This is a partial answer to a topic that has sometimes cropped up in the comments, here for instance. This was posted after I put something like boiled potatoes in the green bin. Usually, if in doubt (as in the case of meat), I look at the Fürth website, and there it says Essensreste (remains of meals) are OK. The worst (and only other) occasion was when I got a highlighted flyer pushed under my door. I don’t mind being corrected – well, I do really – but I don’t like to think that if there are brown paper bags from eight flats and a shop in the green bin, someone recognizes which is mine.

Hence the query: who else uses the rubbish bins in the street for private refuse, to avoid detection ? And what euphemistic term could one give that –
Fremdentsorgung?

Here’s the list of what goes in the green bin, from the website of the city of Fürth:

Küchenabfälle:
Obst- und Gemüseabfälle,
Kaffeefilter und Teeblätter
Essensreste
Gartenabfälle:
Grasschnitt, Laub
Schnittblumen
Heckenschnitt
Zimmerpflanzen
Sonstige kompostierbare Abfälle:
Kleintierstreu, -mist aus
Stroh, Heu, Holzspänen

For a long time in English we’ve spoken of a person wearing two hats if they combined two functions. Probably the expression wearing a double hat is not completely new, but most of the ghits are very recent.

It usually refers to a future position in the EU and it looks as if Tony Blair made it popular in a speech in November 2002:

There is an overlap between the work of the High Representative and the External Relations Commissioner. Some have proposed that in future this role should be occupied by a single person wearing a double hat. As Javier Solana has said, this would raise practical problems that we need to debate. My point is simply this. Double hatting cannot be a way, through the back door, of communitising the CFSP.

Wearing a double hat sounded odd to me when I first read it. Even odder is the plural: ‘For our session this afternoon, I am wearing double hats’ said Eneko Landaburu in Brussels in January 2006.

This has now gone into German as the Doppelhut.

In der Diskussion über den Vertrag über eine Verfassung für Europa (VVE) ist oft vom sogenannten Doppelhut die Rede. Mit dem Begriff Doppelhut wird auf die Besetzung zweier Ämter durch eine Person verwiesen. Dabei verweist der „große Doppelhut“ auf die Stellung des Präsidenten des Europäischen Rates und die des Kommissionspräsidenten. Der „kleine Doppelhut“ bezieht sich auf die Rolle des Europäischen Außenministers.

Die Welt calls Doppelhut ‘EU-Jargon’. It also comes up in a list of important EU terms.

Here’s a picture of someone wearing two hats, but not a double hat:

Michael Herman in the Times reports that the Scottish postal worker who won £34 m in the Euro-Lottery is giving some to her husband, from whom she is separated prior to divorce. Under Scottish law, the date of separation marks the division of marital property, whereas under English law, it is the date of divorce.

Scott Cochrane, a family law partner at Brodies, said: “Scottish law takes the concept of a clean break on separation very seriously. Even if the Cunninghams did not formally divide their assets on separation, if they now decided to divorce the courts will use the time they separated as the key point and ignore what has happened since.
“The fact that Mr Cunningham, according to reports, has not lived with his wife for several years is a slam dunk: he would have no hope.”

(Whether you believe her maiden name is Kelly or Cunningham depends on what paper you read)

The blog downwärts has discovered the most famous thing about New Zealand law: instead of everybody suing each other for accidents, there is a state compensation scheme. This is an unusual way of dealing with tort law:

Eine Besonderheit des neuseeländischen Rechtssystems ist das sog. Accident Compensation System, das deliktische Schadensersatzklagen weitgehend ausschließt und durch ein System der staatlichen Entschädigung ersetzt: Jeder, der einen Schaden erleidet, sei es bei der Arbeit, im Straßenverkehr oder zu Hause, hat einen Anspruch auf Entschädigung gegen den Staat, gleichgültig, ob der Unfall durch ihn selbst oder durch einen Dritten verschuldet worden ist.

This is usually mentioned in books on tort. Here’s another description:

As students of tort law know, New Zealand is the home of perhaps the most ambitious attempt made in any advanced country to develop a systematic administrative alternative to tort litigation. Its government-backed Accident Compensation Commission provides no-fault compensation for accidents not only on the highway but generally, and its payments serve as a substitute for conventional tort litigation, which is disallowed in a wide range of circumstances where it would be available in more or less every other advanced country. Tyler Cowen has been visiting New Zealand and rounds up various useful links on the ACC, its origins and operations, and the scholarly assessments that have been made of its record.

For the links mentioned here, click on the source above at pointoflaw.com.

The Spanish government paid 12,000 euros for a new logo, the bottom part of which looks a bit like the German one.

Source: English
Spanish, Spanish

More copying in Germany here.

(Thanks to Trevor)

Here’s some Fürth wiring. Actually some of my lighting here comes the same way:

This is probably how Grundig got started. Of course, the greenery is part of the more recent campaign to make the town green.