Ten tips for deciphering old German handwriting is a post by Katherine Schober on deciphering Kurrentschrift, with useful links, for example to wordmine.info, which is a kind of crossword-solving site.
Apparently Sütterlinschrift is a modern version of Kurrentschrift. Here’s a picture of Ludwig Sütterlin (source here (PDF)).
Thanks to Ann Sherwin for the link.
The latest in my series of ‘doorbells’. This one is in the City of London.
The hardest thing was finding the matches, the second-hardest lighting them.
I don’t really recommend rainbow bagels.
There was a row between Daimler shareholders at the AGM buffet, because one of them was packing a doggie bag of frankfurters, which have more names than I realized, and the Stuttgart one is Saitenwürschtle, Saite being their skin. This was in Berlin, where perhaps there was fear of missing out on the sausages. There were 5500 shareholders present, and 12500 frankfurters had been ordered.
Wikimedia image:
Ein Aktionär habe mehrfach Würstchen vom Büfett zum Mitnehmen eingepackt, sagte die Sprecherin. Eine andere Anteilseignerin habe ihn darauf angesprochen – dies habe zu einem verbalen Schlagabtausch geführt. Um die Lage zu entspannen, habe man die Polizei gerufen. Die Aktionärin habe eine Anzeige wegen Beleidigung erstattet.
It seems that the gentleman helping himself insulted the lady who objected, since she is charging him with Beleidigung.
This story has been widely reported in the British press too. The Guardian:
The row broke out when one man repeatedly went to the buffet and began wrapping up several sausages to take home, whereupon a female shareholder intervened to tick him off, resulting in a shouting match and the police being called.
Answering shareholder questions at the meeting, Daimler board chairman Manfred Bischoff said: “We had to call the police to settle the matter.”
A Daimler spokeswoman said it was a verbal altercation and the police were called to calm matters – because the female shareholder wanted to file a complaint for slander, and did so.
They call Beleidigung slander, but more information is needed. A big legal translation problem!
At the very bottom of the homepage of this blog, there are links on English law, including Delia Venables‘ site.
Note also the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, edited by Nick Holmes and Delia Venables. (I’m not sure I realized this had a website). Both Delia Venables and Nick Holmes can be followed on Twitter, and Delia yesterday tweeted links to two articles by her:
Free case law resources online
Free current awareness legal resources
For example, there is Current Awareness from the Inner Temple Library, and Halsbury’s Law Exchange:
Halsbury’s Law Exchange is a legal think tank, hosted by LexisNexis. It aims to communicate ideas on reform or legal direction to decision makers and the legal sector and promote debate through papers, reports, events and media pieces.
Current awareness is obviously a thing.
An article by David Allan Green (who blogs as Jack of Kent) in the Solicitors Journal on The revival of legal blogging, in which he points out how many barristers blog, and how few solicitors.
A new resource to me is Lawbore, a resource site for law students created and maintained by Emily Allbon, who is a lecturer at the City Law School, City University, London. She writes about it in Lawbore: legal education made fun. One item on Lawbore is a guide to reading a law report: Anatomy of a Law Report:
Paul Magrath talks us through Hunter v Canary Wharf Ltd [1997] AC 655 providing us with pointers throughout. We also have a copy of the case in full, with no audio.
There’s also a guide to blogging lawyers.
Aldi scraps name of ‘rape yellow’ paint after complaints from sexual assault victim
Only in England? It’s rather shocking to read that Aldi has changed the name rape yellow on its paint to rapeseed yellow after a complaint from a customer who had been sexually assaulted.
Apparently the plant is known as rape or rapeseed, that is, the word rapeseed can refer to the whole plant. I am sure the yellow is the yellow of the flowers, not the seeds, as some papers seem to think. It’s also known as oilseed rape and canola.
The name “canola” was chosen by the board of the Rapeseed Association of Canada in the 1970s. The “Can” part stands for Canada and “ola” refers to oil.[5][6] However, a number of sources, including The Free Dictionary, continue to claim it stands for “Can(ada)+o(il)+l(ow)+a(cid). The name was coined partially to euphemize the name of rapeseed oil, to avoid the negative connotations of rape as a violent sex crime, from the Latin “rapere”.
But the standard name is either rape yellow or rapeseed yellow, see RAL 1021 here.
A Wikipedia site seems to be mainly German, because it says of light ivory ‘Mandatory for taxis in Germany since 1971, although in limited states only in recent years’ and broom yellow: ‘Deutsche Bundespost since 1980, since 1998 Deutsche Post AG’. And for what it calls rapeseed yellow: ‘Österreichische Post, Deutsche Bundespost 1972–1980, Gold in the Flag of Germany’.
This reminded me of the paediatrician/paedophile story, but apparently that was a myth.
Well, it’s hard to forget something that never happened. There was no attack on a paediatrician in Portsmouth. As is frequently the case when relatively minor events are turned into massive morality tales, the facts of what happened 10 years ago are continually twisted – in Gwent, people! – it was not carried out by the ‘populace’ but probably by a small group of teenagers.
