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 Jordi Pujol, the big man of Catalan nationalism over the past 40 years, said that “crossbreeding” (mestissatge) with immigrants would mean the end of Catalonia.
My dad’s been shagging Mrs P for years, and the kids are doing fine.

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?

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”

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.”