Tabaré Vázquez, Uruguay’s new president is apparently a verticalist. I haven’t the faintest idea what that means, particularly as his predecessor was not a notable drunk, but it sounds like a good thing for a politician to be. Catalonia’s famously horizontalist leader, Pasqual Maragall, has announced that he won’t, after all, be attending the inauguration, [...]

Boaring equipment for a less obviously grubby political class.

Bruce Bawer’s links page, that is. Mr B is apparently part of the metropolitical tendency. I might be, too, if I thought any of my friends would know what it meant, and if I weren’t so ridiculously fond of being Attila the Idiot. (Thanks, MM.)

Ik heb geen rooie pruik.

Some curious intercultural business in Der Untergang.

I’m currently putting together an e-commerce site for some people here who want to sell their products abroad. Since I haven’t yet found my next fixed address, this means writing PHP in internet/phone shops. Yesterday I was in a Punjabi one in the Raval when there was a sudden bout of frenzied rustling from behind [...]

Nice typo, but unfortunately even their sex industry isn’t what it was.

Karim has published an interesting photo illustrating the latest advances in Tunisian motoring technology. Cars are to be fired vertically from secret underground silos in midtown locations; airborne, their trajectories will be managed using GPS. Plans for 2006 include roll-up-and-down of the product to the baby’s pram and market trader segments.

The mysterious Windsor fire lights explained.

From José, an interesting variation on the evil-dictator-tries-to-eradicate-language urban myth: Franco banned Catalan but not Valencian.

A brief discussion of Mozart and Verdi’s Requiems and Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia.

Including two energetic forgers’ opinion of the Rajasthan Police’s sense of typographical style.

Of clerks and whores.

Notating cow dances is quite easy because of the lack of significant vertical variables–none of your Laban or Banesh nonsense here. Cow dance notation retains its charm, however, because it involves cows. Here’s a sample of the dances performed by Mataró’s well-documented carnival cow.

Quick and dirty, but better and more accurate than this, ridiculous and expensive.

This kind of thing needs to be stopped.

“Bears to be released into Pyrenees”, writes Nick Lloyd. That’s nothing to what I’ve got planned.

Iberian linguistics is even more complex than I had thought.

White storks and other stuff.

Nuns and crocs on the road to Cádiz.