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.

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 [...]