It’s been widely reported, even in English-language papers, that a vault containing Franz Kafka’s papers was opened in Zurich yesterday, I believe in the presence of several people including one Germanist.

The Independent:

Just why it has taken so long for the hidden manuscripts to see the light of day is a story of Kafkaesque proportions in itself. Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka – whose surname means “magpie” in Czech – was a little-known Jewish writer with a handful of published German stories to his name when he died.

I don’t know why we need to be told that Kafka means magpie in Czech – especially since it doesn’t, it means jackdaw. Not that I know any Czech, but Google thinks magpie might be straka.

LATER NOTE (August 2010): here is a photo of a jackdaw on Fürther Freiheit:

It rained a bit yesterday. I wouldn’t mind if it rained a bit today too. (Stadtparkcafé cat)

The Independent reports today that enough fat is being removed from the sewers under Leicester Square to fill nine double-decker buses:

Enough fat to fill nine double-decker buses is being removed from sewers under London’s Leicester Square.

A team of “flushers” equipped with full breathing apparatus has been drafted in with shovels to dig out an estimated 1,000 tonnes of putrid fat.

I wonder what the temperature is like down there.

I reminded me of the recent article in the Guardian with the title Wales, Belgium and other units of measurement.

It started with the bit of iceberg ‘the size of Luxembourg’ that had broken off near Iceland (the same description was used in German).

A Guardian letter writer, commenting on the same story, endorsed the argument: “I would have had some difficulty even if the chunk had been described in terms of the size of Wales. Could you tell us how big it was in football pitches or Olympic swimming pools?”

As Nancy Banks-Smith has noted: “Any plague spot of indeterminate location is always compared to Wales. Wales is not quite sure how to take this.”

The article refers to double-decker buses as DDBs.

There’s more about Wales and Belgium at h2g2, including what the USA and Canada say instead.

Wikipedia also has an entry on unusual measurements. I didn ‘t realize that shake and jiffy are defined in astrophysics and computing, nor had I encountered the microfortnight:

One very convenient unit derived from the FFF system of units is the microfortnight, one millionth of the fundamental timeunit of FFF, which equals 1.2096 seconds. This is a fairly representative example of “hacker humor”, and is occasionally used in operating systems; for example, VMS’ TIMEPROMPTWAIT parameter is measured in microfortnights.

In German I have found Bayern, Österreich, and Luxemburg again.

Euleta, the European Legal English Teachers’ Association, is holding a conference at the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg:

EULETA 2010 Conference

We are pleased to announce that the 2010 EULETA

Conference will be held at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, Germany.
3rd – 5th September

More details on the Euleta site. The conference programme can be downloaded as a PDF file.

Some of the speakers are from outside Europe too. There’s even a talk by Peter Wilton on legal translation from German to English, and I gather there may be one or two more talks added. There are two blocks, so usually a choice of topics.

Ralph Stenzel and Dr. Christopher Hornstein et al. have started a multi-author blog (in German) about Fürth, called Fürther Freiheit.

It has entries by nine authors to date, but others may apply to post (their work has to be ‘inhaltlich kompetent und sprachlich versiert’).

It looks as if some of the main topics will be architecture and local politics.

You can get the entries and comments by separate RSS feeds. The archives can be inspected by month, and there is a tag cloud too.

I started a Fürth blog myself some years ago, with the similar title Fürther Freiheiten. It was on Typepad, so when I stopped writing it I deleted it. I thought there would be lots of interesting things to write about Fürth, but it seemed to me to demand a wider range of entries than I felt like writing. It’s surely much better with several writers. If I wrote about one article in the local paper, there were many more I could have written on, and then the question arose: why

Another problem was that I wasn’t going to collect many German readers, nor did I want to write for a potential expat community. Forums like Toytown Germany I find very useful, but they aren’t what I would write.