When I was searching for the last entry, I discovered a Fürth pedestrian zone webcam I didn’t know. It belongs to the Hirsch Apotheke and is practically on my corner. At the time of writing you can still see both the old and new rubbish bins beside each other. You can see the pretzel kiosk and Wurstbude, and the ticket machine that used to be a nice shade of green. Sometimes a couple of cats used to walk from one window on the roof of the building with New York on the ground floor, but maybe that no longer happens. Also the Rathaus in the distance, of course. And you don’t have to refresh the page to update the camera every 60 seconds.

Here’s another reference to the same webcam, on a page that leads to others. It was entered there on September 15.

Here are two shots of the webcam which I sneaked out and took.

Anfang Juli erschienen in der erneuerten Fürther Fußgängerzone bronzefarbene Abfalleimer, Baumumrandungen und Sitzgelegenheiten. Ich berichtete über die Bronzierung des Fahrscheinautomats und die Begrünung der Abfalleimer durch Hundeurineinwirkung.

Heute sieht man neben den bronzenen Abfalleimern wieder die alten. Die neuen “kommen weg” (Zitat Müllabfuhr). Man beachte auch den Baum, dessen Metallumrandung angefahren und nicht ersetzt wurde, jetzt mit Holzumrandung.

Hot off the press: the new bronze rubbish bins will be disappearing (tomorrow, I think).

Danilo Nogueira beschreibt ein enttäuschendes englisch-brasilianisches Rechtswörterbuch und einen erfolgreichen Plagiatsprozess gegen einen Nachfolger.

In Hey, counsel, you’ve plagiarized my book! in the latest Translation Journal, Danilo Nogueira summarizes a case of dictionary plagiarism and how it was proved. Surprise, surprise – people in Brazil too buy dictionaries by price rather than quality.

I have never put much stock in Noronha’s. I do not even think it deserves to be called a dictionary. It is just one of those rough-and-ready bilingual wordlists loosely put together by the staff in offices where they have to cope with a foreign language. People just go and throw in everything that comes to their minds on the quod abundat non nocet principle, so dear to Brazilian lawyers. Noronha’s book provides no usage notes, no examples, no collocations, no explanations. Nothing but a term, a hyphen and one or more translations. … It also tells you

* intoxication = intoxicação.

and fails to mention that intoxication translates both as intoxicação (what happens when you eat bad fish) and embriaguez (what happens when you have just had a couple beers with the guys) and nobody ever gets arrested for driving while intoxicado, but driving while embriagado may get you in trouble with the law. In other ways, it does not give you the translations most likely to appear in legal contexts.

There is to be an appeal, apparently. I was surprised the case even went to court, but it’s often claimed you can’t plagiarize the content of dictionaries.

At Christ Church, Spitalfields:

Round the corner from the church:

Smokers, driven out of doors since July 1st, outside Liverpool Street Station; Children of the Kindertransport sculpture by Frank Meisler:

David Currie, im Alter von 71 gestorben, hielt in den achtziger Jahren Vorlesungen über amerikanisches Verfassungsrecht an der Universität Hannover und an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, und später noch in Heidelberg und Tübingen, und veröffentlichte ein Buch auf Deutsch darüber, sowie ein Buch auf Englisch über das Grundgesetz. Er war Professor für Jura an der University of Chicago.

David Currie was a professor at Chicago Law School. His death at the age of 71 is reported by the WSJ Law Blog, which has links to other obituaries.

He studied German as an undergraduate, was a visiting professor at some German universities, and wrote about the German constitution in English and the US constitution in German (seems to be out of print, but the ISBN is 3 7875 5352 5 – I see amazon.de has an interesting page ISBN-Suche giving the option of searching for an ISDN in various catalogues).