I and the cat are in no doubt that all this public nakedness is linked to the campaign for a new statute of autonomy, and that Clos or Carod or Maragall or someone is going to emerge as a contemporary Jantje van Leyden. “Who?” rises the cry from the Catalan street.

That’s what this morning’s El Periódico says. The council is promoting it along with two naturist bodies, ADDAN and ALETEIA, and there’s a pamphlet featuring a naked woman up on Montjuïc. Now, the thought of naked girlies is likely to give immense pleasure to local coppers, who like nothing better than standing around in the [...]

Most of you will only have heard of Spanish socialist defence minister, José Bono, for his having called Tony Blair “a dickhead” and for his having awarded himself a gong for flying the small Spanish contingent out of Iraq and back to barracks. It would be unfair of this blog to focus on Catalan ethnofascists [...]

A glittering prize for the person who, on being asked to select his channel’s best 10 programmes for veteran news broadcaster John Humphrys, “sent him tapes of programmes such as Banzai, Breasts Uncupped and Nip/Tuck.” There is, however, a glaring inconsistency in his criticism of reality telly and defence of news journalism: on the one [...]

There is no sound quite as revolting as an ex-street cat on heat and with ferocious nasal congestion licking its posterior end, and the smell is not exactly Scandinavian pine either. Jimmy Rushing on his 1944 recording of Harvard blues sings
I don’t keep dogs or women in my room
but omits mention of pussy, which is [...]

The following curious passage brought back memories of a quiet Tuesday several years ago:
The sixty Catalans imprisoned in Adrianople, after the murder of Caesar [German adventurer, Roger de Flor, leader of the Pyrenean mercenaries known as the Almogávares], on hearing the rumour of the defeat of the young emperor [Michael Palaeologos, who had Roger de [...]

Bit old-fashioned, probably still works, though the pollo doesn’t look too happy about being faxed to hungry consumers:

The news (via Normblog) that the Iranian justice system has strung up a mentally incapable and unrepresented 16-year old girl for getting to know a boy shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has heard the stories of those who escaped the revolution or the various officially sanctioned torture and murder [...]

Salvador Sostres & procreation

I just don’t get why Pujol, the big man of Catalan nationalism over the past 40 years, said that “crossbreeding” (mestissatge) with immigrants would mean the end of Catalonia.

If you live in Spain and you want data-rich maps that you and others can update easily on your server (eg for generating humming-bird hawk moth distribution maps or locators for a news site), you either spend a lot of time writing an app that will automatically layer your data onto freeware maps out there [...]

There’s a brief reference this morning in the Guardian to how, back in 1964, Stuart Christie tried to blow up Franco. Christie, after three years in prison here, went on to become mates with the terrorists who attempted to do the same to the Heath government, the BBC and various other symbols of fascist oppression [...]

When the inspector calls, the chief weapon of fundamentalist fishermen–particularly those with long white beards–is Genesis 1:26-28:

I reckon Gayle Tomlinson has let herself be suckered for the purposes of this story in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, passed along the counter by that notorious pie-lady, Margaret Marks:

When the Maoists take Kathmandu, what do you think they will say to the entrepreneurs who sell Che Guevara t-shirts to Westerners looking for an alternative?

I suspect the timing of this item on the AP wire@Lancaster Online (thanks, Meinte):

They speak (or someone speaks) Catalan in the Edinburgh branch of Harvey Nichols, according to The Scotsman. The assistant from Georgia, we are told, is called Nestan Rasmussen, which sounds pretty unlikely, and the manager claims that English is also spoken, which inclines me to disbelieve the whole story.

Burglar and ex-Libertines singer Pete Doherty was caught in June carrying a flick knife. “If the law was to send me to prison it wouldn’t be able to look itself in the eye,” he commented after yesterday’s hearing, in what critics are taking as a clear rejection of the post-Surrealist aesthetic currently sweeping East London [...]

