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.