Postman’s leg and udal law

Posted on 24 January 2015 by MMarks

I will be getting back to legal translation matters – really! Meanwhile:

1. Postman’s leg £2.95:

Apparently these are also sold as Dinosaur Bones.

2. Burns Night tomorrow: Lidl has or had kilts on offer.

3. Between the Lines: podcasts on literary translation, including Joyce Crick on Freud and Kafka in English and Anthea Bell and Jo Catling on translating W.G. Sebald.

4. It seems holders of manorial rights in land will not be able to claim damages for fracking.

5. I suppose it’s not likely that, if Scotland were to be independent, Orkney and Shetland would have to be handed back under udal law? It does appear that a very few people, possibly not including royalty, are or were pursuing this line.

AN INDEPENDENT Scotland will have to hand back Shetland and Orkney according to Denmark’s British Ambassador.

In partnership with Norway’s King Harald V, the Danish regent Queen Margrethe II intends reviving the ancient rites of Udal Law which were ratified by the Scottish parliament in 1567.

The seven noses of Soho guided walk

Posted on 4 January 2015 by MMarks

Happy New Year to all readers and I wish you the infinite wealth which you may or may not get after seeing all seven noses in Soho on Peter Berthoud‘s tour – recommended. Do not fall for anyone offering you ‘six noses of Soho’ at a reduced rate. This is a pale copy and, what’s more, ineffective. The Peter Berthoud walk was not just about the noses and went all over Soho and beyond in two hours as the weather got drier and the skies gloomier.

We saw one of the altered traffic signs not yet spotted and reversed by Westminster Council:

I’d seen one in Brick Lane before. But I didn’t know they were a set and were the work of Clet Abraham, a French artist. There’s an interview with him in the Huffington Post.

The noses proper were the work of Rick Buckley, but because he didn’t out himself at first, stories grew up around them.

English language curiosities

Posted on 29 December 2014 by MMarks

On reading this headline in The Local:

Merkel to meet Putin in January over Ukraine

I wonder whether anyone will shoot them down. However, the earlier headline about the blazing ferry has been improved (Flaming ferry counted 18 German passengers).

In the following, what role was played by Microsoft Word capitalizing words at the beginning of a line?

but maybe the locals can’t read.

On a different subject, there is probably a law against this kind of thing in Germany:

Heston also created his own kind of mince pies, which were OK except they weren’t really mince pies, more like Linzer Torte. They had the tangerine-flavoured sugar too.

Sheep and lamb

Posted on 26 December 2014 by MMarks

Here’s a photo taken earlier this week by my friend in Donzdorf, on the Schwäbische Alb. The shepherdess is carrying a newborn lamb up the hill to the place where the sheep are put in an electric fence. The mother ewe apparently headbutted the sheepdog aggressively. Up the hill, the lamb stood up and began to bounce around.