Boing Boing links to Bad Toon Rising, which describes itself as follows:
bq. Bad Toon Rising is a collection of drawings of well-known cartoon characters produced by amateur artists entirely from memory and without any reference materials whatsoever.
A lot of them are much easier to recognize than the Pink Panther above.
Via Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites, on August 19th, a blog about autopsies, Autopsy Report, by a medical examiner intern. Looks like a good read. That in turn has a link to the Virtual Autopsy site.
Handakte WebLAWg quotes the Kurier reporting that the people’s advocates are getting more work, or at least were in 2002, as the result of a TV series about them. The Volksanwalt (Hausmaninger in The Austrian Legal System – ISBN 3-214-00239-2 – calls them People’s Advocates) is a kind of ombudsperson introduced in 1977. Ombudsmen or ombudspersons act as intermediaries between the public and the administration. There are three Volksanwälte, one from each of the three strongest parties in parliament; they serve for six years and can be reelected once. The Volksanwaltschaft/People’s Advocates’ Office is a federal office intended to help the legislature supervise the administration. About one-third of last year’s complaints from citizens were outside their jurisdiction, however.
There isn’t anything quite like this in Germany. Some Länder have Bürgerbeauftragte: Rhineland-Palatine has had one since 1974 (German); and there is a Petitionsausschuss (German), a committee on public petitions to which people can apply on federal level.
For any language enthusiasts who have read this far, there is a Volksanwaltschaft in Südtirol / South Tyrol too, and there is a website giving the details in German, Italian and Ladin. I heard of a child in South Tyrol who spoke Ladin at home, German at kindergarten and Italian everywhere else. Here is what is apparently a Ladin news site (but I’m open to correction here).
Slightly off topic, but now it is lawful in the Netherlands to buy small amounts of cannabis for medicinal purposes, perhaps some light should be cast on the difficulty of getting superior tomatoes – at least in Britain. The Independent reported on August 19th. I think things are slightly better in Germany, though I recall that manufactum sometimes sells potatoes ‘for cooking only’ that are clearly seed potatoes of a variety of obscure types.
Here is a photo of some nice tomatoes in an Italian supermarket.
HandAkte WebLAWg links to a superb Irish law portal, at University College, Cork. It has a wide variety of links, including a mailing list that has archives dating back to 1994, events, legislation, and the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Law blog links to Bild Zeitung’s collection of Die schrägsten Vorschriften Deutschlands – Germany’s weirdest official regulations. Here’s an example:
bq. Der Tod stellt aus versorgungsrechtlicher Sicht die stärkste Form der Dienstunfähigkeit dar.
(Unterrichtsblätter für die Bundeswehrverwaltung)
bq. “From the point of view of pensions law, death is the most extreme form of unfitness for work.” (Teaching materials for the German Federal Armed Forces Administration)