I’m pleased to assist any of my devoted EuroSavant fans in signing up to Google+!

Here’s the link.

Oh, and here’s my own profile on it: http://www.eurosavant.com/+. I’m not suggesting any necessary connection between the two, and you’ll see anyway that I am far from adapting my Google+ to fully represent EuroSavant, if indeed I ever do so. For now, I mention most – not all – of my posts there, with links to the post itself and to the (main) foreign-language article inspiring it.

UPDATE: Come to think of it, Google+ does offer another forum for readers’ commentary on EuroSavant posts, as a supplement or alternative to our Facebook fanpage. I have to tell you, I’m more likely myself to see what you write on Google+!

(And no, I’m afraid it’s not I who thought of this – thanks to reader “bwsmith” for his/her suggestion!)

The brief of this EuroSavant weblog, as all familiar with it know, is normally pieces from the European press written in some language other than English. Then again, there’s always room for the rare exception. Consider:

For four months Belgium has been without a government, its public debt is approaching 100% of GDP and the spread of Belgian 10-year bonds over the German benchmark is today three times as high as at the beginning of this year. Is Belgium the next country with a sovereign debt crisis?

As if the EU needed another such problem! Nonetheless, with the political system there seemingly unable to form a government, with a national split-up now a real possibility – the option is now being discussed in Walloon (French) circles as well as Flemish ones – who’s going to take care of payments on its ever-expanding sovereign debt?

The analysis, by Susanne Mundschenk and Raphael Cottin for EuroIntelligence, is a couple weeks old but still definitely worth a (belated) mention, as is the accompanying 10-page PDF document that goes into even more detail. All are in English.

Regular readers will know how reluctant I am to intrude in this weblog with posts of an administrative (or anything other than a content-providing) nature. But maybe such a transgression is justified in this case: my WordPress counter tells me that this is the one-thousandth post I have produced here, starting from EuroSavant’s humble origins (and different blogging software, and rather different look) way back in April, 2003.

For what that is worth . . . the main point is to fulfill the promise I made to several e-mail correspondents to notify them when the time came. Otherwise, I don’t get too sentimental about things like this, or much of anything (as is evidenced by another notable personal milestone recently attained). I just carry on, usually . . .

Remember the Hand of Henry? You do if you’re Irish. That refers to the blatant handballs committed by star Barcelona striker Thierry Henry, playing last month on the French national team in a World Cup playoff game, that enabled the winning goal to be scored and sent the French to South Africa instead of the Republic of Ireland. These fouls were evident enough to the millions watching the match on TV, but not to the crew of officials actually in charge of the game, and this result which robbed the Irish of their World Cup 2010 participation was allowed to stand.

Now down in the Southern Hemisphere, the French team isn’t doing very well and will probably fly home after only the three games of the tournament’s first round, but that is not the point. The point is rather the continued refusal by FIFA officials (i.e. from the international football organization in charge of the World Cup) to install any sort of modern technology (e.g. televised replay review) to ensure that officiating travesties like what happened to the Irish can never happen again. This only ensures, of course, that such a thing will happen again, at least one more time, and this during that organization’s signature event that draws the sustained attention of billions of spectators from all over the world – a substantial portion of whom tune in to cheer on their own nation’s team.

Sure enough, another such travesty has come along on cue, namely the denial yesterday to the United States team of a perfectly-valid third goal which would have capped a tremendous rally from a 2-0 deficit by half-time with a glorious win. Instead, the US team earned a 2-2 draw, which gave them a mere one point towards advancing further in the tournament rather than the full three to which the victory they deserved would have entitled them. (more…)

Aygül Özkan: Ever heard of . . . Well, wait! In the first place, is it a he or a she? (No fair looking at the title. And don’t worry, I won’t ask you to try to pronounce the name; I can’t hear you from here anyway.)

Unless you live in Hamburg or in Lower Saxony, you probably don’t have a clue. Aygül Özkan is a she, 38 years old, of Turkish descent. And, as it turns out, she is the choice of Lower Saxony state president Christian Wulff (CDU) to be the Social and Integration Minister in his new cabinet. (She’s also rather pretty, check out the picture – but I’m not allowed to say that about Muslim women, is that right?)

