What is acceptable in boxers and (Don) kings is not necessarily so in lesser mortals. Here’s some English-German translator explaining for the umpteenth time on his blog why he is the best:
My old school used to be a hands-on kind of school, but now, after they adopted new curricula last fall, it’s just downhill from [...]

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson (Enowning > a Slashdot interview):

Picked up the two-month-old Beast of Bages this afternoon from a farm where she was in imminent danger of being eaten by hunting dogs. She’s still too shy for photos, but has already assaulted one of the neighbours and climbed all over the bookcases, so here (MP3, 4.93MB), by way of welcome, is a snipped [...]

So it’s just going to be the once on Peel. That was a strange summer, when the customary laziness was suddenly interrupted by unfamiliar terms like “airplay” and “contract”. Then the singer got eight years for stammering during an armed robbery and the guy in the suit ran off with the money. Or something - [...]

A fascist left site stole an excerpt from a translation of Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and posted it approvingly next to what they think is the authentic cover. Check it out. (Tim Blair > Barcepundit, neither of whom seems to be the agent provocateur webmaster of Nodo50.)

The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting [...]

An elderly waiter is teaching his younger colleague English in the weights room of a noisy downtown Barcelona gym, accompanied by an interesting selection of 90s house hits:

Ik had me wel ’s afgevraagd waarom Sinterklaas gedichtjes niet hoefden te rijmen, tenminste niet op de ons bekende wijze. Antwoord heb ik gevonden in een heel geinig rijmpje van Andries Pels (1631-1681):

At bar Miramelindo in Barcelona

Better no jobs than a few English-speaking seagulls. Ah, my people.

So Richard Cœur-de-Lion owed his name to bravery in battle? Hmmm, because Robert Chambers‘ 1869 Book of Days, pillaging a medieval romance, tells a different tale. As we join proceedings, Richard is languishing in the nick (again! but it’s German this time) for having beaten up a pub musician, killed the son of the king [...]

Two points re Eunuch umpires needed (for the Madrid Masters):

Also via Margaret Marks, a machine that does perfect translations in a number of European languages.

Sad and strange: Helmut Simon, the guy who, with his wife, found Ötzi, the prehistoric iceman, has disappeared while walking at somewhere in the region of 2,400m. Rescue teams have given up hope of finding him alive, and Margaret Marks tells me visitors to Der Standard are already speculating (now I scroll down, I can [...]

Forget the Murdoch-Blair story and compare this man with this man. Oh dear.

This is a new channel in the continuing story of a Dane’s struggle to get money owed to his son - that’s what they say, and I believe them - by big evil Catalan multinational, Chupa Chups, without relying on Catalonia’s dodgy courts. John Pawlenko has been following it closely for the last month, and [...]

In a riposte to a piece by Ron Gompertz about Spanish plans to sue Italy over the Roman occupation, Al Pernales suggests that a win might encourage Madrid to sue the US for collaborating with continental drift during the Triassic and thus raising to an unacceptable level the price of an afternoon’s shopping in Manhattan. [...]

Apparently a bunch of American academics came to Barcelona recently on their annual beano and, rumours about Baldie Tours having spread, recoiled in horror when they got into their coach on Monday morning and found a delightful young Spanish woman waiting for them. “Where’s the baldie? We want the baldie!” they cried as one. Apparently.

Two brothers [illegible] one kingdom. One dreamed of peace for his country, the other fought valiantly for his ideals:

I’ll be visiting Jan van Bakel’s site again shortly to quote from his extraordinary collection of letters written by Flemish soldiers in Napoleon’s armies, but here’s another strange thing I found, which he quotes from Rüdiger Safranski’s Martin Heidegger - Between Good and Evil (1998):

It is held in some ovoids that the only way to understand what you wrote when drunk is to repeat the experience. Although fixed habits ill become a man without a fixed income, I have knocked back the odd glass of phylloxera blood from the Priorat and will now endeavour to explain to you, dear [...]

