He ventured along a path, following a field of cane whose leaves shook softly with the noise of a crushed newspaper. In an end he could make out several triangular cabins. Near these primitive houses, a dying bonfire sent winks by its embers.
“Haitians!” thought Menegildo. “They must be completely drunk…

I’m going to do a quick and dirty update to 1.5 this afternoon, so things may look weird for a while (or longer). Update: think it all works. Please tell me if you get any weird stuff.

In a surreal exchange, mediated by Carlos Ferrero Martín and Margaret Marks, and with the usual machine googleation, “in declarations conducted in Majorca days ago, our minister of Culture, Bald Carmen, pronounced the following phrase: ‘Before cook I was fraila’.” Whereupon the journalist said, ‘Bis bald, Carmen,’ but was severely beaten by the Balearic [...]

When I was poor, I wrote pastiche in considerable quantities (and even did a few sit-down-and-sweat exams) for music students who could afford not to fulfill their harmony and counterpoint requirements personally. I figured that if institutions issuing degrees were too lazy, stupid or corrupt to investigate a sudden improvement in a student’s grades or, [...]

That man’s got another one.

Not so much flogging as snogging a dead horse, here is an excerpt from Rafael Miralles Bravo’s Memorias de un comandante rojo (1975), quoted by Fernando Díaz-Plaja in Anecdotario De La Guerra Civil Española (previous post), dealing with the brief civil war within a civil war in May 1937:
The 4th passed without incidents other than [...]

Here. Now all we need are silencers and tailgate dumpbag implants. (Via Memepool)

Broken lightning conductor on a stork chimney in Barbastro.

Romance pipes are not as sweet as their Indian cousins.

“A lieutenant said to his captain that he needed to get to the city which could be discerned at the foot of Tibidabo, where his regiment was. Why? Because his mother was there, and he wanted to see her after three years of absence caused by the war.”

“Is it true about the parsley, Your Excellency? That to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians you made all the blacks say perejil? And the ones who couldn’t pronounce it properly had their heads cut off?”
“I’ve heard that story.” Trujillo shrugged. “It’s just idle gossip.”

There certainly are similarities between the languages spoken by the Welsh and the Indians, but these particularly Indians don’t live in Asia. You see, the Welsh discovered America. (Is the tale of Robin Hood and Indian Dark an echo of this? Should Malcolm Muggeridge have said that the last Welshman would be an Indian? I [...]

He died for our groceries, in Tiana:

“And as we find in a book of laws called Digesto that city used to be called Guiris because it was created by Garfeus, son of Canaan and grandson of Noah.”

Hola guapo hola guapa hola guapa hola guapa hola guapo hola guapo. Unfortunately no trannies passed by.

Re Cuniculandia, the Wikipedia Phoenicia article currently says that “the name Spain comes from the Phoenician word Sapan, which means ‘that which is hidden’.”

Another book I’d like to get hold of: Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí by (1951) Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, apparently “the story of a boy who is kicked out of school for writing in an unintelligible alphabet.” It cannot possibly have been as bad as Rotor, but teachers were probably stricter then.

The polls are fine, but Blair secretly expects to lose: he now has an official spokes-man. (OK, so you’ve never heard of Norman Tebbit.)

To underpin their advertising pitch many webmasters use simple devices to fake the number of visitors on their site and the number of click-thrus to other sites. Nationalist crazy Francesc Ferrer’s approach is simpler: every page on his blog says it has been visited 10 times. Yesterday’s entry recounts the prosecution of some kids from [...]

Here’s a free translation of a verse sung door-to-door by caramelles in Sant Cugat on Easter Sunday of 1948: “Neither house nor home here for lots of folk./This overcrowding’s getting past a joke.” The Andalusians who arrived here in the 20s built themselves cave and shack homes on the margins of Montjuïc, and many [...]

Yotro’s got some good Graves and something even better. Congratulations!

Someone has picked up on my pechelingue post and introduced it into the Spanish Wikipedia (”la expresión inglish pichinglish”, March 2005). A link back would have been cool, as would a scientific health warning.

Vaguely re this post, here is something which South Africans apparently find amusing. Hmm…

Let’s have a Tozer Street!

Good one over at Normblog.

Emphatically not a rodent; possibly Herb Alpert’s true muse.

Fine, but where’s the marketplace, and how long before it takes off in Spain?

Unfortunately, like peapole, I don’t think carzy (automobile-related mental condition) qualifies, creative though it is.

Catalan soldier with serpent; clearly not a trombone; Filipino guardia de vino; Catalan forge (definition, process (PDF)); Catalan knobbing furnace; Barcelona man goes to war; Garrotxa volcanoes; Catalan miqueletes; pre-Orwell Catalan barber; seasickness in Spanish Caribbean; Madrilenian crypto-Jews; Hebrew marriage contract, Gibraltar, 1826; bull kills mayor of Torrejón.

… and a brief note on Catalonia’s contribution to popular culture.

The Popular Front’s Patent Baldness Remedy.

Apparently I am a very massive driver in a dark cloak. I do, indeed, own a djellaba.

If the back leg of a giraffe can get away with charging €600 for moonlighting as a tarantula, then it does make you wonder whether the War For Oil slur (apologies, anyone?) was nothing more than a genuine case of mistaken identity.

Not, it seems. It is amazing how many patriotic Catalans are still unaware of the farty feats of Mr Pujol. (Via Memepool.)

Catalan patriots like nothing better than to mine stone and build housing estates in the countryside, protected or not. Check some cool photos over at La Veritat.

Still no good Spanish stuff on BJAODN, but I did like the water-on-Mars entry.

Sob, Desbladet came to Barcelone and didn’t do a baldie, sob…

Grande consuelo es tener/La taberna por vecina,/But trying to find a spider there:/It’s a facking misdemeanour (guv).

“We print this recipe, not out of self-interest, since we are giving it away free, being inspired solely by the conviction that we have of its efficacy and to see if we can be of assistance to our fellow men.”

Coming back into town this afternoon on Renfe after one of these, we heard the intercom voice say “Correspondencia con metro y bocadillos de la Generalitat,” I swear it.