Ah yes: as the profile in the FAZ by Frank Pergande is careful to explain, Ms. Özkan is Muslim, or at least nominally so, the daughter of parents who both emigrated to Germany in the 1960s from Turkey, of which the father has long run his own tailor-shop in the Hamburg suburb of Altona. As it turns out, the “C” in that “CDU” that describes the party of which both she and her boss Wulff are members stands for Christlich, or “Christian”; it’s the mainstream party of the conservative Right that is also in power (under a coalition arrangement) at the federal level in Berlin. It’s the party of Chancellor Merkel – indeed, the Bundeskanzlerin certainly knows who Aygül Özkan is, and a picture of them together has appeared in the press, including in Germany’s leading Turkish newspaper Hürriyet. (more…)

I know that my readers don’t tune in to this weblog to read “meta” blogposts about the blog itself. So I keep those to a bare minimum, and “bundle” such announcements into one such post whenever possible. That’s what I’ve managed to do this time. Astute readers will have noticed the recent accretion of a number of physical changes on this blog’s layout, so now I’d like to point them out – and the additional features and capabilities they make available to you – explicitly.

I’ve had a Twitter-feed associated with this blog for more than a year, but up until recently its function was limited to echoing the titles and (shortened) links to the blogposts. It still does that, but as of a few weeks ago I have also started posting unique Twitter content (the last five “tweets” of which are echoed on the homepage) that fishes from the same broad pool of European non-English-language sources to alert readers to developments for which 140 characters (including link to the original) provides sufficient room for discussion. Such tweets are distinguished by the abbreviation of the information source at their very beginning. Or else the re-tweet source: In something of an analogy to what I do with my regular blogposts, I also often re-tweet news items from other foreign-language Twitter-feeds, discussing them in 140 English characters with original link.

I realize that many of you simply read my blogposts via your RSS reader and so may not be aware of this new Twitter feature; I think that it does offer a new dimension of information, so you should check it out, at least by taking a look at the current last five on the EuroSavant homepage.

Also, I now have a EuroSavant Facebook fan page. You’re encouraged to visit that – just click on the icon towards the top of the right-hand column – especially if you are on Facebook yourself. In particular, this affiliation with Facebook marks a change to my previous policy of not displaying readers’ comments to my blogposts; such comments can now be made when and as you like on the “Wall” of that fan page, and I might even respond. (Direct e-mail is still always welcome.)

In a related development, I have also registered EuroSavant with NetworkedBlogs, an application that enables Facebook users to subscribe to blogs within Facebook itself. Feel free to “follow” EuroSavant to make use of that; you’ll find the widget that provides one way to do so in the right-hand column of the EuroSavant homepage as well (although you’ll need to scroll down; it’s just below that big alphabetical tag cloud).

Regular readers of this blog know that I rarely stray from the functional description given in its tag: “Commentary on the European non-English-language press.” Naturally, I make this assertion as the prelude to one rare instance where I violate that mandate. In mitigation, though, it should also be fairly obvious how close to the functioning of this blog issues of translation are, which moves me to bring up for discussion the “I, Translator” article by Princeton Translation Program director David Bellos published in last Saturday’s New York Times.

As you might expect, the growing capability of machine translation (with the translation facilities provided for free by Google in the vanguard) presents me with a number of fairly challenging questions. Did I simply waste all that time of my past, of my precious youth, learning the various languages that I claim to be able to use at present? (And am I wasting it now as I continue to study others? I’m afraid I can’t stop myself.) Are the translation assignments I occasionally get to earn a bit of money fated to dry up? Is there indeed any point anymore to a weblog supplying “Commentary on the European non-English-language press” when anyone can now plug any given article into Google Translate and read it? (I still don’t believe that last part is actually true.) With these worries in the back of your mind, you expectantly click on an article like I, Translator, one that purports to defend human translation and foreign language capabilities, hoping for a encouraging ego-boost for the home team, for your side, for those who master foreign languages the old-fashioned way. I mean, hey, this is from a Princeton guy!

