I knew it was windy last night, but I didn’t realize it had come to this – a picture of Fürth from the Sparkasse webcam at about twenty to five p.m., Central European time:

(Via zonebattler’s homezone)

Middlesex Guildhall is a building near the Houses of Parliament. It was a Crown Court until recently, but it’s being refurbished – greatly refurbished, apparently, by Lord Foster – as the building of the new Supreme Court (Wikipedia). It appears that there’s a conflict between the kind of furnishings people want to preserve and the image of court of justice they would like to modernize.

BBC News has some photos.

My attention was drawn to this by the weblog White Rabbit by the barrister Andrew Keogh, who departs from his usual avoidance of legal subjects to describe the beauties and shortcomings of the building and the paucity of attractive Crown Court buildings as a whole. Here’s the relevant entry:

Middlesex Guildhall is a listed building and is to be refurbished in a way that has caused howls of horror from traditionalists. I don’t really have a problem with this generally – the place did look pretty tired and the refurbishment plans actually look pretty good, albeit ones that I can’t imagine they would ever get past English Heritage in any other context. Okay, it’s staggeringly expensive also but after the Millennium Dome we are probably inured to that sort of stuff. Governments are for wasting money. My gripe is – they are mucking about with courts 1 and 2!!! This should never be allowed to happen….
Next thing you know – they will take Judge Jeffries’ name down!

I haven’t read any Robert Harris before, but this (Christmas present) was a very good read.

The ‘ghost’ is a ghostwriter with no political interest who finds himself with a huge contract to write the autobiography of the former British prime minister, Adam Lang, a lightly adapted version of Tony Blair with a wife similar to Cherie Blair. This involves spending time in Martha’s Vineyard in winter. Lang is facing prosecution at the ICC for his part in deporting terrorists who were tortured.

It’s a page-turner, it carries its research into ghosting and the American setting lightly, and above all it’s rather sparely written – a pleasure to read every sentence. Out in German too, and the English version is a paperback now (I got the hardback).

amazon.de
English paperback: Ghost
German hardback (translated by Wolfgang Müller): Ghost

Further election posters (for earlier SPD example, see here).

This is mystifying:

I haven’t noticed any increase of learning in the immediate vicinity, but I believe scientists have been imported to the former Grundig territory.

Meanwhile, in Erlangen, the Green Party can’t swim, so they present themselves on bikes:

In this way they merely blend into the rest of the population of Erlangen. Here is a bicycle park at the station:

Certain Ideas of Europe, the Economist blog, under the heading Speaking French: a British terror, has links to clips of Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth II speaking French, and Nicolas Sarkozy speaking English.

Your reporter once had a boss in Brussels, many years ago, who came from a generation of Englishmen who learned technically perfect French but believed that it was somehow actorish and unmanly to speak it with anything except a full-strength British accent.

My mother did French at school and at university, in the early 1920s, and she used to say, ‘We didn’t do the accent in those days’.

It is widely reported today (and yesterday) that British police have been importing German shepherd dogs and are confronted with the need to say Sitz instead of sit or retrain the dogs to understand English commands.

The stories are all apparently based on one Press Association report and most contain the examples:

sitz: sit
platz: down
aus: let go
holen: fetch
bissen: bite

Here’s the Sun, for example (surprisingly free of anti-German sentiment). The Daily Mail goes into more detail:

Another police dog-handler, who has worked with the German-trained pooches, said: “It was quite fun learning a new language.

“It’s amazing how quick they are to respond as soon as you utter a German command, but when you say ‘let go’ in English they just look at you like you are crazy.

“But as soon as you say ‘Aus’ they drop whatever they are holding like a shot.”

The learning is a two-way process, however, with the dogs also being taught English in the hope they will ultimately become “bilingual” and respond to both languages.

A Derbyshire police spokeswoman said: “I know we have got three and we speak German to them but they are now learning English. We are repeating the German commands in English so they are becoming bilingual.”

Here are some German dog commands (Hundekommandos). Fass, of course (sorry – not Beiß – see comment), is missing, as you’re not supposed to train your private bull terrier to do that.