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.

Antonio Mingote claims to have walked down Muntaner in uniform the day before Barcelona was officially taken by Franco.

“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 [...]