- Mohammad Mostafaei, the lawyer with whom I was arrested in Iran, has written a book. He says I am in it too, but I can’t read Norwegian, so I have to wait for a translation.
- Does anyone still remember José Echegaray or Henrik Pontoppidan? No? Well, that shows how overvalued the Nobel Prize for Literature is.
- Young people often express disbelief when I tell them that smoking used to be not only permitted, but completely normal on airplanes.
- The most unmotivated people work in telephone shops, don’t they? This seems to be true all over the world.
- When Mark Twain was 59, he was so broke that he had to embark on a stand-up comedy tour around the world.
- Many countries in South America do absolutely fine without daylight saving time.
- Who would have thought that a French nationalist looks to Russia for funding and to America for inspiration?
- After writing about Mexican Nazis, I should also mention the “Legión de Guerrilleros Mexicanos”. Organized by cowboy leaders, this volunteer army had between 100,000 and 150,000 men (and their horses) at its disposal during World War II, ready to fight off a feared invasion by Germany or Japan.
- This may be of interest to fellow legal translators: at EUR-Lex, you can read the texts of EU directives and regulations, ECJ decisions and much more in up to three languages next to each other. To find the official terminology in another language, this is more reliable than a dictionary.
- How to get my attention when sending an e-mail:
- Any message with a lesser compliment will be disregarded.
- Bad news: each time I run a half-marathon, more people die. This really made me think about the consequences of my actions.
- But the main culprits are the large running events, like marathons in New York, Boston or Berlin. I prefer to run smaller races in the mountains, in the forest or in a small town, anyway.
- Returning to item no.1, here is a video of Iranian lawyer Mohammad Mostafaei and his lovely family (his wife and daughter were with us when the Iranian Intelligence Service stopped us in the street and dragged us from the car).
The Happy Hermit 