Those of you who share my support for the struggle against illegitimate power and privilege will have been delighted by the defeat last week in single combat of that decadent Spanish aristocrat, Rubén Ramírez Hidalgo, by a humble English poultry farmer, Tim Henman. (As you know, hidalgo (”nobleman”) is but a concertina arrangement of hijo [...]

It’s not very long, but just try saying it. (Found in the Dutch section of this page while updating this page. It refers to the apprentice of the guy who makes the keyholes for the locks on the collars of greyhounds. Or whatever: I’m not an expert in Dutch canine bondage products.)

Says Marwan Issam from his computer games stall in a centre of Sunni terrorism:

The French section of Squat.net is brilliant. It’s where you publish stories that reveal even more of the *real* truth than Indymob can take. For example, the neoliberal press claims that Sant Joan, the local midsummer night feast, passed off without trouble. Wrong! Fist informs us that

Following the post on evidence in Barcelona of the relationship between Saddam and Alkiedoodah, I have had several interesting conversations with The Right Reverend Dom Gelul. His work (and I paraphrase the jacket of a book by Kamal Salibi):

Writes Vince Stankay of Florida in response to news of increased penalties for drunk drivers in Slovakia:

Usually when the Olympics come to town there’s a big clean-up, during which junkies with little muscles get kicked out to make way for junkies with big muscles. That’s what happened in Barcelona in 92, but from this op-ed piece by Costas Iordanidis in Kathimerini it sounds like the Greek government is not having it [...]

A new study, Fish intake during pregnancy in relation to offspring’s early cognitive development, shows that
women who ate fish regularly during pregnancy had children with better language and communication skills by the age of 18 months.
Interesting, then, that fishermen seem to be such silent ghits:

Life really is much better now that many Christians and some Muslims realise that chopping up and burning gays and lesbians does not generate good PR. Contemporary hate money goes on marketing campaigns based - quelle surprise! - on mumbo-jumbo:

The cultural naivety of Irish political atavism is evident in this placard. NO RED CARPET FOR KILLER BUSH, it says. Smart opponents would have tried to change the meaning of the red from whatever it originally was to reflect the blood which they would have us believe Bush is spilling needlessly.

Yesterday I received a letter from Holland whose relevance was diminished somewhat by its having been stored for four weeks en route, presumably here in Barcelona. Correos, the Spanish post service, is one of the many relics of a culture that Francis Bacon described four centuries ago:

Mark Liberman notes that Nuer is considerably more irregular than English, which leaves me wondering how to measure linguistic irregularity. For example,

Can we include orthography as one of our criteria? Nuer orthography looks pretty rational, and certainly has none of the ghoti-ness of English.
What about actual use? I’ll bet Nuer isn’t as rich in ers [...]

It will be of particular interest to the deranged conspiracy theorists who make up roughly half of Barcelona’s population that there is a shop called Goma 2 (Goma 2 was the explosive used in the Madrid massacre) just a couple of blocks up from a beer factory called Sadamm (or however you spell it):

One way of passing evenings when a talking pig looks like being the highlight of the televisual entertainment is to improvise stories on the basis of collections of found words. Here is a short Chinuk-wawa glossary, taken from an article by Nancy Bartley on the language revival which appeared in the Seattle Times:

chinuk-wawa
english

QHata Nayka
How are [...]

“Then the monsignor left the altar and told us that we could start killing the Jews.”

Where boring old Ulster farmers just used to store A for horses, Dutch farmers would park that shiny new Mercedes where the tax inspector couldn’t see it. Catalan farmers however are undisputed champions when it comes to the creative use of their barns:

This type of soil has no market value, so the only explanation that [...]

One of the principal flaws in the Vatican’s claims that the Inquisition was not really all that bad is the supposition that the distance that now exists in Spain between church and state was also present when torturing and burning women was the norm. It’s possible that the Spanish state tortured and burnt more than [...]

I know more Catalan geology than most trombonists, but this paper, Stratigraphy and petrology of the Miocene Montjuïc delta, was an absolute revelation (and I’m not just trying to demonstrate to you what a smart git I am). The graphics and tables are lousy quality, but from now on the text is kind of compulsory [...]

