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2006-03-13 09:17
In the middle ages - those ages of middleness! - the ambient water
quality in towns varied between "sudden death" and "lingering death"
and persons for this alleged reason preferred to consume a special
kind of bier called "small bier" of very modest strength because they
wished not to die.
Haldis Gundersen, 50, vred p� vattenkranen i k�ket - och ned i diskhon
rann �l.
- Jag trodde jag hade kommit till himlen, s�ger Gundersen till VG Nett.
Haldis Gunderson, 50, turned on the watertap in the kitchen - and down
in the sink ran sweet, sweet bier.
"I thought I had died and gone to heaven", said Gundersen to VG Nett.
Was it a miracle, you ask or enquire? Well, while the Pope might for
all we know find it sufficient grounds to beatify Milosevic, there is
the little matter of the bar on the ground floor and the mixup with
its many pipes and plumbings. Lawks, Saint Milosovic, who'da thunk
it?
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2006-03-10 16:53
�1. It is the Japanese economy!
Japan's decade of deflation was officially declared over on Thursday
when its central bank ended five years of ultra-loose monetary policy
and moved to a regime of managing interest rates.
Oh those deflationary decades!
�2. Gravy train toot toot!
I'm ridin' on the gravy train and feelin' just fine
Ridin' on the train with only gravy on my mind
Man comes up and tells me "Hey you gotta get down!"
I say back to the man "Hey don't bug me you clown!
Gonna ride the train of gravy to the end of the line!"
"Gravy Train", Arv� Guthrie
It
is the European Parliament!
MEPs should spend less time travelling the world and more attending
key votes in order to raise the credibility of an institution that has
long suffered from a reputation as a "gravy train", the president of
the European parliament said on Thursday.
�3. It
is their excellent Lordships!
Charles ["Crusher"] Clarke, the Home Secretary, has decided to
overturn the defeat next Monday in the Commons, setting the scene for
a tug-of-war between the two Houses. He has told colleagues he is
prepared to keep MPs and peers sitting late into next week in an
effort to force the legislation on to the statute book.
�4. It
is the weather!
In Danmark:
Bl�st, kulde, sne i weekenden
Bl�, winds, bl�! Crack your cheeks and sn�!
�5. It is all OK!
And we didn't even know it had been a problem!
Danska kronprinsparet kan andas ut.
Marys b�stis, Amber Petty, �r p� v�g bort fr�n Mark Alexander-Erber
med f�rflutet i Australiens kriminella mc-g�ng, skriver danska Se og
H�r.
The Danish crownprinsesscouple have learned to breathe! [Breathe
prinsess breathe!]
Kronprinsessmary's best chum has ditched her allegedly ex-gangster
boyfriend.
�6. It is the weekend!
Have fun, Varied Reader! We will!
[Permalink]
2006-03-10 09:57
It is over
almost before it's begun:
Het Nederlands honkbalteam is er niet in geslaagd de tweede ronde van
de World Baseball Classic te bereiken. In het Hiram Bithorn-stadion in
San Juan legde het team van bondscoach Robert Eenhoorn het af tegen
Cuba: 2-11.
The Nederlands honkbalteam is not going to reach the second round of
the World Baseball Classic. In the Hiram Bithorn stadium in San Juan
nationalcoach Robert Eenhoorn's team was lost to Cuba, 2-11.
Cuba, isn't it? You're never going to get anywhere against the Havana
Honkballers, for sure.
In other news, our first assessment of the year came back from the
University of Openness with a mark of 86%, which is exactly the mark
we got for most of our assessments last year. We suspect a
conspiracy, for sure.
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2006-03-09 16:36
It is shaving, and its ambiguous relationship with technology:
About 1.7 billion men remove facial hair, 1.3 billion of them with
blade and razor. Each of those customers shaves 20,000 times in a
lifetime, spending 139 24-hour days removing 27ft of facial
fuzz. Seventy per cent of those 1.3 billion wet shavers, furthermore,
favour Gillette over its hated rival, Wilkinson Sword, a company
founded in 1801 as George III's preferred bayonet supplier.
Bayonets!
