Pedestrian zone/FuZo Fürth

Before we worried about the Neue Mitte in Fürth (project to create gigantic shopping centre closing in a whole road as putative salvation of local shops), there was the new pedestrian zone.

There was a design, with partly curved stones I believe, and an invitation to tender produced no tenders!

After that the design was simplified.

Then the firm employed ordered stones from China, which did not come.

When the stones did come, there were big gaps between them such as to fell wearers of high heels.

The stones also cracked a bit, suggesting the harvest festival procession may have to change its route.

Horrible bronze street furniture was introduced, and the nice green ticket machine was carefully bronzed.

Shortly afterwards, the bronze rubbish bins were peed on by dogs, I presume, and began to go green.

They disappeared. So did the bronzed bum-freezing little seats designed to prevent large gatherings of non-natives. One or two are still there, but the one outside this building was replaced by a hole in the ground, carefully filled in with stones slightly different to the rest.

Today, in the sleet and snow, scaffolding was put up and a horrible bronzed pole with oval cross section rose. It appears that two such poles are to bear a light. This was the beginning:

After that, attempts to put the light on and erect the second pole seemed to fail. There was a lot of phoning and smoking. Eventually, the solitary pole was covered with a plastic bag:

The other pole was stowed away, and after some deliberation, and even a chat with the police, the crew departed, to warm up indoors if they’re lucky.

One can only hope the worst.

7 thoughts on “Pedestrian zone/FuZo Fürth

  1. Your spam filter should let you exclude domains.

    “Jennz56”, whcih appears to be the principal offending puppet, turns up on automatic location-finders as German-based and is itself the target of spam.

    • Ah, thanks re the puppet.
      I have actually tried to exclude @smr.edu.pl, but it hasn’t worked yet. It says I have to exclude @ with a backslash, but I obviously haven’t got it right. I excluded a couple of linked websites, but since they vary, it doesn’t help much.

    • Forgot to say it worked eventually. I had thought it only blocked complete domain names, but I must have entered something wrong myself.

  2. Comment spam is a real problem. Of the three blogs I keep (two somewhat neglected at the moment, in part due to the frustrations of dealing with huge volumes of spam comments and bogus registrations), two are based on WordPress and have constant issues despite filter plug-ins. That’s one reason I’ve left my translation blog on Google’s Blogger platform – less maintenance effort despite an appalling lack of flexibility.

  3. If you are using WordPress, there is a plugin called WP-Captcha Free. After I installed it, I stopped received spam. I guess sth similar can be found for any web blog platform. ;)

    [url=http://www.mantas-translations.com/]???????????[/url]

    • Thanks, yes, I use Serendipity and had already fed the plugin – not Captcha, but simply blocking the address. It works now, so I must have missed out a semicolon or something. Captcha doesn’t block humans, unfortunately!

      • Also using S9Y and also suffering from the same bastards from smr.edu.pl. Didn’t realized that there is the possibility to block certain domains. Thank you very much for the tip.

        I’ve entered ‘@smr.edu.pl’ in the e-mail comment wordfilter. Hope that this is correct.

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