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2003-08-01 12:10 (UTC)

Safeguarding le steenky cheese, &c

The EU observer is one for the bookmarks, I should say. Look:

Thousands of international companies may be forced to re-label their products as the EU tries to protect its most prestigious generic brands. [...]

A draft of the list is said to include some of Europe's most prestigious brand names - Bordeaux, Cognac, Porto and Sherry; and Gorgonzola, Parmesan, and Stilton cheeses.

Against stiff opposition from the US and Australia, the EU has been pushing hard to place an outright ban on what it sees as false labelling of foreign products with traditional European names.

I rilly rilly love these stories, although not of course quite so much as prinsessor. The many glorious patrimonies! The fierce custody battles over traditions and place-names! The legal twists, and the legal turns! The joy and the heartbreak! (I am not kidding, you know.)

This old story doesn't have the final update on Parma ham (which must be sliced either in Italy or in front of the customer to qualify for the label judges finally decided on appeals of appeals of appeals) but it came up when I was trying to figure out the Cheddar cheese situation:

But others, such as Cheddar cheese, have become so widely used that the EU says it cannot stop producers across the globe using them.

However, while any cheese can carry the name of the Somerset village the words West Country Farmhouse Cheddar are restricted under the EU's Protected Designation of Origin regulations.

Guess what? There's an official web page outlining the products currently covered (I have linked the Swedish version, because there is one, but there's a language-bar at the top, hurrah!) and falukorv, is on the list, Gentlepersons of Gender and Otherwise! (Join us, Norway, and put together we can put the many lutfisk and hvalk�tt pirates to flight, oh yes indeed!)

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2003-08-01 10:08 (UTC+1)

Prehistory, no good for thee

It's been a bit of a prehistory week off bladet - I have spared you the disappointments of Le Point's "special" (they got me last week, too, with with some under-spiced brain "special", sigh. I'm on to your games now, Le Point.) Instead lets have a nice German megalith:

Arkeologer i Tyskland s�ger sig ha uppt�ckt en stencirkel som kan vara Europas �ldsta solobservatorium. Stenl�mningarna n�ra den tyska byn Goseck ber�knas vara omkring 7 000 �r gamla, att j�mf�ra med engelska Stonehenges cirka 5 000 �r.

[Archeologists in Germany say they have discovered a stone circle which could be Europe's oldest sun observatorium. The stone relics near the German town of Goseck are thought to be around 7000 years old, compared to about 5000 years for the English Stonehenge.]

Stonehenge is the most overrated tourist attraction in England, by the way. If you aren't an obsessive paleo-archeologiste and you are spending less than a month in England then do not bother.

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2003-07-31 10:50 (UTC+1)

A marriage made in hell

The pope, a deeply reactionary Polish gentleman with a tendency to dribble and a lifelong celibate, has taken exception to the idea that persons should be allowed to choose their own life-partners without regard for his charmless bigotry:

A document explaining the Catholic Church's opposition to same-sex unions, signed by the Pope's chief theological advisor, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is being published on Thursday in Rome.
[...]
The Pope called on all Catholic members of parliament to oppose legislation which equates what the Catholic Church regards as normal families with gay couples.

And who's that batting his eyelashes coquettishly at the man they call the Divine Daddy of Drool? Why, it's no less than the Warmonger-in-Chief of the Free and Democratic Republic of the United States of America, and he's all hot and bothered himself:

As the meeting opened, President Bush, who is a Methodist Christian, suggested that gay people should not be allowed to wed.

"I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we ought to codify that one way or the other," he told reporters in Washington.

Gentlemen! Tell us less of your nasty Middle-Eastern death-cult's grotesquely attenuated understanding of viable kinship structures, puh-lease! Some of us are trying to have a civilisation, thankyouverymuch.

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2003-07-31 10:51

Sm�rg�spost

Butter your finest gooses, Varied Reader, it's a whirlwind out there.

Fish!: Exactly what does it take for a fish to qualify as Icelandic? Apparently the Fast-Track Fish Packing immigration procedures have provoked legal actions.

La belle dame sans tiara: Felix the Knudlet has turned one, hoorah, but the papers are fixated on its Aspiring Australian Auntie: she has learned another whole word, and has sat on a horsie all by herself:

�Goddag,� sagde Mary Donaldson p� perfekt dansk, da hun k�kt red forbi under sin morgentur i skoven.

�Hello,� said Mary "Knudella" Donalson in perfect Danish as she bravely [sic] rode past during her morning outing in the forest.

Isn't she clever?

Babies brains: How do you interrogate someone who hasn't even Knudella's grasp of language? You strap electrodes to their head, of course! ("No, Igor, just the stick-on ones while the ladies and gentlemen of the media are here.") What fun!

Language lawyering: via Pedantry, a site dedicated to laws governing language status around the world. Which is less surprising to you Varied Reader: that it's as out of date as it is ambitious; or that it's exclusively in French and hosted in Canada?

Gratuitous train link: The fastest train in England, ever. (Readers in countries with modern and functional rail systems are reminded that it isn't kind to laugh at the afflicted.) One of the French science periodicals had a whole Hors-S�rie about the next generations of trains. I was very proud of myself for resisting that.

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2003-07-30 11:09 (UTC+1)

Remarks on being remarkably unremarkable, from Ockelbo

It's that kronprinsess again! (It is very annoying that all this stuff seems to come out in Expressen, when I am a loyal Aftonbladet reader - thanks to Anna Louise for the prod.)

Anyway, she has visited little Ockelbo, where her bestly belov�d Daniel grew up, but they're far too Swedish down there (up there? over there? I have of course no idea at all where Ockelbo is) to be fazed by a mere kronprinsess a-courting.

