TEN Network News, Australia: Playground inspiration at the railway station in Utrecht, The Netherlands. August 11, 2011. http://youtu.be/vZrUuC8j7XY
Dutch genius and ingenuity at its best -making the familiar even more useful and fun! The quickest distance between two points is a slide!
Despite The Netherlands being a small country, size-wise, it's ranked number eight, right behind Sverige (Sweden), in the number of readers coming to my humble blog, and the home of a few readers who fairly regularly send me a head's-up on interesting ideas, news stories, songs and videos.
Blijven die ideeën komen!
Let me take the opportunity to show you some of my favorite recent Dutch treats...
(In case you forgot or weren't reading the blog then, as I've previously mentioned here, The Netherlands is a country that my family has always had a great deal of warm feelings for. We not only knew a few very friendly Dutch emigres in North Miami Beach as I and my sisters were growing up there in the 1970's -esp. me- but one of my two younger sisters studied in Rotterdam at Erasmus University for a semester her junior year at IU -January of 1985- and absolutely LOVED IT.
So much so that four short years later, she had her honeymoon in Amsterdam and the rest of the country after getting married in New Amsterdam -New York!- which is when I first became aware of and a regular subscriber to the salmon-colored New York Observer.)
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KLM Royal Dutch Airlines video: KLM Personal Space Experiment
See also: Tribal DDB Amsterdam's social media campaign for KLM.
KLM's Tile & Inspire Journeys of Inspiration ad campaign video:
After you select your country from the drop-down menu, make sure that you click the volume control at top right!
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines video: KLM Tile & Inspire: The Making of...
Photo of a KLM Boeing 777-200 wrapped in customer's quotations and tile portraits.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines video: KLM Fly2Miami (KLM inaugurates direct Amsterdam-Miami flights)
Story is at : How A Tweet Turned Into An In Flight Dance Party
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Armin van Buuren feat. Christian Burns - This Light Between Us (Official Music Video)
I first posted this video in my January 10th, 2011 post titled Armin van Buuren feat. Christian Burns - This Light Between Us -Official Music Video; Unplugged version with Christian Burns & Eller van Buuren at
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"Bride Flight" opened in Los Angeles in June, 2011
Directed by Ben Sombogaart
See the official website at: http://www.brideflight.nl/
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This is a pretty amazing article.
The Daily Mail
The land that feminism forgot: They wouldn't dream of working full-time, spend three hours a day drinking coffee and their men pay for everything - have Dutch women found the secret to happiness?
By Liz Jones
Last updated at 11:34 PM on 9th March 2011
Have you wondered what life would be like if feminism had never happened? If we were all housewives? If we were not required to live on our wits and our adrenaline, and were able to take up a hobby? If men were happy to step up to the mark and look after us?
Am I talking about travelling back in time to see what life was like in the Fifties? No, it is much simpler than that. I am catching a flight to Amsterdam.
Read the rest of the post at
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TV4.se Nyheterna video: Kommuner raggar arbetskraft i Holland.
Sverige behöver invandrad arbetskraft. I dag finns det tusentals kvalificerade och arbetslösa invandrare i Sverige. Samtidigt raggar kommunerna arbetskraft utomlands. TV4Nyheternas Lena Sundström har besökt Emigrantmässan i Utrecht.
TV4 Nyheterna reporter Lena Sundström visits an Emigration Fair held in Utrecht, The Netherlands in February that sought to motivate smart and educated Dutch workers to consider emigrating to Sweden, with various parts of the convention space dedicated to different aspects of life in the country, with about 100 cities and towns represented. This fair is very successful as over 700,000 Dutch citizens a year seriously consider emigrating overseas and over 120,000 actually do it.
It's not said in the video but one way of looking at this fascination that Sweden holds for some Dutch citizens is that just as kids who grows up in small towns in the U.S. often aims to go to a big city some day to do whatever it is they they aim to do, so it is that for a person who grows-up in a small and congested country like the NL, where land is precious, going to a country with lots of space to breathe sounds appealing.
For someone from NL, the mid-central and northern parts of Sweden -where as I recently wrote, film director David Fincher has recently recorded some scenes in Sollefteå for the new American film version of "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" starring Daniel Craig- can be like visiting another planet.
Space is everywhere, along with hills, mountains and lakes.
And if you're not careful, loneliness.
It's almost disorienting.
February 13, 2011 http://www.nyhetskanalen.se/tv?videoId=1.2015063
Article: http://www.nyheterna.se/1.2014991/2011/02/13/kommuner_soker_arbetskraft_i_holland
Article: http://www.nyheterna.se/1.2014991/2011/02/13/kommuner_soker_arbetskraft_i_holland
Me, I like to think I'm open to new things, but I definitely draw the line at reindeer meat.
That is, unless you can somehow convince me that it tastes just like, yes... chicken.
Or even lamb...
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Bandera, Texas -Cowboy Capital of the World- where my mother's side of the family has lived continuously for over 150 years.
To quote myself, whether in Iceland or the Hill Country of Bandera, Texas, the Faroe Islands or Holland, "girls love horses..."
And if there are a few things we know about our friends in the land of the Oranje, de nederlandse, one is of them is that Cinzia ♥ horses and Johnny Depp and Pirates of the Caribbean.
That is a stone-cold fact you can't deny.
I first discovered Cinzia's earnest YouTube videos a few months ago after seeing it next to one by Eva Skemm, another devout teenage horse lover -from the Faroe Islands- whom I first mentioned in my July 27th post,
There's simply nothing like a great horse...
Cinzia video: Horses and Pirates of the Caribbean
Cinzia's YouTube Channel : http://www.youtube.com/user/cinzialoverhana
Cinzia's website: http://www.dayrahorses.tk/
Cinzia video: Dare to dream -Dayra horses [300+subs]
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Question: If Miami-Dade County or Broward County had a 'Sister County' sort of deal along the lines of the Sister Cities program, with Amsterdam or Rotterdam -cities where my sister her honeymoon and went to school for a semester while going to IU- and they did an exchange of elected officials and employees, what would happen quicker?
The people from South Florida "accidentally" flooding the city, or the Dutch using common sense and some style to make Miami more sane, livable and possibly, sexier?
Slate
HOME / ARCHITECTURE: WHAT WE BUILD.
Can Cities Save the Planet?
Scientists are skeptical. Planners are hopeful. The Dutch are pragmatic.
By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008, at 6:58 AM ET
Winning With Water
According to Timothy Beatley, an urban-planning professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Green Urbanism, the per-capita carbon dioxide emissions of American cities are almost twice as high as those of their European counterparts. Hardly surprising, since European cities are denser and more compact, homes are smaller, and people rely to a far greater extent on mass transit. So if Americans are to significantly reduce their carbon footprint, we will have to do a lot more than switch to reusable shopping bags and recycle our soda cans. But as a recent conference on "urban design after the age of oil" at the University of Pennsylvania (where I teach) demonstrated, there is something of a disconnect between the global-warming problem and the available solutions.
Read the rest of the post at:
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Transit Miami
The Dutch, Beer and Thinking Bike
By Felipe Azenha On May 5, 2011
On Tuesday night I had the pleasure to meet several members of the Dutch delegation that came to Miami for a two-day ThinkBike workshop. The purpose of the ThinkBike workshop was to learn from the expertise of Dutch planners. They came to teach us how we could improve downtown Miami’s bikeability. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the actual workshop, but I was able to make it to the post-seminar cocktail hour. Over a couple of Cold Stellas I spoke with several members from the Dutch delegation, a gentleman from the County Public Works Department, as well as citizens all of whom participated in the seminar. The feedback I recieved was extremely positive.
Read the rest of the post at:
By the way, I spotted someone riding one of the Dutch bikes -with the KLM basket- in May in Hollywood, east of The ArtsPark, that I strongly suspect had been stolen
I didn't know what it was, though, since I hadn't read the story yet.
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Houston Chronicle
Steffy: U.S. and BP slow to accept Dutch expertise
By Loren Steffy
June 8, 2010, 10:13PM
Three days after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico, the Dutch government offered to help.It was willing to provide ships outfitted with oil-skimming booms, and it proposed a plan for building sand barriers to protect sensitive marshlands.The response from the Obama administration and BP, which are coordinating the cleanup: “The embassy got a nice letter from the administration that said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,'” said Geert Visser, consul general for the Netherlands in Houston.Now, almost seven weeks later, as the oil spewing from the battered well spreads across the Gulf and soils pristine beaches and coastline, BP and our government have reconsidered.
Read the rest of the post at:
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Please be sure to read my blog post of almost a year ago, August 18, 2010, titled Fascinating Deutsche Welle TV video of innovative architect Thomas Rau in Amsterdam, and what he's done with the WWF HQ in The Netherlands
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/fascinating-deutsche-welle-tv-video-of.html which accompanied this interesting video.
Rau Architects video: Thomas Rau on Deutsche Welle TV
http://rau.eu/en
RAU Architects YouTube Channel:http://www.youtube.com/user/RAUarchitects
RAU Architects YouTube Channel:http://www.youtube.com/user/RAUarchitects
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Video: Holland's most beautiful soccer goals ever TOP 15 [part 3 of 3] [HD],
Last year before the 2010 World Cup tourney started in South Africa, I predicted that The Netherlands would win, likely beating Spain 4-2 in the final. C'est la vie.
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This was a real gold nugget of useful information.
Information Professional magazine
The Sirens of Pirate Bay
By Martin Bossenbroek
woensdag, 05 augustus 2009
Martin Bossenbroek is directeur Collecties en Dienstverlening van de Koninklijke Bibliotheek
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Newspaper front pages in The Netherlands: http://en.kiosko.net/nl/
Special thanks to Henry Hudson...