The launch of the Fusion is the latest offensive in the bitter,
chronically litigious razor war that broke out in 1971 between
Gillette and its sole mass-market rival, Wilkinson Sword, known in the
USA as Schick. That year Gillette, with its twin-blade Trac 2, changed
67 years of tranquil shaving history dating back to founder King Camp
Gillette's patenting of the safety razor in 1904.
Being a tranquil sort of chap, we favour a 1904-style single-bladed
safety razor. It is vair vair nice, except as aeroplane hand-luggage.
Since we are too idle to be sure of shaving every day, we especially
cherish its lack of cloggable interblade interstices.
Since then, a competition in possibly bogus technical gainsaying has
been played out. It's known in marketing as "sneakerisation", in
honour of the panache with which the trainer industry manages to sell
increasingly flimsy and outlandish designs for ever-higher prices.
Slightly to our surprise, there appears to be scientific support for
the superiority of the twin-blade, although no one who is not in
severe need of being beaten about the head with a copy of Bourdieu's
Distinction is making any claims for more.
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2006-03-09 13:52
It
is - as it so very often is - Belgium, man! Belgium!
Frans Bauer gaat veel betekenen voor buitenlandse studenten aan de
universiteit van het Vlaamse Leuven. De universiteit zet de liedjes
van Bauer, Clouseau en Doe Maar in als lesmateriaal om hen sneller de
Nederlandse taal machtig te maken.
Frans Bauer is going to be well-known to Buitenlands students at the
university of Belgian Leuven. The university has set the songs of
Bauer, Clouseau and Doe Maar as reading material for them to get up to
speed with Dutchy-Dutch quicker.
Works for us - where do we sign up?
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2006-03-09 10:21
Dutchbladets - like 'bladets pretty much everywhere and everywhere
else - rely on newswires for much of their news, but Dutchbladets play
it straighter than most: the middlebrow mainstream Telegraaf
and the poshbladet
NRC cover
the birdflu homing-pidgin news in a word for word identical manner.
Word for word, you ask or enquire? Well, almost:
Sier- en postduiven, die nu wegens de dreigende vogelgriep verplicht
zijn afgeschermd, mogen vanaf volgende week woensdag weer naar
buiten.
Dove- and postpidgens, which now on account of the threatening birdflu
obliged to be uplocked are, may from next week Wednesday again towards
outside.
Sier- en postduiven, die nu vanwege de dreigende vogelgriep verplicht
afgeschermd zijn, mogen vanaf volgende week woensdag weer naar
buiten.
So, afgeschermd zijn or zijn afgeschermd; you pays your
moneys and you stakes your cultural capitals.
[Additional reporting from ANP and our zweetie, and especially our
zweetie.]
[Permalink]
2006-03-08 16:37
(We didn't make that up, did we? We learnt it as the last line in a
Zwedish childrensssong when we were an unchildren in non-Zweden.)
Anyway, it
is a very excellent sn�-orkester!
[Permalink]
2006-03-08 12:57
�1. Scouse sn�kaos
It is Liverpool!
SNOWFALL plunged the region into chaos yesterday as one motorist died
and several others were injured in a seven car pile-up.
For large values of "yesterday", at least. (Thanks, Big Sis!)
�2. Hairy lobster?
Hairy
lobster?!
Forskarna har d�pt den nya djurfamiljen Kiwada efter Kiwa, skaldjurens
gudinna i den polynesiska mytologin.
Researchers have named the new animalfambly Kiwada after Kiwa, the
shellfish godess in Polynesian mythology.
(Is that polytical correctness gone mad, by the way? We can never tell.)
�3. A source!
It
is a source:
"Nine English traditions out of ten, old Eustace Pilbrow used to say,
date from the latter half of the nineteenth century" (Pilbrow is one
of the college Fellows in the novel)
C P Snow, The Masters, Appendix (p 309 in the Penguin edition):
�4. Estonian Ice Cricket!
It
is slightly cold:
Cricket fans in Estonia have developed a special icy version of the
game to play during the Baltic winter there. [...]
Ice cricket has been played in the eastern European country for six
years now, becoming a game in its own right.
Ridiculous! Everyone knows they pinched it from the late
nineteenth-century S�mi game of Qriigut!
