A few links to make up for not posting:
Supreme Court blogs
The UKSC Blog has a post on other supreme court blogs in other countries, in particular Ex Tempore in Ireland:
“Ex Tempore” is a lawyers’ latin term meaning, roughly, “at the time.” Unusually for a Supreme Court, the Irish Supreme Court resolves a large proportion of its cases ex tempore, by issuing its decision orally at the conclusion of the argument, without issuing a written judgment. The name “Ex Tempore” also captures the strengths and limits of any blog that covers a working Court: the blog posts are timely and off-the-cuff.
Also Strasbourg Observers, a project of Ghent University to observe the European Court of Human Rights. There’s also an ECJ blog, and of course the SCOTUSblog. Court artist was also new to me, as was The Court (Canada).
North American English dialects
Rick Aschmann has developed a site where he collects YouTube videos and locates their pronunciation on a map. About himself he writes:
I am a professional linguist and a Christian missionary, working in indigenous Amerindian languages. My work has nothing to do with English, so that is why this project is just a hobby.
A few readers have asked where I am from, and what dialect I speak. Actually, I am the total opposite of the kind of people I am looking for for the sound samples on my map: They have each been born and raised in one specific place in the U.S. or Canada. I was born in Mexico City, the son of Christian missionaries, and moved back and forth between Mexico and various places in the U.S. throughout my childhood, spending most of my time in the U.S. in the Oklahoma City area. My parents met in Mexico.
Agony aunt on relationships with German men
Jill Sommer recently had an entry on her blog – it’s the latest one today – I gather it will be deleted in a week’s time, so this link may be dead. The entry was posted in June 2008, and the comments have developed into an exchange between mainly American women who can’t understand the signals German men are sending or not sending, with Jill taking the role of the agony aunt. One of them refers to her ‘joining the forum’, so I suppose they have little idea of the main topic of the blog. I can’t offer any advice on this subject myself, even though the locals believe the only reason a British woman would move to Franconia would be to marry a German (they don’t regard this as an insult, I mean the fact that marriage dictates one’s life).