“The city of Vlme, which belonged to the Fuckers”

While it would be nice not to have to say so quite so often, George W is not as incoherent as the Democrats would have us believe. What is strange is that they have used this strategy against other Republican candidates in the past without, as far as I’m aware, having notched up any successes. [...]

I’m intrigued by this excerpt from a discussion of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, a new play by Robin Soans (who apparently also once wrote for The Two Ronnies):

“You call it a bat, but I call it a fluttermouse.”

Bush and Blair are not at all welcome in Spain at the moment, so guess who is:

Whatever’s happening in Najaf today, it’s never going to be half as frightening as South Africa. IOL tells of a newsreader trying to interview an on-the-spot reporter while, unbeknown to her, the latter is being robbed by a gunman:
As Katopodis crossed live to Thaw at the first take, his cellphone stayed on - with inaudible [...]

To be fair, Austrian writer Robert Menasse is going after The System in his German spelling reform diatribe, not the 2 l8, m8 clan, but it’s still heavy stuff. Apparently–and I find him a bit difficult to follow–the reform was racist because it Germanised both “German” and “force-assimilated” immigrant words, neoliberal because it has created [...]

Mark Liberman has omitted a major British contribution to redundancy from this spelling reform post. “[About] as much use as …” is found pleasantly unassertive by lovers of warm beer, and it also tongue-trips with a greater joie de vivre.

Things have come to a pretty pass when lovely girls, handsome men, gorgeous costumes, melodious songs and a splendid orchestra no longer constitute suitable educational material for American students. It is easier to understand why attempts to bring Gilbert and Sullivan to Catalonia have failed. Here’s part of a review by J Donald Smith of [...]

Bombs and drunks galore here, but it’s still not as bad as California. Here’s Fashion Week Daily (”How L.A. fashionistas spend their summers”) on the West Coast alternative to alcoholism:

David Bell, the British Chief Inspector of Schools,
said last summer that infants increasingly lacked speaking skills because of the “disrupted and dishevelled” lives some were forced to endure.

The “150kg ETA bomb” on the beach at Sant Carles de la Ràpita is an obvious hoax designed by PP-puppet Zapatero to discredit ETA and Catalan nationalism. As we all know, ever since that little bloke with the moustache didn’t do a deal with the Basque neo-Nazis, the Catalan and Basque peoples have been advancing [...]

As noted previously, large, yellow, rounded-cylindrical marker buoys are found bobbing just off the coast here. I call them Homers, but have only just found out why.

Here’s a photo from the opening of the Barcelona Forum’s big youth jamboree:

An example of the complete bollocks with which travel sites think you’ll be satisfied is to be found on Travelcreek, which tells us that:
Gerona is the second largest city in the province of Catalunya after Barcelona and is dissected by the Onyar river.
Leaving aside the fact that Catalonia isn’t a province, Girona hasn’t been on [...]

Wulong has gone today from being a starving, soaking peasant living in a bamboo hut with his Tosh (1/2) to collecting funds on behalf of Shan secessionists, on which I have no view. It’s too hot.

Satirical mag Titanic has gone one better than publishers Springer & Spiegel, who yesterday deserted the state language reforms of the mid-90s:

Get 0.9 and bin MSIE is the advice of this rank conservative.

If you’ve read Edward Tufte’s stuff, you’ll know that the Japanese used to be good at cartography. So were the British, the Dutch, the Swiss…, but since WWII the Americans have made the running in terms of technological and graphical innovation, as well as putting together some wonderful resources–just think of the University of Texas’ [...]

Someone has just suggested something that would make everyone’s life very much easier: that Mr Colom was neither Genoese, Catalan, nor Norwegian, but an invention of Mr Tolkien.

Because “Kerry” contains more syllables than “Bush”.

Yesterday someone calling himself Wulong wrote to me in the hope that I would persuade Europe and the US to act together to save him from vegetarianism. The only real politician I know is currently falling around drunk in a French village, so it’s going to be a while before I can do anything. Meanwhile [...]