I don’t know how I overlooked the englishdroid.com site wittily described by Geoffrey Pullum at language log.

bq. PEQ Preparation/Execution Quotient: the time spent planning an activity divided by the time spent doing it in class. For example, the hour you spend searching the Internet for a ten-minute filler would have a quotient of 6. A fifty-minute role play that took you five minutes to dream up would be 0.1. (Any activity that has a PEQ greater than 0.5 should definitely be avoided.) There’s a present perfect activity in this book. – What’s the PEQ?

bq. pig’s bladder and bells
Equipment the teacher takes into class to amuse the students, like board games, dice, realia and pictures.

De lege agraria nova is a Portuguese weblog on agricultural, environmental and food law in the Portuguese-speaking countries. The authors are Professor Lucas Abreu Barroso (of the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, in Brazil) and Manuel David Barroso.

When I was reading JuraBlogs (shows the newsfeeds of German legal weblogs), I clicked on ‘Slip Opinion: Todesstrafe’ at the German American Law Blog. Instead of the entry, the following appeared on my screen:

Kein Zugang aus impressumspflichtigen Staaten
Impressumspflicht verletzt US-Recht

Sollten Sie versehentlich über einen Dienst aus einem Staat mit Impressumspflicht hier gelandet sein, doch nicht aus einem Staat mit Impressumspflicht stammen, klicken Sie hier zum Besuch von German American Law Journal in Washington, DC, USA.

Impressumspflicht is hard to translate, isn’t it? Anyway, I live in Germany and I come from the UK, and both of those states are members of the EU. It’s widely believed that the Impressum is German law, but in fact it’s EU law (see my archives). So I am not allowed to access the German American Law Journal (German version) via its newsfeed. I am not sure why this is, though.

The first link took me to a Supreme Court decision, JOSEPH McINTYRE, executor of estate of MARGARET McINTYRE, deceased, PETITIONER v. OHIO ELECTIONS COMMISSION. Why do I have the feeling that this decision doesn’t apply to me because I’m not a US citizen?

I then – disobeying the rules – clicked through to the blog and found that slip opinion means vorläufige Begründung. Thanks!

The next thing I did was to see what happens if I click on a link to the English-language version of the German American Law Journal (there was an entry on Sunday). Well, what do you know – no nasty warning! But what about people from Ireland or the UK, or any other people from the EU who want to read that blog? It seems that only Germany and Austria are being banned here.

LATER NOTE: There is an explanation of the blocking at Die Blogelei.

I don’t like those Google ads that come up when you’re searching for some specific book and lead you to ebay or somewhere like that, where they tell you they haven’t got it. But the following is amusing: it appeared when I was looking at the law section of the Times Online

bq. Legal Profession Sale
New & used Legal Profession Check out the deals now!
www.eBay.com

It did produce a lot of Buy It Now ads, mainly for books, but no sale of The Legal Profession as such.

The Language Guy is a new weblog by Mike Geis, who describes himself as a retired linguist. To judge from his profile, he may write something about law and language.

bq. I wrote “The Language of Television Advertising,” “The Language of Politics,” and “Speech Acts and Conversational Interaction.” I also wrote and consulted on linguistic issues arising in such legal domains as trademark law, deceptive advertising, and jury instructions in death penalty cases.

(via Language hat, who had it from Aldiboronti at Wordorigins, which is always worth looking at)