Abu Ghraib’s Executioner
For those now gleefully plugging the Bush = Saddam line, there’s an interview in the Telegraph with the ex-hangman at Abu Ghraib prison:
For those now gleefully plugging the Bush = Saddam line, there’s an interview in the Telegraph with the ex-hangman at Abu Ghraib prison:
OK, this blog is officially enamoured of Quaderns, which as well as calling Kaleboel un fenomenal poti poti now says we’re indispensable. A brown envelope is on its way to a smoke-filled office in Andorra.
Here are a couple of fragments from Antoni Rubió i Lluch’s L’Expedició catalana a l’Orient vista pels grecs (The Catalan Expedition to the Orient as seen by the Greeks (1883, 2004 edition translated from Spanish into Catalan)). This is Rubió i Lluch quoting Epaminondas Stamatiades:
Is it necessary after all that we have said that we [...]
The good news for mourners of dead tongues is that in Northern Ireland they’re inventing new languages, dialects and other officially authenticated and subsidised cultural goods at such a rate that the province will soon be exporting the surplus to the Amazon delta. As Jason Walsh points out:
This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:
People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family are nice so there’s hope yet.
A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:
At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:
More educational train journeys here.
The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:
In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge hook at the end of it. The brown body, covered with turquoise blue splashes, was contracting in spasms. The joints moved, sometimes sliding over each other, sometimes turning sideways. Four huge transparent wings, covered with a dense web of
glittering threads, trembled in the air. A monstrous head hammered upon the window-sill.
This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, has been assisted by both the PSOE and the PP in government, trading the feasible need for the support of nationalist deputies for silence. It hasn’t found a commercial distributor in Spain. Maybe it will elsewhere.
Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.