Minor criminal offences/Bagatelldelikte

Can anyone tell me what criminal offence is to be reported to the police here?

These people must have been very angry for a long time. One is almost tempted to give them the Sonntagsblitz (an advertising paper with some local news, produced I think by the Nürnberger/Fürther Nachrichten).

Here are some less angry people:

See earlier entry on Communicating with the postman.

Photos/Fotos

I have been slow to post recently, but I did spend two days attempting to update my weblog software, until fortunately the problem was solved and the work done by Garvin Hicking, who is the Serendipity developer, with the help of the user Timbalu, who first realized that the MySQL database on my provider’s site was extremely ancient and the mysterious feedback I was getting, e.g. suggesting I increase permissions on subdirectories I could not even see, resulted from MySQL being unable to cope with the data. My fault, no doubt, as I had not updated since 2007.

To make up for the silence, here is a photo taken in Fürth last week.

Although I haven’t heard mention of the royal wedding in my many phone calls with the UK, I gather from the German press that everyone in the UK is really excited about it. If so, you might consider the book Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (amazon.de, Daily Telegraph).

Here is a picture of a bookstand at Erlangen station. Things were not like this twenty years ago:

Now an example of new German, in case you are out of touch:

And finally, taken this morning, part of a flea market outside the TV shop run by Ingomar Schnatzky:

Harvest Festival procession/Erntedankfestzug

The harvest festival procession at the Kirchweih was last Sunday, so this is a late report. This photo shows the integration of immigrants, with the oxcart followed by the Turkish group with a portrait of Atatürk.

Here is Barbara Ohm, who has been the principal local historian and guide for years:

Here’s another local dignitary (or two):

And this is what it looks like today, after the Kirchweih (the weather was very good this year). Not many town centres are given over to a funfair to this extent):

Pencils/Bleistifte

This is a view of the Faber Castell pencil factory, or part of it, at Stein. I go through Stein most Fridays so this time I got out to take a picture.

The occasion for the picture is an article in the Economist in September, Faber-Castell:
The future of the pencil – An eight-generation family firm shows how innovation need never stop
.

Apparently it was Faber Castell that invented the hexagonal pencil, which won’t roll off the table, and various other things.

I got this from IPKAT, where Neil Wilkof is disturbed by the Economist’s claim that Faber Castell stole the idea of putting a rubber (that’s an eraser, for US readers) on a pencil (someone else had patented the idea, but the judge thought it was obvious).

What did The Economist mean by “stolen”? I mean, in today’s world, the bad guys, at least under one view of things, are the patent trolls, who are accused of seeking to enforce a patent solely for the purposed of extracting “unfair” rents from unsuspecting users of the patented invention. No one would go so far as to say that patent trolls are “stealing” from the third parties who agree to pay the troll a sum to settle. Be that as it may, the pejorative context of the patent troll is exactly the opposite from the Faber situation in the 1870’s. All that Faber apparently did was defend itself from an infringement claim by alleging that the patent was invalid. If that is theft, then virtually every defendant in a patent litigation action is candidate to be of a “thief”, if it succeeds in invalidating the patent at issue.

Meanwhile, for those who read German, have a look at Lexikaliker’s blog, mainly about pencils. Even if you don’t speak German, the photos are interesting.

Cattle egret/Kuhreiher/Bubulcus ibis

This is a bit of a cheat as I see it in Nuremberg Zoo, in an en closure that the public can go into, with ibis, black stork and spoonbill.

But they are beginning to breed in England, along with little egrets. I just wanted to link to this brilliant headline: Egrets? We’ve had a few, in the Independent (the yellowish-brown colouring is in the breeding season, apparently).