Did anyone else suffer as bitter a sense of disappointment at what the article actually turned out to say as I did? As for you, Mr. Bellos – Did it have to be so hard? All you needed to do was provide a convincing listing (and explanation) of machine translation’s disadvantages vis-à-vis human translation, maybe with a few disadvantages in the other direction thrown in at the end to preserve an even-handed, judicious aura. What we got instead was almost the opposite. Machine translation (although from Carnegie-Mellon, not Google) saved lives in the Haitian earthquake! Google should be OK “for maybe 95 percent of all utterances,” probably even for use in translating lower-quality literature that “employ[s] only repeated formulas” in its language.

Damn, Mr. Bellos, you’ve given away most of the store by this point; what’s left, if anything, that human translators would be able to do better? True “literary translation” is what’s left, “works that are truly original – and therefore worth translating,” although even then “human beings have a hard time of it, too,” i.e. will still be liable to get things wrong. Gee, thanks. Of course, three paragraphs previously we already learned that there’s no need to use machines for literary translations anyway, since there are more than enough humans ready to do that work. Bellos seems to lose sight of the fundamental consideration that, although there are more than enough human translators available, all or most of them will demand to be paid for the work, while machines will not.

Add in the various other sloppy elements here – “two important limitations” to statistical machine translation are announced, but it’s never clear what the second one is; there’s a brief history given of machine translation, but one of doubtful relevance especially when space is at a premium in a high-profile column like this – and one comes to the end desperately hoping that Bellos did actually deliver a convincing treatment of the whole translation question but that it fell victim to brutal disfigurement at the hands of a human editor prior to publication. (It does not seem to have been fact-checked, in any case; see the appended error correction about Warren/William Weaver.) As it stands, with public advocates like this, those of us who remain exponents (and practicers) of human translation certainly stand in no need of any more detractors.

Hope you’ll forgive me for going off-(blog)topic here. The last time I visited the US, one task on my list was to go to a doctor’s office to get a physical check-up. But the way the receptionist answering the phone at the first place I called went immediately and without invitation into a long introductory spiel about which insurance schemes they accepted and which they didn’t (I was a foreigner: I was simply ready to pay cash) put me off so, that I gave up on the whole idea.

Now we read on-line in the New York Times (Cost Dispute Halts Airlift of Injured Haiti Quake Victims) how US authorities have stopped evacuations of critically-injured Haitian earthquake victims to American hospitals because of a dispute about who will pay for their care. One doctor in charge of a nonprofit foundation assisting in Haitian relief efforts is quoted as calling this delay potentially catastrophic for these sufferers.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you: Health Care Provision – American style! Cut out this crap: Send them on to Canada, or else over to France, where I am (sincerely) sure they will gladly be attended to properly.

But wait – who’s gonna pay for the extra fuel and aircraft wear-and-tear involved in diverting the medevac flights that way? Well, I’m sure there are some French planes there at Port-au-Prince as well, or could be if the American authorities in charge of the airport will allow them to land.

UPDATE: A subsequent NYT article of Sunday, 31 January 2010 now states that the primary reason American medevac flights from Haiti were suspended is because US facilities for treating these patients – mainly in Florida – were simply being overwhelmed. Nevertheless, it does mention Florida governor Charlie Crist mentioning specific financial considerations in a letter he wrote about the situation to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

The renowned Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon was so kind as to answer the question I put to him about whether this weblog would be more valuable as just a “link blog.” In case you’re a bit late to this, trying to take a look at his answer which has scrolled way down, you can search on the phrase “I read 10+ European languages,” but let me save you the trouble, here’s what he opined:

Linking to foreign-language articles is tough — but the eurointelligence.com daily news briefing is good, and something along those lines but done on an intraday basis would be fantastic. Give it a go, see if it’s fun and if it works!

I’m indeed inclined to give that a try, as you will soon start to see on this website, perhaps accompanied on occasion with the longer-type articles I have tended to write this far. As always, reader feedback by e-mail is welcome. (Yes, I suppose I also need to start think about offering an alternate EuroSavant version for reading on the smaller screens of mobile devices!)

