There’s a lot of coverage in both the Spanish and the English press of the tragic death of 19-year old Adán Sánchez. LaMesera.com has a short tribute, along with audio and QT footage of the man and many other fine artists. You won’t believe me, but I originally got into this stuff while wearing a [...]

More from Terry’s Big Adventure:

Nice to see that local power generation rental business, Guimerá, has been bought by a company with real salesmen.

I think it’s generally agreed that Panayotis Soldatos gets the credit for the first use of the term paradiplomacy, way back in 1990 in an essay of his, An Explanatory Framework for the Study of Federated States as Foreign-Policy Actors, in Michelmann & Soldatos, Federalism and International Relations: The Role of the Subnational Units.
While its [...]

Mr Chappell has been rude about us again, but I figure I can take insults from a man who comes from a region where they marry their infant cousins because the ovens aren’t big enough to cook them. This is what he says:

Thierry kindly informs me - thank you, but why? - that Edward Saïd (1935-2003) is scheduled to make a surprise appearance at Voix de la Résistance, a fest being organised to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Le Monde Diplomatique.

Here’s something even idiots like me can understand: Branko Milanovic, World Bank economist and Carnegie bobo, explaining with reference to football why unfettered global markets will inevitably increase quality and increase and entrench inequality. The solution: regulation, with the UN as FIFA writ large. Hmm…
Thank you, Geoffrey!

I’ve seen this happen to a sheep as the result of a heart attack.
Many thanks to Andy “Drunk” Pandy.

Naive do-gooders like me were cheered immensely by the news that the Arab League summit in Tunis was apparently cancelled because al-Bush said the following to his Tunisian counterpart:

Doesn’t look like George Soros is too worried about the new green/red-tinged regional government:

You’re standing there watching a gang of hardnuts running a find-the-lady game. Your wallet’s safely in your pocket with your hand on it, and you know better than to get involved in this type of scam. What you may not know is that this is a new version in which the game is nothing more [...]

The local Spanish conservatives (PP) and Catalan separatists (ERC) are saying that the public launch on April 3rd of Barcelona’s gorgeous new light rail service (nother site) should be delayed, while the crumbly old Catalan nationalists (CiU) have only just stopped short of asking for each tram to be preceded by a man waving a [...]

“Spring is here, spring is here, Life is skittles and life is beer,” sang Mr Lehrer, but first it’s time to park that old Ebro or Simca under an old olive tree (or a holly oak, or whatever takes the wrecker’s fancy):

In the States civil servants get paid to censor vanity plates. Here are a couple that didn’t make it in Florida:

Some more old nonsense from El Diario de Barcelona, 1894/8/22, quoted in Paco Villar, Historia y Leyenda del Barrio Chino (1900-1992):

Tom Shields in his excellent sports column in the Sunday Herald makes the interesting claim that:
Camp Nou was turned into a concentration camp by police… The fans sporting green and white, even those with ingeniously secured tickets for expensive seats at the Camp Nou, were herded through a gauntlet of riot police into a small [...]

Here’s a crummy piece by Brian Whitaker, the climax of which is the news that the miserable intellectual achievements over the last few hundred years of societies dominated by Islamic orthodoxy are all the fault of - quelle surprise! - the USA and Mr Blair:

From the Manchester Times (that’s Manchester, TN, people):

From Juan Antonio de Zunzunegui, El Chiplichandle. Acción picaresca (Madrid, 1940):

Here. Now all I need to do is stop the cat vomiting on the kitchen table.

Mr Losowsky is most insistent that he is not a well-read prostitute. Send him some books, someone.

A foreign baby-trading story in the papers the other day was greeted with general horror. Here then is a Barcelona court statement dated 1946/12/2 and quoted in Paco Villar’s 1997 Historia y Leyenda del Barrio Chino (1900-1992):

There was a big discussion at choir last night about the frightful quality of semen in Barcelona. That’s not an infrequent topic of conversation, but this time it was at least partly based on quantitative evidence, namely a new comparative study by a local reproductive health institute.
The first deranged hypothesis was of a correlation between [...]

El Diario de Mexico says that, once the six Brits (thanks, Andy) make it out of the Central American cave in which they’re currently gravely prejudicing Mexican national security while waiting for low tide, they’re going to be turned over to the country’s immigration service. I’m not sure whether that means they’ll be sent back [...]

“Diet selection was estimated using fecal analysis”

This is for the whistle-playing smack addict who nearly broke my eggs this morning:

Barcelona council has released a couple of specimens of “native” ducks into the city’s parks and is contemplating a similar campaign involving squirrels. The ducks have been operated on to stop them fleeing to suburbs without Chinese restaurants, but in general this is good stuff. Right? Wait a minute:

Don King hedged his political bets pretty well this time round, with contributions going to Dick Gephardt, George W and Carol Moseley Braun. He is not always so diplomatic.

Hahaha…

… are going from bad to worse. First there was the defeat of a tawdry bunch of Manchester liberals by a rabble of saucepan- and mobile-wielding Marxists. Then 70K kids left behind 20 tons of rubbish in a couple of Seville suburbs during an impromptu spring party - organised by phone. And now a colleague’s [...]

Prosecution statement (1946/9/20) quoted in Paco Villar, Historia y Leyenda del Barrio Chino (1900-1992):

I’ve moaned about this before, and here’s a similar complaint in Terry’s Big Adventure:

The 10% myth nailed (via BoingBoing).

Almost forgot today’s (final) instalment (parts 1, 2, 3) of a sentence in Seres Míticos y Personajes Fantásticos Españoles by Manuel Martín Sánchez:
dramatismo.
I like my drama neat.

PL just sent me what he believes is a made-up story by La Vanguardia’s plagiarist moron in London, Rafael Ramos, the essence of which is that the City thinks that our new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is just wonderful. There are a number of problems with the article:

“Clos!” mutters a wealthy neighbour every time it rains, confident that doom is imminent for Barcelona’s dentally salient mayor. In fact the AA rating assigned by Standard and Poor’s to the latest offering of municipal debt is just another sign that Barcelona is in pretty good shape, [insert preposition here] 20 years of Catalan socialist [...]

They’ve nailed Jack Kelley of USA Today, so when are we going to hear some news from Josep Maria Casasús on the fate of La Vanguardia’s plagiarising illiterate, Rafael Ramos? (Here he is with some more porkies in the Independent, full text on al-Jazeerah.)

This is the kind of news that must break the hearts of the beards who want to establish little, backward Islamic fiefdoms:

And here are the 63 words that constitute (part 1, part 2) part 3 of the serialisation of a sentence in Seres Míticos y Personajes Fantásticos Españoles by Manuel Martín Sánchez:

Here, taken on this walk, is a shot of Mexican multinational Cemex’s Sanson cement factory at Sant Feliu, where the Llobregat cuts through the coastal range: