Bad news: the cat has become a coke addict and has taken up snooker.

Amid celebrations of plane crashes and the imminent extermination of everyone congenitally uncongenial (uncongenital?) to a deranged fascist from Omaha, Malcolm ZZZ in his must-read 1963 Alex Haley interview for Playboy makes the following interesting assertion :
When I’m traveling around the country, I use my real Muslim name, Malik Shabazz. I make my hotel reservations [...]

The cat has learnt how to play football. She can do sideways passes and penalty shootouts with a pencil stub and we’re now working on basic cocaine technique.

The use of an Anglicism, esquàter, is a grave handicap to the popular struggle against the neoliberal Satan and should be resisted. Although esquàter obviously hasn’t yet made it into the Catalan-Valencian-Balearic dictionary of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, okupa, the normal usage, doesn’t appear either. So what does the right-thinking bourgeois Catalan say to the [...]

Belgium is, of course, not the only country with problems. Why does urgent post from Barcelona to Britain take longer than the regular service?

No, it’s not a Belgian joke: in Belgium you can send your email and have it delivered, registered, by a smelly man with a severe drinking problem, all for only €9.84. The business offering this innovative service, Certipost, is a joint venture between the dismal old state telecom and post businesses, Belgacom and De Post, [...]

Like a tree quick, rooted in the wind…

There has hitherto been little acknowledgement of the pivotal role of the B3-34 Soviet programmable calculator in popularising difficult topics like marine and space exploration. Sergei Frolov (author of essays like Bugs, Undocumented and Interesting Features of Soviet Calculators and an interesting introduction to early Soviet semiconductors, and a pretty good photographer of butterflies) is [...]

If, as Francesc Ferrer writes, the Carod scandal is a Madrilenian plot to discredit Catalan nationalism, why did Carod fall for it? He’s not a Spanish agent, is he?

If you’re not already tied up (or down) this evening, try to make it along to the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (Carme 47), where John Barrass, director and editor of Barcelona Business, is giving a talk at 19:30 entitled Invertir a Catalunya: totxos, cargols i carreteres. I think it’s open to all, and, with Aragon apparently [...]

One of the greatest benefits of country walks around Barcelona is the break they provide from street rage induced by the complete lack of interest shown by urban pavement users in the needs of others.
The conventional explanation is that bumping is the result of a different sense of the relationship between self and society, [...]

This is good: the NY Times says that smart dealers are trawling eBay for misspelled items, buying them cheap, spelling them correctly and relisting them:
John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them. Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he cleaned [...]

Hell, I didn’t know that Thomas Pynchon had been referred to on the Simpsons, nor that we’ll get to see him (not) on the show in Spain in about 2010.
Via Elastico.

In a country in which even traffic wardens carry guns, both ERC, the party of disgraced politico Carod-Rovira, and its youth wing, JERC, like to refer to ETA as an armed organisation. Why this vagueness? A wolf and a sheep are both mammals, but it seems to me important to be able to distinguish between [...]

Hahahahahahaha. This is going to drive La Vanguardia’s apparently deranged plagiarist and liar Rafael Ramos completely bonkers. After months of him telling us, allegedly from London, that Blair’s lies and the BBC’s overwhelming saintliness were about to be exposed for all to see, it seems that Hutton has said the opposite. Now, I’m sure The [...]

Featuring Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, Uncle Joe Stalin and the Singh brothers from Mohali.

Far be it from me to want to draw attention away from the Carod Rovira roadshow or to mock or criticise Esquerra in any way, but is it really true - as someone in a position to know told me last night - that Carod’s party colleague, Jordi Portabella, is heir to a decent proportion [...]

This suggests that it may not be as easy as I had thought to have myself declared a latter-day Celtiberian.

Tearing myself away from puffing the undoubted pleasures of wines of the Penedès for a moment, I would point out that mediaeval Romance languages constitute another possible origin of the use of k- instead of c- or qu- by naughty boys and girls. Here’s a brief and highly speculative sequence of events that I hope [...]

JWdB asks:
How can a force that acts upon matter stop the expansion of the space that matter sits in?
Go and make fun of him.

Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain:

One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.
If the [...]

The Herald (Glasgow):
Regions such as Catalonia, Quebec and Britanny and countries such as Ireland show that promoting and investing in a distinctive culture can reap dividends in tourism and profile.
Does that make nationalism tax-deductible?

Following on the tense Berlin climax of the beer-from-Mars post, I suspect that the Tiergarten may also provide the key to the following excerpt from a message posted by a furriner on behalf of the nice Catalan boys and girls who dress up as squatters and spraypaint daddy’s bank (but not mummy’s 4×4) instead of [...]

La Vanguardia’s front page lead this morning is the revelation that - far from being the spontaneous result of an evening down the pub - Samsung’s decision to shift operations to Slovakia was considered in advance and that the negotiations were conducted in secret! Honorary MBAs all round for the journalists responsible for exposing this [...]

… or so says the Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing Company, which gives employees free beer, bicycles, and trips to Belgium and runs the first wind-powered brewery in the US. Sounds good to me, said this sinkhole for Belgian beer, angling for a freebie XL Fat Tire t-shirt.
There’s an unfortunate tendency to take advertising claims like [...]

Apparently they’ve found the remains of a mosque down in Siurana de Prades, which was the last Muslim stronghold in these parts and which fell to Ramon Berenguer IV in 1153. The following anecdote was included in the C13th/14th author Al-Ḥimyarī’s geo-historical encyclopaedia Kitāb al-rawḍ al-miʻṭār fī ḫabar al-aqṭār and is quoted in one of [...]

If CNET are so bloody clever, how come I receive their Morning Dispatch at five in the afternoon? Three concepts for further study: IP mapping, time zones, personalisation.

Intrigued (and overjoyed, as always) to receive a mail from my good friend, Moses Aziz, in which he writes (my emphases):
Dear Friend.
As you read this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday… I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer . It has defiled all forms of [...]

Tom Cruise’s devastating critique of the moral bankruptcy of societies in which hats are worn sans horns is borne out in The Daily Yomiuri’s crime stiuris. Today’s highlights include dramatic accounts of the deeds and denouement of

71-year-old pickpocket Onna Ginji. Named after Shitateya Ginji (Ginji the Tailor), leader of a large Meiji period gang, [...]

It may seem childish, but it did please me to discover that Doris Moreno Martínez was supervised for her thesis on the Inquisition in C16th Catalunya by one Ricardo García Cárcel. Having survived his encarcelación in these parts, Abenatar Melo escaped to Amsterdam where he wrote a verse version (1626) of the Psalms of David, [...]

So there I was, dear reader, saying the nicest things about Margaret Marks. And now I discover, to my dismay, just the vaguest trace of irreverence in her posts (1/2) re John Cage’s 4′33″, implying that she secretly possesses seven heads, ten horns, various crowns, and upon her heads the name of heresy. For what better than a piece that can be performed by anyone, that provides automatic free updates reflecting changing soundscapes, and that reminds one of Thoreau when he writes:

Dertig döllig opgetuigde kinderwagens worden door evenveel dronken mannen in de binnenstad kapotgereden. Alaaaafff!

“Sh*t, operating as the preeminent figure of self-alienation …, becomes a symbolic medium for questioning the place of the autonomous individual in new postcolonial societies.”

Any experts out there? I’m interested in the bit in art 16 that says “La citación para la Junta ordinaria anual se hará, cuando menos, con seis días de antelación”. Do the six days refer to the point in time at which one has to have been made aware of the meeting, or to the [...]

Giles Tremlett has an amusing/alarming article on the local man who is being required to pay more than half his monthly €980 (£678) disability pension in order that his mid-20s sons may lounge around at his ex-wife’s home. I don’t know what British law is like re parental obligations to keep feckless offspring approaching middle [...]

… exits stage left, his daily Z done:

Coets (”rockets”) refer to the fireworks sold (and presumably concocted) by Drac Màgic, a small business that we pass on this walk. If you inspect the larger version of the photo carefully, you’ll see the Virgin of Montserrat on the ceramic top right. In an initial wave of naive enthusiasm, I thought that the propietors [...]

Why the hell has the cat started licking pears?

Handy performance tips for the new eggcounting

Through the serpent have come all evils in the world.