If you are at all any regular reader of this weblog, then you presumably are interested in what is going on with and what is being written about in the European press. And, as of Tuesday of last week, you’re in luck! For no less than the European Commission (working together with a “media consortium” which I assume is called “Courrier International”) has since that point had on-line a new European press site called presseurop.eu.

You can read presseurop’s somewhat bureaucratic editorial charter here, but the basic idea seems to be to pick out a selection of interesting articles from a wide spectrum of the European press and – rather than commenting on them and printing translated extracts as needed (if any) – instead actually translating them in full into a wide range of other European languages and then making them available on the website, on separate pages for the separate languages. For the record, those languages, beside English, are Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, and all you need to do to adjust the language with which you view the website is go to the drop-down box in the upper right, underneath the “RSS feeds” link. (more…)

Did the New York Times editors really begin a paragraph in a collective editorial on the website today with “Whomever [sic] the recipients are, they should be investigated . . .”? It appears that they did (it’s the eighth paragraph down).

Shocking! Look, my intent here is certainly not to fire a rhetorical volley against the mainstream media (MSM), of which the NYT is of course the foremost representative. (That would anyway be outside the remit I have set for this weblog, namely “Commentary on the European non-English-language Press” . . . oops, looks like it’s too late for that now!) It’s clear that EuroSavant critically depends on the MSM, although usually its foreign-language variant, for the very justification of our existence. (I would expect that the relationship be viewed as commensal rather than parasitic.) I definitely wish the NYT and all its MSM brethren well, whether they are of direct use to this weblog or not. It’s just that one defense of their continued existence has been their higher standards, of reporting, of accuracy – of proofreading, too. Yet on this evidence it seems that cutbacks on staff at the Grey Lady have reached the point where they don’t even have a copy-editor available to review their leaders, or at least one familiar with the difference between the subjective and objective cases.

(Hat-tip to Talking Points Memo, who nonetheless either did not feel it incumbent on themselves to insert a “[sic]” after the offending “Whomever” or else somehow also did not notice it.)

UPDATE: Aha! I just happened to look again at the offending NYT editorial a week later, on Tuesday 10 March, and that “Whomever” has been corrected! Of course, there is no indication anywhere by the NYT editors that they actually changed anything in this piece after it first appeared on their website, other than that vague statement at the bottom that “A version of this article appeared in print . . .” BTW, just in case you don’t believe me that “Whomever” was there originally, you can check out the quotation of that editorial in Talking Points Memo, where it remains.

Happy Australia Day, mate! It’s the down-under version of, say, the Fourth of July, and because of the topsy-turvy character of Southern Hemisphere seasons those characters down in Oz get to celebrate it in the same nice hot weather we Northerners usually get to celebrate the Fourth, Bastille Day, etc. Nonetheless, it’s perfectly possible to celebrate Australia Day here in Amsterdam (just not in anything even resembling warm weather) and I hope to be able to get away later on to do that.

Yet, as always, we like to be somewhat contrary here at EuroSavant, so that – even though this lies admittedly outside this weblog’s usual remit – I have below for your consideration an interesting video (English-language) I came across on Reuters. Check out the title. I know: it’s hard to believe. The mere thought of such a ban seems so very contrary to the associations we usually attach to the concept of “Australian,” no? But the brief interviews recorded on this clip should leave you with the impression that it all is but a tempest in a teapot. (“Tempest in a C-cup”?) And the beach footage is inspiring.

Anyway, this just gives me the excuse to try an embedded video, something this site has never tried before. Oh, and if you don’t get the reference in the title to “white pointers,” then you’re obviously just not Australian.

So now Israel has unilaterally decided to stop bombarding the Gaza Strip. Gee – why just now? Could it have anything to do with the inauguration of an entirely-new American administration on Tuesday? And could the timing of whole episode from the attacks’ very beginnings on 27 December be somehow connected to a desire to take advantage of the “hands-off” attitude of top American leaders while Israel still could?

For all the evident excitement about Inauguration Day, people need to stay on the alert on Monday, tomorrow: Pardon Day. That is the last day of George W. Bush presidential power, and so surely the day he will issue a set of shocking and unprincipled pardons to protect himself and his underlings from, among other things, war crimes charges. Isn’t this clear? Doing so at any point before would have spoiled the effect of (and probably increased the volume of flying shoes at) his rather pathetic “farewell tour” of self-justifying interviews and press conferences. So stay tuned.

