This basilica is not usually part of the route from Upminster to Fürth, at least not since the Brussels orbital motorway was built. It’s a good idea to try the detour in afternoon rush-hour, so there’s time to take a photo. Photos of the King Leopold II tunnel and various immigrant grocery shops are unfortunately missing.
Here is the last food before the Eurotunnel (Folkestone side):
and here the view approaching the tunnel on the Calais side:
High Court decision on the right to anonymity of a blogging police officer (relating to an application for an interim injunction). The blog – Nightjack – has been deleted by the authors.
The case is about whether a blogger (policeman or journalist) has the right to preserve his or her anonymity if someone finds out the blogger’s identity. It was Mr Justice Eady who made the decision in favour of privacy on Max Mosley.
What seems wrong to me is not so much the decision as the conduct of Patrick Foster, the journalist who outed the blogger. Charon QC links to two rather negative entries on him, which suggest he specializes in unmasking identities.
Neutral Citation Number: [2009] EWHC 1358 (QB)
Case No: HQ09X02293IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN’S BENCH DIVISIONRoyal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
16 June 2009B e f o r e :
THE HONOURABLE MR JUSTICE EADY
____________________
Between:
THE AUTHOR OF A BLOGClaimant
– and –TIMES NEWSPAPERS LIMITED
Defendant____________________
Hugh Tomlinson QC (instructed by Olswang) for the Claimant
Antony White QC and Jonathan Barnes (instructed by Times Newspapers Ltd) for the Defendant
Hearing date: 4 June 2009
____________________
Mr Tomlinson submitted that the thousands of regular bloggers who communicate nowadays via the Internet, under a cloak of anonymity, would be horrified to think that the law would do nothing to protect their anonymity if someone carried out the necessary detective work and sought to unmask them. That may be true. I suspect that some would be very concerned and others less so. Be that as it may, Mr Tomlinson needs to demonstrate that there would be a legally enforceable right to maintain anonymity, in the absence of a genuine breach of confidence, by suppressing the fruits of detective work such as that carried out by Mr Foster.
It’s a problem for translation blogs too, of course. I don’t intend to attempt to unmask the Masked Translator – not that that blog goes out of its way to anonymously chastise real translation companies – but most translation blogs are cheery and positive, for good reason: potential clients might prefer that – and it’s refreshing to read something different. Then again, it would be unprofessional to publish traceable information about one’s translation work, except where and when that work is published.
The police blogger has been given a warning and will not be further punished:
A spokeswoman for Lancashire Constabulary said that Det Con Horton, who is understood to be an officer with the force’s Eastern and Pennine divisions, had been spoken to and received a written warning but would not be disciplined further “unless anything else was to come out”.
She added: “We have conducted a full internal investigation and the officer accepts that parts of his public commentary have fallen short of the standards of professional behaviour we expect of our police officers.”
Meanwhile, The Independent reports on the unmasking of a pro-life blogger whose blog about being pregnant with a terminally ill baby was invented.
LATER NOTE: See Head of Legal on NightJack: the Times should be ashamed
Article by the legal editor of The Times, Frances Gibb – with photo of the blogger, now permitted.
Article by Patrick Foster himself with details of blog entries that could be traced to real cases.
Blog entry from Pupillage and How to Get it.
Possibly the oldest wooden church in the world – insofar as it still is a wooden church. Or maybe not quite so old, depending on your dendrochronological view.
Chris Haller from Stuttgart has been in the USA for five years and on his website www.spreadgermanisms.com he is campaigning for an increase in Germanisms in the English language.
There are a number of German terms for which there are no useful English equivalents. Because of their usefulness and beauty, these terms called loan words have entered the English lexicon. While there are large amounts of useful and plenty more ridiculous English loan words in the German language, barely any made it the other way over the big pont.
When Chris Haller moved to the United States in 2004, he knew the obvious Kindergarten and Bratwurst and over the years discovered lesser known Germanisms like Kitsch, Doppelgänger or Schmutz. If only folks in the US would learn about them, he thought, and what about all the other fun German words? The ones daisy-chaining multiple Nouns to build fun words like Fussballgott?
I’m not sure what the purpose of this is: whether to take revenge on the English language for the excess of anglicisms in German, or whether to fill in these putative gaps in our ability to express things.
I’m separated from my OED at the moment or I would show that some of these actually started in British English, i.e. this side of ‘the big pond’.
Experten kratzen sich angesichts dieses Trends zu Germanismen den Kopf. Auch Stefan Brunner, Leiter der Sprachabteilung des Goethe-Instituts in Washington, hat keine Erklärung für das Phänomen gefunden. Ein Grund könnte in der Herkunft mancher US-Bürger liegen. Immerhin behaupten 17 Prozent von ihnen – also rund 50 Millionen -, deutsche Vorfahren zu haben. Und Deutsch rangiert nach Spanisch und Französisch an dritter Stelle der Popularitätsskala.
LATER NOTE: The Bremer Sprachblog has taken up this very article (Nürnberger Nachrichten) and had great fun with it.
Banksy stages almost-secret exhibition in Bristol, because he ‘wanted to give something back’ to the city (pictures).
Rory MacLean (who grew up in Canada) writes in a Goethe Institut weblog, Meet the Germans – his Rory’s Berlin-Blog is apparently only part of it -, in which he currently sits on the fence about sausages in Germany and Britain, with many quotes.
I can understand people enthusing about Nuremberg Bratwürste (found the WPA password here), although I often wonder how they get by without rusk to carry the flavour in the fat, and I find Nürnberger and Fränkische – a larger version – can be too salty to be versatile. But calling Currywurst glorious seems to me inappropriate as a comparison.