I have links to some food blogs on my index page. There are at least two lawyer food blogs: The Amateur Gourmet, which started as a law student’s blog, and Appetites, in which Robert D. Peyton concentrates on restaurant reviews and recipes in New Orleans.

Appetites has just had an entry, for once not on food, but on John Grisham. I would support his view on the novels: A Time to Kill is excellent, The Firm is very good in parts, and the others are not so memorable (I seem to remember getting bored with the denouement always meaning sending someone away on a witness protection programme).

The topic of the article is the conflict between Grisham’s support of a lawsuit against Oliver Stone because a film of his was claimed to have inspired a crime, and the content of some of Grisham’s own novels. This is in the context of a New York Times article on Grisham:

bq. The gist of the NYT article is that Grisham is a lucky guy who eats well, and doesn’t care about the Atkins craze. He writes one book a year, and lives like a king. May we all be so lucky. I found myself admiring the guy for ordering what he wants, for being relatively humble about the source of his success, and for apparently being a mensch in general.

The entry closes with an apology and a link to a source of food blogs:

bq. Anyway, this is hopefully the last non-food related story I’ll write on this website. Apologies to anyone who came here from food porn watch looking for a recipe, or a restaurant review.

As Robin Stocks notes, one doesn’t want one’s weblog to appear within a frame carrying a disclaimer but also advertising for one of the numerous translators’ sites that have become so popular recently.

I don’t know whether these people have really attached my weblog, and Robin’s, and a few others, not all related to language, or if they’ve just linked some kind of search of weblogs.

At all events, there are bits of Javascript and php script out there that can be incorporated in a weblog and break the frame – thanks to Robin, Peter Müller and Clemens Kochinke.

Well, I wrote to tell them to stop, but I have not had a reply yet.

Ich habe keine Amazon-Wunschliste, aber Sie können bei E-Bay Deutschland für mein T-Shirt bieten.

nachrichten aus absurdistan zitiert drei Übersetzungen ins Deutsche von den ersten zwei Sätzen von “Madame Bovary”, zunehmend länger.

bq. Wir waren im Arbeitssaal, als der Direktor eintrat, ihm folgten ein Neuer
in ziviler Kleidung und ein Schuldiener, der ein großes Pult trug. Wer schlief, wachte auf, und jeder erhob sich, als sei er in seiner Arbeit gestört worden:

Die dritte Übersetzung, von Ernst Sander, ist etwa dreimal so lang und enthält viel mehr Details. Oder gab es eine längere Fassung des Romans in Französischen? Wenn nicht, ist es ehr überraschend.

Die Quelle scheint “Der Rabe 47” (1996) zu sein, aber eine Übersetzung ist von 2003, also kann das nicht stimmen. Dank an Kai Becker von der pt-Liste.

Die englischen Übersetzungen scheinen durchweg kürzer zu sein:

bq. We were at preparation, when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy dressed in “civvies” and a school servant carrying a big desk. (tr. by Alan Russell)

bq. We were studying when the headmaster came in, followed by a new boy, not yet wearing a school uniform, and a monitor carrying a large desk. (tr. by Mildred Marmur)

bq. We were in the study hall when the headmaster walked in, followed by a new boy not wearing a school uniform, and by a janitor carrying a large desk. (tr. by Lowell Bair)

bq. We were in study-hall when the headmaster entered, followed by a new boy not yet in school uniform and by the handyman carrying a large desk. (tr. by Francis Steegmuller)

praegnanz.de ist ein Weblog (Textpattern) von Gerrit van Aaken (dies zumindest großgeschrieben) hauptsächlich über Typographie, zum Beispiel eine Kritik des Harald-Schmidt-Logos. Es gibt auch Aufsätze über Typographie im Web, wie bitte abstand halten.

(Via Wortfeld – einer der Anderswo-im-Netz-Links)

Yesterday I threw some boilerplate into Google. I thought there was a mistake in the text, and this search often finds similar sentences that throw light on the defective text. I put a lot of words in, even though I know Google doesn’t search many. But yesterday, all my words were underlined as a search header!

But I am afraid I didn’t believe it till I read it in Language Log… Google’s ten-word limit has been raised to thirty-two.

Mark Liberman followed this with a report on some problems in Google’s Boolean search, but I’m not going to read about them.