Oh, and Obama has a fresh foreign policy crisis waiting for him as soon as the inauguration euphoria winds down. Yes, it’s Gaza too, but I’m referring more here to North Korea’s new “all-out confrontational posture” towards South Korea (the latter’s military is now on high alert) together with its claims to have procured enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons.

UPDATE: Well now, on the question of further pardons it looks like I was wrong!

It’s a cliché, but oh-so-true: as we all try to make our way in these hard economic times, it’s those little luxuries that have to fall by the wayside. (And all on-line content has to start showing banners or Google-ads or start eking out revenue some other way . . . oh wait . . .) One of the most (in)famous of those “little luxuries” on the American scene over the past two decades has been Starbucks’ offerings of lattes, frappuccinos, and the like, and, accordingly, that flagship American coffee-chain has lately been taking it squarely on the chin in financial terms, and recently announced plans to close 600 of its shops in the US.

That fiscal trajectory, from top-of-the-mountain to down-in-the-dumps is all-too-familiar in these times – does it remind you, say, of Citibank? Perhaps it won’t be too much longer before even Starbucks will stand in need of an espresso-bailout.

That may very well be on the horizon, in fact, and this time from a private and foreign source, as we read on the on-line site of the German weekly Focus: Coffee-farmers want to buy Starbucks. (more…)

The website Politico came out yesterday (fittingly, a Sunday) with an article noting that President-elect Obama has yet to attend church – any church – since he won the election. His two predecessors did manage to do that as they waited to take office – George W. even headed to services while the 2000 election results were completely up in the air in recounts and litigation, poor fellow – but Obama has instead chosen to spend his Sunday mornings at the gym.

A Dutch paper this morning picked up on this story, and naturally it was the Nederlands Dagblad, an explicitly Christian newspaper: Obama waits on going to church. (No sign of the story, though, on the website of that other Dutch Christian newspaper, the Reformatorisch Dagblad.) Their coverage (from the “foreign editor”) for the most part repeats that of Politico, although they also obliquely justify why it might be that the Obama’s have not yet found their new church-home, by mentioning that which church they might choose is currently the subject of feverish speculation equal to that which attended the choice of Sidwell Friends as their daughters’ new school. And they quote an unnamed Obama staff-member reassuring us that “The Obama family attaches much worth to religious experience in a church.”

Yesterday we had occasion to examine the delightful article from the Frankfurther Rundschau by Dietmar Ostermann about the Hummer SUV. Sad to say, Ostermann could not avoid the conclusion that this Monster Car’s days seem to be numbered. But fear not! Hope for resurrection is at hand, as we learn today from Der Spiegel (With the Hummer to the Putting Green) – if you can accept a cut-down model designed to roam on the manicured grass of golf courses, and with electric drive, that is. (more…)

“Ratzinger? The name sounds familiar,” I said to myself when I heard word about the Roman Catholic supremo who henceforth is to be known as Benedict XVI. And in fact this weblog had a discussion only last August of an interview the then-Cardinal gave with the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro. To my amazement, I discovered that I actually agreed with much of what he said then.

Allow a rare personal note here, which at least will be of interest to those of my readers still around who happen to wonder what really has been preoccupying the EuroSavant the last couple of months, keeping him mostly away from his keyboard.

The answer is on this page. Hint: search for “Amsterdam.” It’s probably inevitable that I’ll inflict more about this on you at a later point; in any event, it is quite an all-absorbing side-project, and is likely to become so again.

Administrative entry here, as much as we try to keep them few-and-far-between. Over the past month-and-a-half or so I’ve really been plagued by comment spam. You can read some background here about what this has all been about – what it is these nasty people are trying to gain by this behavior – together with my past warning here that I would have to turn comments to this weblog off every so often to ward away this plague. Like when I went to bed: things really got old the first couple times I failed to do that and so woke up and logged-on to find unbelievable amounts of comments to delete in the early-morning hours.

