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2003-08-01 12:10 (UTC)
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!)
[Permalink]
2003-08-01 10:08 (UTC+1)
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.
[Permalink]
2003-07-31 10:50 (UTC+1)
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.
[Permalink]
2003-07-31 10:51
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.
[Permalink]
2003-07-30 11:09 (UTC+1)
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...
[Permalink]
2003-07-30 09:14 (UTC+1)
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.)
[Permalink]
2003-07-29 15:54
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.
[Permalink]
2003-07-29 11:24
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.
[Permalink]
2003-07-28 15:26 (UTC+1)
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]
[Permalink]
2003-07-28 12:53 (UTC+1)
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.")
[Permalink]
2003-07-28 10:19 (UTC+1)
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.)
[Permalink]
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