Det unga k�rleksparet tillbringade i veckan flera dagar i Daniels hemtrakter och kronprinsessan b�rjar nu bli en vanlig syn f�r ortsborna i lilla Ockelbo.
- Folk h�r t�nker inte l�ngre p� att det �r n�got extra, de �r ett par som alla andra, s�ger Erik Olsson, vaktm�stare p� Daniels gamla skola.

The young sweethearts spent several days last week in Daniel's home district and the kronprinsess is becoming now a common sight for local residents in little Ockelbo.
"Persons here don't think it's anything unusual, they are a couple like any other," says Erik Olsson, janitor at Daniel's old school.

Except that one of their daddies is the king, of course. (No prizes for guessing which, sorry.) Personally I would be surprised if Kronprinsfred doesn't get his act together before the Swedish parliament asks itself on behalf of the king on behalf of Daniel for Vickan's fiskekutter in marriage, but I'd certainly now want to see the odds before placing a wager...

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2003-07-30 09:14 (UTC+1)

Bull Market in Spanish

I am told that a certain Mr Beckham of Manchester, a football player, has recently moved to Madrid, which is in Spain where they speak Spanish and that.

For reasons I do not claim to understand this is considered to be news even outside Lancashire:

The Schools Minister, Stephen Twigg, said Spain was England's number one tourist destination and Spanish was the second most important European language for business. But few teenagers study the language in school and the government has made the pursuit of any foreign language optional at GCSE level.

Mr Twigg is Schools Minister so it would be unforgivably rash to assume he could find his arse with both hands, but "this second most important European language for business" claim is intriguing nonetheless. Is this just timeshares and tourisme, or did Spain become the throbbing powerhouse at the heart of Yoorpean business without me noticing?

An unscientific study of the prospectus for the College where I study Swedish suggests that Spanish is the most popular language in adult education by a metric shedload. Meanwhile the Frenchy-French is still just about holding Italian off for second place, and there's more chance of seeing the Engleesh sauntering down the high streets in lederhosen yodelling vigorously than of seeing them enroll for German classes. (Swedish is on the syllabus mostly because the head of the department is Swedish, but in any case learning Swedish is considered harmlessly eccentric rather than an act of treason.)

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2003-07-29 15:54

Auntie to the rescue

Engleesh-speakers are not eating up their nice foreign languages, yum yum, as everyone knows, but the BBC would like to fix that.

There's an extraodinary quantity of stuff there, if French, Spanish, German or Italian happen to be your thing. The beginners' stuff is very functionally orientated and grounded in practicalities, though, and I really find it hard to cope with that sort of malarkey. The unbegginers' stuff is much better - French slangs, anyone?

Meanwhile, I'm currently 40% of the way through the syntax section of my syntax-focussed German course, and my parsing skills are coming on apace and I'm enjoying it all a good deal. It would be churlish, I feel, to complain that I still don't actually know any German words yet. To everything there is a season and all that, and it's early days yet.

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2003-07-29 11:24

[book review] An anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks.

Sacks has made the field of neuro-anthropology his own, and the seven accounts included here confirm his mastery of the discipline - they read just fine as gee-whizzeries of the differently neurologued, but Sacks is always trying to find a way in to an understanding of the mode of being of his patients (in many cases turned collaborators); without slighting the organic basis for their symptoms, he remains preoccupied by the constructions of selfhood that work around or incorporate them.

Certainly, there is enough spicy goodness here to problematize any facile and reductive theory of mind (which included all of them the last time I checked), from the eidetic memories of the Painter of Pontito, condemned to endless visions of his boyhood town, to Temple Grandin, autistic abattoir designer extraordinaire,'s account of a visual mode of thought unmediated by language (which she struggled to acquire) and her claim that her mind doesn't implement repression in the psychoanalytic sense.

If Sacks is relatively unforthcoming about the seasonings appropriate to different types of neural deficit, this is the book's only significant weakness.

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2003-07-28 15:26 (UTC+1)

My (Spicy) Brain Hurts

Not so much an optical illusion as an intimation of the crawling horrors that lurk where the Old Ones wait, beyond the Euclidean conception of space to which man's minds are mercifully confined.

Which reminds me to ask, what in Cthulu's hideous name is the eldritch horror men call a "snickerdoodle"?

With articulated head and arms, red eyes that light up with love, and a sweet, shy expression, Carl is as irrestible as an unfathomable being of incomprehensible horror can be. Before you go mad with terror from the sight of his true form, you'll want to rub his tummy and give him balloons and snickerdoodles.

[via Plurp]

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2003-07-28 12:53 (UTC+1)

The nice thing about being a mathematician

Not that I am one, really, but it still feels like my native affiliation. Anyway, the nice thing is the way that we slice problems differently from other persons. It turns out that the techniques my group has been developing would be good for fashionable problems in cosmology as well as ocean dynamics, and the people in cosmology are currently doing it all wrong.

Probably we won't have time, but it would be dead cool to pretend to be an astrophysicist for a while. ("I mostly do oceanography, but I'm an astrophysicist on alternate Tuesdays.")

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2003-07-28 10:19 (UTC+1)

A chart to untold riches, me hearties, aarrrr!

A map of the brain, hoorah:

Dr John Mazziotta, an expert on the imagery of the human brain from the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) said: "No two brains are the same. Their shape. Their size. The way they are organised."

And, of course, their spiciness. (I would summarise what the story says properly but it doesn't go beyond "They've made an archive of brain scans and it's rilly rilly cool," which of course it is.)

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