The problem here was the possibility, or even the likelihood, that readers would want to leave legitimate comments but would find that not possible, with the comments feature temporarily turned off. Those comments would quite likely then be lost, rather than saved for a later time when comments might be turned on. (I know that I, for one, wouldn’t bother to try again later to contribute if I was stymied the first time.) Well, I’ve upgraded the software now, and it seems that it once again is possible to leave comments on while still avoiding comment spam (knock wood).

Just wanted you to know. We now resume our regularly-scheduled (hah!) blog . . .

Sorry, I’ve need to turn the comments off for a little bit on this weblog. Some new antipathy on my part for comments is only half the reason: comments of any kind from interested readers are always welcome, but the waves and waves of script-generated comment spam that I am currently suffering under are certainly not. I gamely do my best to go through and delete each one of these, but when I open my e-mail and the amount there to be deleted is in triple-figures, then I have to find another solution.

I want to keep this closed-comments duration to a minimum, so I’ll shortly be enabling them again – sticking my finger outside, in a manner of speaking, to see if things are relatively “safe” again. In the meantime, if you want to leave a comment and find that you can’t, go ahead and e-mail me and we can certainly arrange something.

The EuroSavant site here was acting strangely for a while today: no archive links, for example, and what is more important, nothing showing up when you clicked any “More” link to get any given full weblog entry. Apologies for that. It had to do with the installation of a software update, and should happen again rarely, if indeed at all.

One thing that update did fix was my trackbacks. I only recently noticed that none of my beloved readers could trackback to any €S entry, because the pop-up window would not provide a trackback URL address. Sorry that I realized that so late, but of course I was never in the habit of trackbacking myself! That’s also fixed now.

EuroSavant heads east, into Internet-café-only Internet access and thus doubtful posting. But I’m back just in time for the aftermath of Election Day.

Yes, it’s true that I have been off-line for a number of days. Please, people. Have you ever heard of Jews?

Could it be that the “O” in “MAO” stands for, say, “Oreshkovic”? And the “M” for “Micah”? Had you thought of that?

Over on his excellent weblog “Informed Comment,” Prof. Juan Cole has already posted his boxscore for the three-week-old Najaf confrontation that is seemingly coming to a close through the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. The losers: the Americans and their Iraqi interim government. The big winner: Sistani. And for Shia insurgent Muqtada al-Sadr it all was a “wash.”

I don’t quite see things that way. I think this is quite an excellent outcome for the American side, even the same sort of “divine intervention” for them that the remnants of the Mahdi Army hiding within the Imam Ali shrine (falsely) claim to be for themselves. True, I am no learned professor, and I don’t watch, hear, or read the Arabic press. (I did know Arabic in the past, but that was a while ago; that capability is now, let’s say, in remission.) But the following argument I offer for your comment and refutation. (more…)

For the first time in a long time I’m taking another road-trip in connection with the SegwayEuroTour. Back with my next entry on Monday, maybe on Sunday. I’ll try to grab the URLs for a review of John F. Kerry’s big night at the convention – what, in the German press? In the Hungarian press? I always welcome suggestions. The problem simply is that, due to time-zone considerations, the candidate is scheduled to wind up his acceptance speech about two yours before my train departs for points east. Any contribution I would be able to make in that intervening time would be instant analysis of the rawest, worst sort.

Here at EuroSavant we’re proud to serve as a bridge and guide to European happenings and European opinion. But just today the thought occurred that maybe it’s time to occasionally – very occasionally – reverse that polarity and turn that “bridge” around to examine the US. The added benefit here is that, since American articles are generally in English, as is EuroSavant, readers can be directed to them without so much additional explanatory commentary. (I do not think that I’ll create a US weblog-entry category to add over there on the left, however.)

This article from the Washington Post was the specific prompt for this; its upshot (so to speak) is that, if you’re sitting in a restaurant (or any other business) just south of the nation’s capital and happen to notice fellow patrons around you wearing guns on their hips – who are not uniformed police – don’t think anything strange is going on. That’s legal, it seems, although some business are thinking of declaring themselves “weapons-free zones.” No, just take in the sight and marvel at it (but carefully and unobtrusively, please!), and just feel it as those stereotypes you’ve held (or maybe have been fighting against) of America as a “Wild West” society presided over by a cowboy president get a shot – so to speak – in the arm.

