Dutchmen and Dagos
Captain Kettle, the British Library Online Newspaper Archive and our fellow-Europeans.
Captain Kettle, the British Library Online Newspaper Archive and our fellow-Europeans.
The ongoing Catalan construction corruption hooha in a nutshell, from the first contractor to turn king’s evidence: “Your friends take you up the arse, you take your enemies up the arse, and you apply existing legislation to the rest.”
Crocodiles have no tongue; frogs have half, because it’s backwards, attached at the front and free at the back; men have one, the best of all, because with it they speak all languages and imitate every animal, as the philosopher Archidamos said; sea foxes [raposas marinas] have two, as I have said; women have three, because they talk with their mouth and with their fingers and heart, and their tongues are rough and sharp, like those of cats and leopards.
Apparently immigrants are being denied access to virtually all night bars in Barcelona’s popular Raval district. I’m an immigrant, and I’ve never had any problems getting in (getting out is a different story), so I guess El Periódico is using the same definition as one of my ex mother-in-laws: “You’re not an immigrant, you’re white!” Despite the beatings and the burnings, Spain’s nignogs don’t complain, which is why the Americans and British are clearly racists while it is equally clear that the Spanish were just having a little innocent fun with those damn Chinkies.
Code-swapping, rather than Gibraltar-Andalusian. This week’s instalment comments on the stateless national soap opera, maritime conflicts and confusions with Spain.
Yesterday the state-approved and -subsidised competition to Baldie Galactic was observed claiming that trencadís was yet more proof of the quite extraordinary originality of the Catalan mind, etc etc. Not so: it has been around for centuries, and any connoisseur of English cathedral windows will be familiar with my favourite application of break-it-and-mend-it–the new/non-sense created from jumbled shards of medieval glass at places like Wells and Winchester after the Puritans had smashed things up. Which isn’t in any sense to diminish the marvellous pique assiette undertaken by Josep Maria Jujol for old Mr Gaudy at Park Güell:


“Nosferatu in Bremen is essentially a flitting liminality … the German soul instinctively prefers twilight to daylight.” Way too many bloody Teutonic incorporeal materialist graffiteros lurking around on c/ Molist, Barcelona.