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.

Herbert Erhard(t) was a Fürth footballer who died on July 3 three days before his eightieth birthday. The plaque in the pedestrian zone (photographed this morning) shows that he was in the German team that won the World Cup in 1954, although he didn’t actually play in that game. The green flag is for the local team, Spielvereinigung Greuther Fürth. (There’s a Kissinger plaque outside my house – I wonder what they’ll do for him?)

Wikipedia DE
Wikipedia EN
Fürther Nachrichten

Fürther Nachrichten seems to have confused the spelling of his name with Ludwig Erhard. Oh, and Ehrhardt was a sports teacher at the local Pfisterschule, which is also going down the tubes, till 1993.

LATER NOTE: Apparently the Erhard spelling is correct – it is the plaque that is wrong.

Now that Christian Wulff has unfortunately had to give up his position as Minister-President of Lower Saxony, his successor has been appointed – David McAllister, son of a Scottish father and a German mother. A touch of the Nick Cleggs there.

Wikipedia English
Wikipedia German

Proud of his Scottish heritage, McAllister proposed to his wife, Dunja, at Loch Ness, and married in August 2003, wearing a kilt.

I suppose he would wear this tartan.

Here’s an interview in The Local.