A couple of readers have recently reminded me of a long-ago promise, still unfulfilled, to read Peter Norman’s book on the European Constitutional Convention, The Accidental Constitution, and then review/comment upon it on these pages. Those are timely reminders, too, in view of last week’s Brussels summit that finally produced a modified draft Constitution that all the assembled governmental representations could agree on. (Within the next two years we’ll see about the very different question of whether the national legislatures and/or voters of each of the twenty-five member-states can agree on it too, a very different question.) The Constitution issue is alive and interesting again, and this book should indeed cast valuable light on the issues involved.

I blame Proxis, the Belgium-based Amazon-clone from whom I ordered this book back in the first week of December (that’s 2003). It wasn’t available right away, which I can understand, so they put the order on hold – and apparently they were able to keep that order on hold for over five months, as the book apparently continued to be unavailable. Put another way, via their website they advertised a book which it turned out they couldn’t actually deliver, within five months at least and who knows for how much longer? (I finally canceled this order a while ago.)

I’ll still be glad to continue to use Proxis, but this is still rather annoying; I was counting on the actual arrival of the book to function as the most excellent kind of reminder that now I needed to read it, for myself and for the benefit of all my €S fans. Now I’ll have to try again. I think I’ll order it this time via that EuroComment site which is the very link I give above to those of you needing more information about this book.

Check out this EuropaQuiz page! (But first disable your pop-up blockers; the reference is thanks to the Daily Czech.) It’s a fun game, it’s free, the questions are indeed challenging – and you can win the prize of having the travel and stay of yourself and a friend to Strasbourg, from 19 – 21 July to attend the inaugural sitting of the new European Parliament, paid for! The whole contest is of course sponsored by that same European Parliament (motto, in the 20 various EU languages: “We’re the one and only!”)

EuroSavant will be away doing missionary work on behalf of the Segway in Copenhagen this weekend. You can read about what this is all about, and previous city-visits, here. Back on Monday, 24 May.

As regular readers (or those who attempt to find something to read?) will have noticed, the €S posting-frequency has lately slowed a bit. I don’t know whether it’s disappointing to you, but it certainly is to me, as even the cursory run through the various European presses that I’m able to do these days reveals all sorts of articles dealing with the various aspects of the imminent EU enlargement by 10 countries. Especially in those new member-states themselves: worries about prices rising, criminals now being able to move more freely internationally, etc. And of course Czech president Václav Klaus doing all he can to throw cold water on the celebrations, even as he is to be found half-a-world away, visiting China.

The true super-readers, i.e. who follow both my websites in parallel (the other one being SegwayEuroTour, which has very little to do with EuroSavant other than a focus on Europe), will realize that one site is currently losing to the demands of the other. That is, it is currently a busy time for me on the SegwayEuroTour: I am going to be able to experience the EU enlargement ceremonies personally, in Prague (even as I can’t find the time to write about it for you, at least before-the-fact), and then the next weekend I’ll be taking the SegwayEuroTour to Berlin.

After that, though (i.e. after about 9 May), the SegwayEuroTour takes a break, so I’ll be able to roll up my sleeves and get back seriously to reviewing the European press to find interesting things to present to you and comment upon. By that point we can even expect to experience the first wave of articles along the lines of “This is what it’s like in the EU?! I want to go back!”

I wanted to put this notice here to stop people from visiting my site in vain, when there is not actually any new content there to see (although you can always browse my archive of articles over there on the left!). The best solution for that, though, is of course RSS, i.e. making use of that white-on-orange “XML” mini-box I have over there at the top-left. If you aren’t familiar yet with RSS, maybe you’d like to learn about it – try here, to name but one place on the Net that can instruct you. (Although, by the way, the RSS reader that I use is Abilon, from Active Refresh. It’s free, of course, and it’s good – the only minus is that it comes with all sorts of feeds pre-installed, which then you have to go through and delete, those that you don’t want to get, anyway.) Wherever you go to find your own RSS Enlightenment, you’ll soon realize that RSS means that you let new content come to you, so you don’t have to go out and needlessly chase it all the time.