… is what the Guardian seems to be saying this morning, noting that in Pakistan only 7% support Bush while 65% think Osama is … well … groovy. Americans should, it is suggested, listen to the citizens of states traditionally resentful of the success of the American revolution and vote for a candidate said citizens [...]

There’s an interesting piece by Kini Nsom at the excellent Post Online (Cameroon) on topless, drunken and otherwise disorderly women in that country. This compelling issue came up in parliament in the form of a complaint by the MP for Sangmalima, Francois Esama, that what “the rights women are clamouring for is to go about [...]

This eez Chief Inspector Clouseau speaking on the phön. No, sorry, this is a malevolent interpretation of a notion dreamt up by Maurice Druon, distinguished member of l’Académie française, who claimed the other day that
French “reduced the risks of differing interpretations to a minimum” compared to other languages…
He presented a declaration of the initiative boasting [...]

“The only constant throughout Spain’s storied history is failure”

Despite the fact my language of choice is that of a far better empire, Kaleboel comes in at no 839 on the list of “more than 10,000″ participants in la blogosfera hispana, as calculated by Bitacoras.com. The infinitely superior Puerta del Sol–also in English–is down at 843, presumably because Jonathan doesn’t include as many pictures [...]

There’s a good opinion piece by Rainer Soller over at Deutsche Welle on the extradition to Turkey of Muslim extremist Metin Kaplan on terrorism charges. This para in particular caught my eye:

OK, The Onion is not always a killer, but this is not at all bad:

A South African friend told me the other day that she had been retrenched. This means that the buggers have made her redundant, binned her, killed her, arranged to see her down the pub in half an hour, matie. The word was devised, not by a corporal during a particularly torrid morning on the outskirts [...]

… said the policeman to the would-be rapist whose tongue had been bitten off by his intended victim in Barcelona, South Africa.

… over at SpainMedia.com. The story was broken yesterday by the Sunday Telegraph, but John Barrass has come up with more, lots more, on Ginemedex, the Barcelona clinic that boasts of performing 30-week abortions. ABC says that the price increases by €200 a week, but, intriguingly, doesn’t mention any upper limit. I’m a firm supporter [...]

Nick Lloyd writes of a lingerie salesman student of his from Zaragoza:

… Henry VIII was at something of a loose end, so he told a builder to put a bowling alley in Whitehall. No one asked him if he had planning permission.

A friend in Nairobi tells me that Kenyan newspaper sales were up 10% yesterday on the news that the local champion of unpulped wood had got the Nobel.

As a Brit, I wonder if there are also Americans who roll around laughing when they discover FranklinCovey’s Mission Builder (”Use our Mission Builder exercise to add focus, direction, and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions”). I suspect not, because whereas Brits usually look at me as if I have suddenly produced a [...]

I once read some complete nonsense by UCD prof Clarence Major, so I do kind of wonder whether he’s got any evidence for the claim (Prentiss Riddle → MSNBC) that relates hip “to the Wolof verb hepi (’to see’) or hipi (’to open one’s eyes’)”. The Peace Corps Wolof-English dictionary (PDF) lists xippi, but they [...]

Nick Lloyd notes that “The spread of mad cows disease into Spain means that, following EU rules, dead cows, sheep and goats can no longer be left in the countryside, and must be destroyed.” Fortunately for Brussels this is not all that remains of a sheep but one of Spain’s rarest creatures, the Aragonese albino [...]

I have been busy for a while, and this is what I have been doing.

However much you hate football, this is the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile. Ah, say people, Ronaldinho is able to do that kind of stuff because he is Brazilian. We liberals know better than to believe any such nonsense.

I keep seeing new words that describe the destruction of the Catalan countryside by corrupt Catalan constructors and politicians. There’s a sheet hanging in the Plaça de la Vila de Madrid, plagued by drunks and junks since the council landscaped lurking places into it, that says PROU LLORETITZACIO!