anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
Lorna’s Shorts is a feed consisting of English summaries of Barcelona news which you can use for free on your website. The standard version looks like this:
You can use Lorna’s Shorts if you understand and accept the following terms and conditions and any that may subsequently be imposed, news of which will be [...]
On Saturday, while I was being chewed by a sheepdog with an intestinal disorder, that notorious socialist Catalan republican separatist (I think that’s the correct sequence), Francesc Ferrer, was watching the Spanish royal wedding. Our Francesc takes life seriously - his writing leads one to suspect that he, too, was once bitten by a dog [...]
By a real live linguist, re criticism of Bush’s “hesitant pronunciation of Abu Ghraib”.
John Chappell writes that “Only [Rafael Ramos] could somehow establish a comparison between a 1930s realist painter and the Iraq war.” What, Barcelona’s leading illiterate plagiarist with an original idea? John might change his mind if he checked Jonathan Jones’ Guardian article, published last week. In fact, all that Ramos (search) adds to the sum [...]
Check the front page of the Vilafranca weekly, el 3 de vuit, but be quick: they might publish something.
I reckon that most of the money invested by local and regional government in providing e-services, ranging from bog-standard pages for rural councils to the more ambitious attempts seen here in Barcelona, was wasted. This is because most projects served either as a means to funnel money to new media businesses set up by the [...]
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Vilafranca is a quiet country town, but the weekly market attracts an interesting range of pickpockets. Hopefully numbers will increase as the works in the main square are completed and the recession begins to bite. This lady put her hand into S’s pocket at a vegetable stall:
She works with another Latin American women with magnificent Indian features who she is calling to find out where she has got to. The stallholder says they are both newcomers. Neither had time for interviews.
Barcelona. Shop no 1 is closed at 11:30, well within its normal opening hours. The iron street blinds are down and there’s no message posted, so I walk across town to shop no 2. Yes, no problem, pay now and we’ll confirm the delivery date in a moment. The call comes a couple of hours later:
- That model isn’t available right now.
- When will it be?
- We may be able to tell you later this month, so to save trouble why don’t you just buy this more expensive model?
- No thanks. I’ll be over later to get my money.
- Oh, we’ll have to see about that.
I tend to try to buy through foreign suppliers and I pray for the day when the Chinese will be running everything. Call me a racist, but it keeps me out of the loony bin.
It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of sovereign debt) informs us that it did so thirteen times between 1500 and 1900. I rather liked this Punch item on steps towards a more united Europe, dated September 1 1860:
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SPAIN, put up by France and Austria, as a candidate for admission to the United European, has been blackballed by England, who declines to associate with an Uncertificated Insolvent. Spain is so frantic that she is half inclined to pay her debts, but will probably think twice over so rash an act.
The Dutch haven’t got any genuine armed forces, so they’re sending in the bailiffs to repossess office furniture from the Dutch Icesave, which has also done a runner.
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