The Vinkhuijzen Collection of Military Costume Illustration has drawings of uniforms and regimental regalia from all over the world. Assembled by one of these great, eccentric collectors of the late 19th Century, Dr. H. J. Vinkhuijzen, a Dutch medical doctor who started out as an army physician and eventually rose to the position of official court physician to Prince Alexander of Netherlands. He pulled plates out of books, colored in black and white drawings and painted his own watercolor illustrations. His collection includes pictures of the soldiers of
many different nations and eras, from military superpowers like the
Roman Empire,
France and
Great Britain, to lesser known, but no less formidable forces, like
Byzantium and
Persia and even taking in such minnows as
Luxembourg,
Monaco and Montenegro. Due to Vinkhuijzen's unusual classification system it can be hard to find some of the more interesting images, such as pictures of
Etruscan cavalry,
Spanish military musicians and
1830's Belgian ambulance.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 4, 2008 -
11 comments
On a sunny May morning, six plainclothes police officers, two uniformed policemen and a trio of functionaries from the state prosecutor's office closed in on a small apartment in Amsterdam. Their quarry: a skinny Dutch cartoonist with a rude sense of humor. Informed that he was suspected of sketching offensive drawings of Muslims and other minorities, the Dutchman surrendered without a struggle.
"
I never expected the Spanish Inquisition," recalls
Gregorius Nekschot, the cartoonist.
posted by plexi
on Jul 24, 2008 -
111 comments
Last weekend's
PICNIC'07 conference in Amsterdam featured a
Green Challenge: to come up with the best marketable green idea that could be developed and sold to consumers within two years. Dutch decentralized renewable energy company
Qurrent took down the big €500,000 prize for the
Qbox: a device which creates optimizing energy algorithms for all devices in a home.
See also:
Green Thing.
posted by chuckdarwin
on Oct 1, 2007 -
10 comments
Horse Rescue in the Netherlands--after a heavy storm in October, 100+ horses were standed on a small island. Here's how they were rescued.
Google video; alternate YouTube link. Warning: Vangelis music.
posted by fandango_matt
on Nov 29, 2006 -
43 comments
Secret agent Huub Lauwers was
parachuted into occupied Holland in 1941 to relay intelligence back to London. His capture by the Germans marked the beginning of the
Englandspiel, a deadly game of cat-and-mouse intelligence that cost the lives of over fifty agents. Lauwers frantically tried to inform the
SOE that he had been caught, but the
Baker Street Irregulars just didn't get it. Or
did they? [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Aug 6, 2006 -
16 comments
One of the great virtues of the internet is the manifold ways in which it has revolutionised the arts. The postmodern works of contemporary artists
Pomme & Kelly (Google Video), when viewed together in context, form a striking example of a well-placed critique of popular culture, and modern living at large. The zeitgeisty meta-irony of their seemingly content-free interpretations of popular songs are only enhanced by the fact that, in a clever keeping with style,
they blog about it as well.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Feb 28, 2006 -
30 comments
THE EVOLUTION OF GLOBAL POLITICS. University of Washington Professor George Modelski is credited with developing the concept of world leadership. There have been five world leaders: Portugal, the Netherlands, Great Britain I, Great Britain II, and currently the USA. Some scholars in political science and history are pointing towards U.S. decline and a takeover by a
United States of Europe...
posted by j-urb
on Dec 12, 2005 -
46 comments
Life without Theo - one year on. It's not that Holland's cherished troublemaker wasn't aware of the possibility - he had been threatened more than once. He just sincerely believed that no-one would harm the "
village idiot", as he liked to call himself
(salon link). Today, the skilled polemicist who regarded it his constitutional right to insult anyone but would at the same time engage anyone in reasonable, friendly debate is
remembered in
various ways.
[more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane
on Nov 2, 2005 -
33 comments
The Dutch-Muslim Culture War
The backlash against Hirsi Ali has astonished and disappointed many Dutch feminists, who continue to count themselves among her biggest fans. Margreet Fogteloo, editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, said flatly that [historian Geert] Mak is crazy. "People like him feel guilty because they were closing their eyes for such a long time to what was going on," she said. In what appears to be a Europe-wide pattern, some feminists are aligning themselves with the anti-immigrant right against their former multiculturalist allies on the left. Joining them in this exodus to the right are gay activists, who blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples. (Via PoliticalTheory.info)
posted by jenleigh
on Jun 15, 2005 -
52 comments
Sinterklaas is coming to town. Christmas comes early for Dutch children. Or rather, Sinterklaas does, having brought his gifts this weekend. While many Anglo-American Christmas traditions owe much to
marketing schemes, the Dutch attachment to mulled wine and spiced biscuits harks back to earlier times. Perhaps too much so: with ongoing racial tensions following the murder of Theo van Gogh, the annual debate over
'zwarte piet', Santa's blackfaced little helper, has been especially heated. (One advantage of artificial traditions is that they tend to avoid such messy questions.) Nevertheless, here's the motherlode of Sinterklaas links, including songs, recipes and background.
posted by holgate
on Dec 5, 2004 -
25 comments
Buying biometrically into big brother? Privium is an IBM-backed pay service at Amsterdam's
Schiphol Airport that allows passengers to identify themselves by iris recognition and thus speed their way through security checks. This being the privacy-respecting Netherlands, the biometric information is not stored in a central database, but only on a card you carry with you; other countries may not be so enlightened. This could well become a standard form of identification. In the meantime, could the failure to buy this service qualify someone as a security or insurance risk?
posted by liam
on Apr 29, 2004 -
6 comments
De Hermitage Amsterdam. In the early 1990s Professor Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of
The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg was considering the possibility of having satellites of the museum in the West. The
Nieuwe Kerk and the Hermitage had already established a strong relationship through the organisation of major exhibitions, and Ernst Veen, director of the Nieuwe Kerk, suggested that Amsterdam would be the
ideal location for a branch of the Russian museum, given the
historical links between the two cities over the past 300 years.
posted by the fire you left me
on Mar 16, 2004 -
3 comments
