieter Kohnen said Saturday that […] if Superior Claes did not act quickly to reform the Dutch Salesian order’s leadership, the matter would be referred to Rome.”

[1] I’d link to the Association’s website, but it portrays children in a sexualized context, which might get readers in trouble.

(Illustration: Vrij Nederland / Peter van Straaten)

I grew up in Blerick, a town with a town hall but without the political body to inhabit it. See, in 1940 the town was added to the neighbouring city of Venlo by the Nazi occupier, which made the possession of a town hall moot.

Interestingly the previous municipality that Blerick belonged to, Maasbree, once had three different town halls, and the council would rotate among them until in 1904 the Blerick town hall was made the permanent one.

In celebration of Liberation day, daily De Pers summed up 6 of the changes the Nazis made that stuck:

1. Child support (the Nazis wanted the Arian race to flourish)
2. Corporate tax (funnily enough, these days our low corporate taxes make us a tax haven, according to the Berserker of Abbottabad)
3. Central European Time (before that, we had our own sliver of a time zone)
4. The Frisian islands of Vlieland and Terschelling (formerly of Noord Holland)
5. Rent control and renter protection (including the right to live in a house forever)
6. Job protection (including the right to keep a job forever)

In a number of these cases the occupier made into law what was already on the books. In other cases the law was kept because it made sense. For instance, with housing shortages being rather prominent after the war, it made eminent sense to protect renters from price gouging. In such cases the Germans had unwittingly produced both the diseases and the cures.

(Photo of the Blerick town hall by Wikimedia user Torval, some rights reserved)

The VVV Venlo football club in Limburg has signed a symbolic professional contract of 10 years for this wee boy of 1.5 years who has a good shot. Sure, it’s a YouTube thing, but 900,000 people if not more around the world have seen this video and now you can too. The little boy, Baerke, even tried out on the field with a VVV Venlo midfielder and apparently the toddler’s grandfather used to play with this team way back.

(Link: telegraaf)