As part of an art initiative in containers throughout the pedestrian zone, this container has magically appeared in front of this building. On one set of shelves I can put stuff from my ‘household’ that I don’t need or want, and people can help themselves, or I can destroy my stuff on the spot and put the results on the other set of shelves.

Mysteriously, the Raumgestaltung website of the artist Barbara Denzler is optimized for IE, but it looks OK in Firefox as far as I can tell. I mean, I think it’s supposed to look like that.

Somehow I feel that the rubbish I would deposit there is too finished to be really arty.

Udo Vetter reports that he constantly receives requests to fill in a questionnaire or survey about lawyers’ use of weblogs for someone doing research in some educational institute or other:

Seminararbeit, Diplomarbeit, Doktorarbeit. Ich habe allein seit Ende letzter Woche elf Anfragen erhalten, ob ich nicht an einer Umfrage über Weblogs teilnehmen möchte. Früher habe ich ab und zu mal Kreuzchen gemacht oder Fragen beantwortet. Aber in der Masse ist das nicht mehr zu bewältigen.

The equivalent for translators is ‘I’m doing a survey on translators and translation memory software’.

The Legal Antiquarian posts an advertisement placed by Calvin Fletcher and J.A. Breckridge in the Indianapolis Gazette (Gesetzblatt) in 1822.

Sinngemäß bieten die zwei alle juristischen Tätigkeiten an, einschließlich solcher, die in Richtung Winkeladvokat gehen, im 5. Circuit. Sie interessieren sich nur für gut bezahlte Aufträge. Sie versprechen auch nicht, “korrekt, gewissenhaft und pünktlich” zu arbeiten, sondern, wie die meisten Anwälte, “so gut sie können”.

The Masked Translator has a great post about the seven deadly sins of translators.

Wrath
For translators this can take several strange forms. At first glance you may not think a freelance translator would find much to be wrathful at in their work. But many are the times Masked Translator has ranted about the horrendous rudeness of panicked agencies who call and wake our household up in the middle of the night trying to get us to do a job in a language combination we don’t even do. MT has also been known to rail in anger at the people who wrote the ******* documents in the first place. People with abysmal writing skills, terrible spelling, illegible handwriting, documents irritatingly peppered with slang or cryptic, in-house terms… MT has even been struck by conniptions of ire at the petty/stupid/irritating things people bothered to write down in the first place. Actually, come to think of it, that’s a lot of wrath. Translators should definitely work to get enough exercise and meditate or talk to other translators or do something to dissipate the wrath. We find blogging helpful…

I mean, not that I recognize myself there, of course…

David Barnish represented himself in the county court and won damages from the travel company Thomson, but his case was snapped up by the newspapers and ridiculed nonetheless.

He booked a holiday in a hotel where so many of the services were in German and for Germans that he couldn’t use them. There was only one non-German TV channel, and there was a children’s club his daughter couldn’t use because it was German.

The Telegraph report is fairly subdued. But then there’s the second Telegraph report, with obligatory photograph of a lounger with a towel on it.

There are plenty of British holidaymaker who can’t bear the thought of a certain nationality always being first to the sun loungers – but one got so angry about being surrounded by Germans on holiday he sued his tour company, and won.

The Sun goes to town, of course (Brit’s holiday from Helmut). Even the Frankfurter Allgemeine is silly – an unrelated photo captioned:

Urlauber lieben die griechische Ferieninsel Kos – wenn dort bloß nicht soviel Deutsch gesprochen würde.

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)