This is a warning in case any other readers of Vibeke Lind’s Knitting in the Nordic Tradition are passing by. This is a Danish book that has been translated into English by Annette Allen Jensen and of which I managed to secure a second-hand copy.

It has a lot of useful material, and it was probably my fault that I was misled by this diagram and photo – I thought they referred to the same thing:

The one on the left:

I did think 15 centimetres was too long, but I didn’t realize till after I’d finished that the cuff is supposed to be turned up twice. I was relying on the photo, in which you can see the black ribbing at the bottom and the black edge at the top of the cuff. (My casting off is a bit dodgy too).

Ah well. Anyone with a long small head need one of these?

I had been practising knitting with one colour held the English way and the other the Continental way, just in case I ever get round to a jacket.

The clergyman Markus Bomhard loves Playmobil figures and created a Playmobil Bible. However, in order to crucify one of the figures, he had first to warm the plastic and remould it, and he put some breasts and a penis on Eve and Adam respectively (I used that ‘respectively’ for the benefit of non-native speakers of English to see how it works). The Süddeutsche reports:

Ein Playmobil-Männchen kann man nicht so einfach kreuzigen. Dazu sind die Arme der fingerlangen Plastikfigur zu starr; sie lassen sich nicht seitlich ausbreiten. Der evangelische Pastor Markus Bomhard weiß, wie es trotzdem geht. Man müsse sie nur lange genug über die Flamme einer Kerze oder unter einen heißen Föhn halten, sagt er: “Dann wird das Kunststoffmaterial ganz leicht weich und lässt sich formen.” Anschließend lasse man das Figürchen noch kurz aushärten, ehe man es ans Kreuz nageln könne. Gottesmann Bomhard treibt bei alledem nicht etwa Sadismus um, sondern religiöser Eifer.

But the Franconian company Geobra Brandstätter object to the alteration of the figures, which they say is a breach of copyright. They don’t mind if someone alters the figures on a small scale, but this pastor actually set up a Playmo-Bibel website (though the SZ reports that when Harald Schmidt changed one of the figures into Hitler on TV, the company took no action). Their lawyers require him to stop using the domain name playmo-bibel.de (he has to call it Klicky-Bibel) and stop printing photos of the figures.

Even the Pope was in favour of the procedure:

“Möge Ihr Projekt vielen Kindern wie auch den Eltern und Erwachsenen auf spielerische Weise einen Zugang zur Heiligen Schrift ermöglichen, der die Grundlage für eine fortwährende Vertrautheit mit Gottes Wort im weiteren Leben bildet”, schrieb Benedikt XVI. an Pastor Bomhard.

LATER NOTE: Roger Heyes on Twitter reports that a Lego version has existed for some years.

(Via Wortistik)

The director of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Ulrich Raulff, thinks that if Schiller were alive today he would not be writing plays but blogging or twittering. He chose plays as the most media-effective form of expression of his day.

Der vor 250 Jahren geborene Dichter sei ganz gezielt “als Medienunternehmer in das damals wirkungsvollste und stärkste Medium reingegangen: ins Theater”, betonte der Schiller-Experte. “Von der Intensität, wie er dieses Medium erobert und nutzt, könnte man schon sagen, wäre zu erwarten, dass er heute vermutlich nicht Stückchen schreiben würde für Suhrkamps Theaterverlag, sondern nach einer anderen, stärkeren Maschine greifen würde.”

This reminds me the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, which I enjoyed as a set book in my degree course. Could one imagine Goethe and Schiller exchanging letters today? But somehow I can’t see it as a text message exchange. Perhaps they would have blogged (despite Raulff’s view that Goethe was less modern than Schiller).

Tweeted by Markus Trapp of text+blog.

Paternoster videos:

University of Sheffield Arts Tower

Paternoster lift

Paternoster, a cyclic elevator

Riding the paternoster at Arbeitsamt Lichtenberg, Berlin

The Onion has a video report on why Franz Kafka Airport in Prague is named the world’s most alienating airport (via Die Zeit).

Another video, or at least audio: Marx / Engels correspondence reading – Harry Rowohlt as Marx and Gregor Gysi as Engels.

Just translated my shortest-ever German legal sentence: ‘Dies verwundert.’

This month, LLRX has an article on researching Australian law.

I went to LLRX.com looking for the article on researching French law. There are English guides to many legal systems there, although somewhat outdated since the project was discontinued a few years ago. And Claire Germain’s French law guide can be found in a newer (2004) version at Cornell (another of the great law sites).