Fox News reports that an Iraqi translator (interpreter?) has been denied a visa to live in the USA because he was involved in attempting to overthrow a government, i.e. that of Saddam Hussein. He saved the lives of a number of American soldiers. In particular, he stole Uday Hussein’s car, which is being defined as a (non-political) felony barring his admission.

Jasim, whose name is being withheld for his safety, has received strong support from the U.S. military, and the Department of Homeland Security approved his application for a visa. But the State Department has denied Jasim a visa because he was arrested in 1996 for actions against the Saddam dictatorship.

There may be more to this murky story: ‘Jasim’ is regarded as a nuisance because he has spoken up against poor treatment of Iraqi translators. See Fox News for (a lot) more details, including a PDF file of letters recommending he be given a visa.

(Thanks to Derek at flefo.org)

Word Spy reports on the use of the word kettle to describe police surrounding demonstrators:

kettle
v. To maneuver protesters into a small area using a cordon of police personnel and vehicles. —n.
—kettling pp.

Here’s an example from the Guardian on March 30:

But it wasn’t really their natty dress-sense or their flags that made them stand out so distinctively from the rest of the march. It was the very special policing tactics that were focused on them: the anarchists, the police seemed to feel, were such an imminent danger to society that they needed to be ‘kettled’ — in other words, to have three police vans crawling along blocking their left-hand side, and a tight line of police one behind another on their right-hand-side, to make sure there was no possibility of break-out.

The word einkesseln is more familiar in German. Spiegel Online, under a heading Einkesselung bei Anti-Rechts-Demo:

Am frühen Nachmittag beginnen die Einsatzkräfte, “Schließungen” durchzuführen – also große Gruppen zu umzingeln. Gleich drei solcher Kessel richten die Einsatzkräfte ein. Damit habe man circa 500 gewalttätige Störer wegen Landfriedensbruch festsetzen wollen, so die Kölner Einsatzleitung. Unter den Eingeschlossenen befinden sich neben zahlreichen Linksautonomen auch drei Kinder und 72 Jugendliche.

(These demonstrators were later taken to Brühl and put into open cages, but that’s a different procedure).

Other words mentioned by Word Spy are globophobe, pickade and summit-hop.

This is a warning in case any other readers of Vibeke Lind’s Knitting in the Nordic Tradition are passing by. This is a Danish book that has been translated into English by Annette Allen Jensen and of which I managed to secure a second-hand copy.

It has a lot of useful material, and it was probably my fault that I was misled by this diagram and photo – I thought they referred to the same thing:

The one on the left:

I did think 15 centimetres was too long, but I didn’t realize till after I’d finished that the cuff is supposed to be turned up twice. I was relying on the photo, in which you can see the black ribbing at the bottom and the black edge at the top of the cuff. (My casting off is a bit dodgy too).

Ah well. Anyone with a long small head need one of these?

I had been practising knitting with one colour held the English way and the other the Continental way, just in case I ever get round to a jacket.

The clergyman Markus Bomhard loves Playmobil figures and created a Playmobil Bible. However, in order to crucify one of the figures, he had first to warm the plastic and remould it, and he put some breasts and a penis on Eve and Adam respectively (I used that ‘respectively’ for the benefit of non-native speakers of English to see how it works). The Süddeutsche reports:

Ein Playmobil-Männchen kann man nicht so einfach kreuzigen. Dazu sind die Arme der fingerlangen Plastikfigur zu starr; sie lassen sich nicht seitlich ausbreiten. Der evangelische Pastor Markus Bomhard weiß, wie es trotzdem geht. Man müsse sie nur lange genug über die Flamme einer Kerze oder unter einen heißen Föhn halten, sagt er: “Dann wird das Kunststoffmaterial ganz leicht weich und lässt sich formen.” Anschließend lasse man das Figürchen noch kurz aushärten, ehe man es ans Kreuz nageln könne. Gottesmann Bomhard treibt bei alledem nicht etwa Sadismus um, sondern religiöser Eifer.

But the Franconian company Geobra Brandstätter object to the alteration of the figures, which they say is a breach of copyright. They don’t mind if someone alters the figures on a small scale, but this pastor actually set up a Playmo-Bibel website (though the SZ reports that when Harald Schmidt changed one of the figures into Hitler on TV, the company took no action). Their lawyers require him to stop using the domain name playmo-bibel.de (he has to call it Klicky-Bibel) and stop printing photos of the figures.

Even the Pope was in favour of the procedure:

“Möge Ihr Projekt vielen Kindern wie auch den Eltern und Erwachsenen auf spielerische Weise einen Zugang zur Heiligen Schrift ermöglichen, der die Grundlage für eine fortwährende Vertrautheit mit Gottes Wort im weiteren Leben bildet”, schrieb Benedikt XVI. an Pastor Bomhard.

LATER NOTE: Roger Heyes on Twitter reports that a Lego version has existed for some years.

(Via Wortistik)

The director of the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Ulrich Raulff, thinks that if Schiller were alive today he would not be writing plays but blogging or twittering. He chose plays as the most media-effective form of expression of his day.

Der vor 250 Jahren geborene Dichter sei ganz gezielt “als Medienunternehmer in das damals wirkungsvollste und stärkste Medium reingegangen: ins Theater”, betonte der Schiller-Experte. “Von der Intensität, wie er dieses Medium erobert und nutzt, könnte man schon sagen, wäre zu erwarten, dass er heute vermutlich nicht Stückchen schreiben würde für Suhrkamps Theaterverlag, sondern nach einer anderen, stärkeren Maschine greifen würde.”

This reminds me the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, which I enjoyed as a set book in my degree course. Could one imagine Goethe and Schiller exchanging letters today? But somehow I can’t see it as a text message exchange. Perhaps they would have blogged (despite Raulff’s view that Goethe was less modern than Schiller).

Tweeted by Markus Trapp of text+blog.

Paternoster videos:

University of Sheffield Arts Tower

Paternoster lift

Paternoster, a cyclic elevator

Riding the paternoster at Arbeitsamt Lichtenberg, Berlin