[Permalink]
2006-03-08 09:23
It is a book on classics, reviewed in tehgrauniad:
The cultural legacy bequeathed by the ancient Greeks, in
such diverse subjects as philosophy, politics, mythology, ethics, art,
theatre, psychology, rhetoric and sport, is incalculable.
(Did the Greeks themselves invent ancestor worship, or is that a
cultural legacy from elsewhere?)
[Permalink]
2006-03-07 15:06
It
is the honkbal!
''I think it will be best for our fans, because, you know, now they
are going to see all of the players playing together on one team,''
added Dominican shortstop Miguel Tejada of the Baltimore Orioles.
As a result, TV ratings in the baseball-playing countries of Latin
America are expected to be high, as they were during the past two
World Series. But the tournament's success ultimately will be measured
by how it's received in places such as China, South Africa and the
Netherlands, where baseball remains little more than a curiosity.
It's not looking good in the Netherlands, if Google Froups is to be
believed. We'll see if anyone deigns to cover their opening game
tomorrow - the build-up has been accorded the deafeningest of silences
since the Telegraaf had a did-you-evah article a month or two (2) ago.
[Permalink]
2006-03-07 11:29
It
is, of course, Belgium!
De Belgische gezinnen dronken in 2005 gemiddeld 80 liter bier, zo
schrijft La Derni�re Heure zaterdag. Dat is een daling van twee
procent in vergelijking met het jaar daarvoor, aldus cijfers van het
marktonderzoeksbureau GFK.
In ongeveer vier vijfde van de gezinnen wordt bier gedronken. Bij een
vijfde daarvan wordt 230 liter bier per jaar verzet. De Belgen zijn na
de Tsjechen en de Duitsers de grootste bierdrinkers ter wereld.
Bier! It is very delicious and it is made out of bier, which is
probably why. The average Belgian drank 80 litres of it in 2005,
which is 2% less than the previous year, which we conjecture to have
been 2004 unless the Belgian calender is less contiguous than our
own.
In about four fifths (80%) of households become bier gedruk. Blah
blah blah. After the Tschecks and the Chermans, the Belgians are the
fattest bier drinkers in the world.
EXTRA: Prinsesse
Dianas d�d var en ulykke. ("Prinsess Diana's death was an
accident".) Nobody tell the Express, puh-lease!
(Did you know that the Express's current tagline is "The world's best
newspaper - and proud of it!" We've had some fairly daft ones of our
own but we could never hope to match the moronic purity of that.)
[Permalink]
2006-03-07 10:12
It is,
once again, the mighty Deutsche Welle's very mighty indeed Langsam
gesprochene nachrichten.
Either our Cherman or our patience has improved, since we can now
stand to listen to it all the way through. We're putting it on loop,
so if we're gibbering by lunch that'll be why.
[Permalink]
2006-03-06 12:38
It is the
extraordinary Wikipedia! We were looking for one of the mock Latin
names of Mr. W. E. Coyote, indefatigable adversary of the Roadrunner,
but the 'Pedia has all of them episode by episode!
Why we were looking in the first place is that we feel slightly like
Mr C in his trademarked position of having run beyond the edge of the
cliff and just looked down to notice the absence of support before
plunging into the abyss.
We have, you see, lately resigned our job, and we do not have another
one (1) to go to. We have, instead, another country and our One (1)
True Zweetie to go to, and we have, what is more, three (3) months'
notice before we go anywhere.
[Permalink]
2006-03-06 10:27
This time, it
is the late Gordon A Craig, author of The
Chermans - once a Penguin, now apparently out of print in Blighty,
and possessor of possibly the finest Franz-Joseph
in California.
Craig, whom Stansky described as "the most distinguished historian of
modern Germany in this country [the FDR] and possibly one of the
greatest in the world," was highly regarded for his numerous books and
articles. These included The Politics of the Prussian Army,
1640-1945 (1955); Europe Since 1815 (1961; still widely
used); a massive contribution to the
Oxford History of Modern Europe called Germany,
1866-1945 (1978); and The Germans (1982). Politics and
Culture in Modern Germany, a collection of Craig's essays that
first appeared in the New York Review of Books, was published in 1999.
If I haven't read your many books, Varied Reader, and let's face it I
probably haven't, please to look after yourself!
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