Mad Andy has a good old laugh at The Guardian for writing that

The mini-site called Barcelona Chronicle - which someone presumably gets paid to produce - is an example of just how bad non-native translation can get. If you were to generate the page automatically then you’d probably have a similar percentage of incorrect words but the spelling would be better.

There was a sad report on the Beeb last week about the Woodwards from Guernsey who were robbed by a gang on the A7 near Tarragona after having a tyre shot out:
The incident is the third of its type in the area in the last month. Spanish authorities believe the shooting of car tyres is [...]

The Observer informs us that

“My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.”

Sez Roland Piquepaille of Mindjack:
An international team of neuropsychologists has improved a device named “Tongue Display Unit” (TDU) pioneered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The device consists of a grid of 144 gold-plated electrodes set in the mouth and able to activate the cerebral cortex, the area of brain normally used for vision, [...]

I caught the first train out of town this morning to go and inspect what a certain farmer has in the fields round the the back (large sections of horse skeleton) before the man rose from his slumbers. Sitting across the carriage from me was an attractive woman, and at the next stop a drunk [...]

Here’s a photo of Gypsy Eric in his first proper job after attempting to cycle to the Ends of the Earth with two pigs, Space and Time, in his panniers. He was quite frequently stoned during the trip, and children also threw rocks at him, partly on account of his clothing but principally because of [...]

Interlingua is a highly user-friendly language with a pedigree that is a bagful of doughnuts better than bitter, twisted Esperanto. Try this:

I’m pretty sure this picture is of the boar-pig hybrids mentioned the other day:

Talking of the Italian hostages in Iraq, Alessandro Cevese, foreign ministry flunkey

Submerging Markets is the only blog I know of that gets scraped by Google News. I don’t know if they’ll take Kaleboel now that Gypsy Eric the Beerstainvoyant has finally signed up to float by occasionally. Send in your photos…

The Organització pel Multilingüisme wants the Spanish royals to start using Basque and various other lesser-used languages in official ceremonies. That seems fair enough to me, but what I found interesting is that they only seem interested in languages which are associated with racist or ethnicist nationalism (list is page right, halfway down).

Lesson 1 in football: referees are blind, not deaf.

Max Weber is apparently alive, well, and recycling his thoughts on social stratification as differentiated market pitches for Ming Pao:

Dean Takahashi has a lovely little piece on Charles Walton, the man ultimately behind the technology being used at Baja Beach Club here in Barcelona to bill drinks wirelessly. Radio frequency identification (RFID) initially lost out to the barcode and his invention was also turned down by General Motors, which viewed it as too ”Buck [...]

Qov, who has just commented an old post, appeared in the documentary called Earthlings: Ugly Bags of Mostly Water and writes a blog, bo logh, in Klingon, which is most admirable. (Are there more blogs in Klingon than Welsh?)
Anyone got video of TV3 news on Saturday? Apparently my choir were on it.

Stalin apologist Rafael Poch has published an article in La Vanguardia which belittles, falsifies, misrepresents the Normandy landings. That’s a common line here, where quite large numbers of people still believe that Stalin (substitute Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Companys etc as you will) was a benevolent (although misunderstood) genius. All’s quiet on the domestic front [...]

Barcelona’s Forum will resort to anything now to get anyone, anywhere to take an interest, so yesterday a bunch of children who are being held for commercial purposes by the organisation were made to release two sea turtles into the Med. Cute, except that this section of the coastal waters is so full of junk [...]

A brief text paste from the front page of an automatically compiled spam portal for Las Vegas:

Glad to see that separatist Catalanist, Ernest Binatch (sic), will be leading a Catalan parliamentary delegation to Morocco next week. Le Matin’s source informs us that “the delegation will pay visits to the areas of Fès, Meknès and Casablanca, during which they will meet the presidents and the walis of these areas.” Since the trip [...]

Polifònica Industrial, the choir of which I am apparently director, is singing and prancing around at the Marató de l’Espectacle at the Mercat de les Flors at 22:25, tonight, Friday. We are going to perform a mild parody of some West African light music with a text in favour of the commercialisation of popular beverages. [...]