[making a guest appearance & wearing a mask]
I've just Googled it:
The European Directive on the Harmonization of Dovetails (E.D.O.T.H.O.D. pron. "Eddy Thud") was introduced in 1999, by the then Transport Commissioner, Martin Bangemann, otherwise infamous for wanting motorcycles either banned completely* or fitted with airbags*.
Bangemann was concerned that use of different dovetail angles might lead to disastrous situations on historic sleeper trains such as the Orient Express: if passengers pulled hard on drawers in their compartments whilst the train was running on bumpy track, the drawers might come apart completely, leaving everything within exposed to other passengers in the same compartment, not to mention nasty splinters on the floor.
At the time, Bangemann himself was walking with the aid of a cane, prompting speculation that it was caused by just such an incident on the special bi-monthly service between Brussels and Strasbourg. Others claimed he was just a miserable, interfering old git who simply wasn't getting enough (travel, I mean, obviously), leaving historians to argue the point for decades to come.
Leaving aside the fact that drawers were normally treated in this way on sleeper trains anyway, without any complaints (at least in the Poirot-type things my wife likes to watch, featuring steamy brunettes, Tom Hiddleston, etc.), the measure was roughly and quickly draughted by the Commission bureaucrats.
Sketchup being not yet invented, the only resources available were Joseph Moxon, pirate copies of Underhill (on Philips V-2000, naturally) and AutoCad on i386 machines. The latter caused several very nasty cases of schielen-pixel, as, by an internal order from Directorate Twenty (auditing), Commission PCs had been locked at 640x480 to maintain pan-European compatibility with the Accession countries.
Debate in the European Parliament was brief but feisty. The German Democrats claimed that standardization was the only way, and that the old "Escher" angle of 7.68 degrees should be made compulsory ("Der einzige Weg ist Escher"). UKIP's three new MEPs heckled and chanted, "We're all Angles now!". At the time, this was thought to have been an obscure reference to St. Augustine, but later was revealed to have been a reference to Farage's favourite micro-brewery brand, "All Angles" (they actually had pints of the stuff concealed under their desks, as usual).
The vote teetered on a knife-edge (fairly blunt though, as Japanese water stones had been refused an import licence). Despite the initial hubris, UKIP's MEPs couldn't agree on a strategy (and couldn't find their voting cards either by that time). The final vote was 623:0 (UKIP abstained).
Of course, nobody in the chamber had actually read the legislation beforehand. They generally felt that was what they paid bureaucrats for. So the alterations, made by a rogue legal draughtsman brought in from Agriculture, were missed entirely.
Angry about his secondment to transport and being removed from the Field Counting Initiative** of the Common Agricultural Policy, he decided to simply substitute a long, curvy rant about Bananas. Nothing was spotted, until a UKIP aide, trying to use the document to mop up a beer ring on an MEP's desk, noticed it wasn't about dovetails at all.
And the rest is, of course, history.
Thought I should put the record straight,
E.
*Those bits are actually true. He was M.A.G.'s dartboard pin-up for years.
** Also true, sort-of: I had a friend here who worked for the Min of Ag. in the 1990s They had an entire department of 50+ people responsible for field counting (to comply with the CAP). And that was just the West of England bit. One should never say the EU hasn't helped employment in the UK...
