This is a bit worrying. With Bayern Munich coming on Saturday – we’re already out of the cup – I wonder if this initiative to wrap the Rathaus tower in an image of turf bodes ill.

This is the artist, Thor van Horn. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look very green from the distance, which is all we have.

But still, the prospective image looks greener. Maybe he’ll do more tomorrow.

In more good news for Fürth, it turns out that Lionel Messi has been keeping masses of cats in a back building here. Now they’ve taken them away from him, maybe he can play for us on Saturday. That would send fear into the hearts of those Schweinsteigers.

Here’s a picture from a few weeks ago. I was very taken with the fan’s green crutches.

Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States

Although the United States is famously a nation of immigrants, Americans often struggle with the pronunciation of foreign words and names. Mispronunciation of even common foreign words is ubiquitous (Eye-rack and Eye-ran spring to mind). Foreign names in legal matters present a particular challenge for legal professionals. The purpose of the Pronouncing Dictionary of United States Supreme Court cases, compiled by YLS students Usha Chilukuri, Megan Corrarino, Brigid Davis, Kate Hadley, Daniel Jang, Sally Pei, and Yale University Linguistics Department students Diallo Spears and Jason Zentz, working with Florence Rogatz Visiting Lecturer in Law Eugene Fidell, is to help conscientious lawyers, judges, teachers, students, and journalists correctly pronounce often-perplexing case names.

They link to a PDF of the article explaining how the pronunciations were found. In some cases there are audio files of the cases.

There are plenty of audio examples, and where a surname is German, they have an American pronouncing it and often a German too. For example, in an 1891 case there was an Oelrichs, and here the American and German pronunciations diverge. I don’t know whether the person in question was a recent German immigrant.

Here, by the way, you can see the distribution of German surnames in Germany.

And here are the real Supremes: Where did our love go?

It’s still school holidays in Bavaria, so at the moment only photos – a potential legal translation post is still on the backburner.

Two men in the Stadtpark. This was taken a few weeks ago, but it’s even warmer now:

At Christmas 2010 I posted about this Bauhaus-type house I had seen on a walk in Upminster (London Borough of Havering).

Now I have found someone to ask about it. David Anderson has a website called Modern London Houses. I had a look at some other houses in Havering, in Heath Drive and Brook Road in Romford, and there was a definite similarity. But the Upminster house, in The Fairway, is quite a one-off building surrounded by others in a garden suburb style.

I wrote to David and he found one reference which was obviously to this house:

It’s obviously a thirties house, and I do have one reference, which is presumably to this house:

The Twentieth Century Society, Journal No2, p120 lists a house built in Fairway, Upminster in 1934 without naming the architect. It was called ‘Oronsay’ and was commissioned by an engineer of the P&O ship SS Oronsay.

The Olympic Games are ending today, but I was well prepared with this book I got at the Grafflmarkt, in which someone has entered all the winners in Munich in 1972. The author was Heribert Lechner and it’s full of diagrams and photos. I think some of the sports have changed since then though.

I’m not really ill but I did finish up in the ENT department of the Klinikum Nord in Nuremberg for five days last week. I had what was described as Neuropathia vestibularis, which could be a virus infection of the ear which attacks the centre of balance. What you see on the photo above is not two pickled cucumbers.

A breakfast:

What looks like a German Saturday lunch, but it was Friday.

Leberkäse (which contains neither liver nor cheese):

Mother Teresa opposite the room where they put warm and cool water in your ears. She may still be regretting being overshadowed by Diana.