I don’t recall anyone having commented on the most important aspect of Donald Rumsfeld’s thoughtful little pome, The Unknown, namely the omission of one important permutation:

Still looking for a name for my movement dedicated to throwing off the Provençal-Catalan yoke and restoring decent, pre-Roman values, I chanced on issue 18 of Quaderns de l’Exili, published in 1946 by folks who headed over to Mexico in 1939. The big idea, expressed in the editorial, is to split the peninsula into four [...]

Nice one from Steyn in the Torygraph: ‘The American constitution begins with the words “We the people”. The starting point for the EU constitution is: “We know better than the people.”’ Our leader has told his French friend that leadership is not one of the latter’s strong points–although I believe it was Zap who, by [...]

In the week that a guy was stabbed to death in fighting between Catalan fascists (sorry, libertarian bodies and left-wing separatists) and other scum, a manifesto (via the usual gin freaks) calling on Catalans to reject the corrupt sectarianism practised by Pujolist and Maragallian administrations and “demand the existence of a political party that will [...]

From the man who called Sylvia Saint a sow, sad news for those who believe that the only good Spanish film is a sex film. Fortunately Jesús Franco shows no signs of making good on his promise to die camera in hand.

… all these academic piss-ups seemed so far away.

The Five Keys, edited:
I built a nest for a sweet little pigeon
But she flapped her wings and flu.
Tralala.

Adnan Sami is a big star.

- One for Omagh, please.
- Eh?
- One ticket for Omagh. It’s a film that’s showing here.
- Ah, you mean Oma[x] [ie, the "j" in jabón]. Are you from England?
- Er…
- Well that explains it. I did philology and in Ireland they say Oma[x].
- Er, well actually…
- What do you think of Bloody Sunday?
- OK, one [...]

Notes al marge is slomo jumping. Catch him, someone. (I think this is part of a general shakeout in the spheroblog, during which the good will go and wallies will continue to whinge and whine. Me stop? No way.)

Mark Liberman is being nasty to our beloved intellectuals, most of whom we manage to ignore most of the time. His frustration may arise from a misunderstanding of the role of the intellectual in European society, which is something like that of a Catholic bishop in the States. I think I recall somewhere in Campo [...]

This instrument has no slide and six valves but it is not a bad clarinet. It’s a French trombone, and that’s that.

John Chappell’s latest commandment over at Libertad Digital comes in a piece that makes instructive comparisons between US and Spanish regional and national government finance systems. No prizes for guessing who gets rubbished.

An excerpt from the Q&A session yesterday at the presentation of Raymond Carr’s new monster, El rostro cambiante de Clío:
- Is Spain feasible without the Basque Country and Catalonia?
- In theory yes, in practice no. I don’t understand why the radical nationalists want to be independent members of the European Union. An independent [...]

Another favourite, gone: Bar Me Quedo Aquí (“I’m staying here”) in Llinars del Vallès.

There’s a nasty rumour going round that Heinz was behind the Bush administration’s campaign to stop Newsweek relying on unnamed sauces.

Someone a while back invented a verb that they thought would guerrilla-brand Barcelona’s Raval district and managed to have a fake letter of protest published in La Retaguardia, Barcelona’s favourite sucker rag. Here it is in Googlish:

If al-Zarqawi has been wounded “in the path of God”, then authorship presumably lies with the Hindu deity Juggernaut rather than US forces.

There’s a do in a couple of weeks featuring some Catalan-language bloggers. Strangely, the list of participants doesn’t include links to their blogs, and, stranger still, one of the speakers is journalist Màrius Serra, who didn’t show any interest when bloggers caught him a-plagiarising. The local state here finances civil society to ensure that its [...]

Unfortunately I can’t see Barcelona’s notoriously tubby and boozed-up municipal police following Rio’s lead and pouring themselves into swimming trunks in order to combat the Maghrebis who stalk and rob tourists on the beaches here, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to think of something else. It might be interesting to issue all new [...]

More bike news in this morning’s Periódico, which reports that council propaganda overstates the actual bike path network by 50%, and that only 14% of it is adequate, a figure which sounds plausible to me. And, as Ecologistes en Acció point out, even when a path is OK, it’s likely to be rendered unusable by [...]

Well, kind of, notes Technologies du Langage: you’ve got to call them “blocs” or “bloc-notes”. Jean goes on to note that “bloc” is already used
in heaps of other meanings… If one had wanted to create “French” French at all costs, it seems to to me that carnet (“notebook”) would have been a better reflection [...]

I haven’t the faintest idea whether “nitty gritty” originated in the slaveships (”no te grites”, stop moaning? Nope) and thus should be avoided by good folks or whether it’s an American Indian training service, but I did like the following gangster talk: “Noo, man! Mi an di man fos taak boo dat, man, aa sins [...]

Since I’m arsing around this morning, here’s some more chicken news. There’s a good story developing up in a small village near Figueres at the moment, where Adela Sánchez has been put on trial accused of murdering Mercè Catalán’s rooster, Matildo. Adela and her daughter, Paqui, had previously sat up at night playing the trumpet [...]

The right is perturbed because men are getting married on Los Lunnis. Their objections are historical rather than theological–no one’s suggesting we respect Genesis 24:3 and 38:6 and allow fathers to select girlies for their sons–and their problem is that the world has moved on. I’d regard myself as a natural PP voter (although that [...]

I hope that machine translation doesn’t get too good, too fast. It’s good to hear that separatist Rafel Homestead is taking flowerpots seriously (the Lads already have two devices now): his wine-producing colleagues further south opposed them as an Espanyolista attack on the local economy.

I haven’t seen cockfighting in Spain, but to judge by this report there’s still a fair amount of it about. Here, however, the authorities are trying to stamp it out, while in Cuba they’re running the show:
Police operation in the farming district of Las Mercedes
SANTIAGO DE CUBA, February 12 (Antonio Alonso, in collaboration with APLO) [...]

Teresa Amat has uncovered an extraordinary document (PDF) produced by the Catalan language police and the Catalan Women’s Institute (which, unlike its British namesake, does not make jam). Its slightly puzzling premise is that language is a mirror of society, and by changing the mirror we can change society, and its creators believe that their [...]

The French are going to reject the Euroconstitution, and for some reason this is worrying some Brits. There’s some interesting anthropology in this post by Jon Henley, and here’s a contrasting piece from a couple of years ago. (There’s a much more exciting effort from Boris Johnston here (free reg), which includes the following:
The French [...]

I haven’t seen Entre el roig i el negre (“Between red and black”) yet, but hope to soon. It’s the diary, apparently genuine, of one of the anarcho-syndicalist gunmen who, when war broke out in July 1936, set out to exterminate the clergy and the Catalan upper middle class, virtually none of whom had anything [...]

The mayor of Icononzo, Colombia says (via Puerta del Sol) that he’s more frightened of gossip than of guerrillas or paramilitaries and has acquired powers to fine tabbies almost four million pesos (that’s roughly 4,100 Belarussian roubles). However, gossips aren’t only dangerous in war zones:
A large part of our middle class not only lives in [...]

Here’s a note (in Catalan) on the fest in Barceloneta where I took down Sale el sol por la mañana last year. The first fruits function of the Judaic Pentecost explains why the locals dress up in food on their return from their trip out to the country, but I guess this relationship was lost [...]

Oh dear, more kerfuffle about official European languages. It seems clear to me that until the Common Agricultural Policy is abolished we should be condemned to Pig Latin.

I have just been released from hospital after wading across the river Besòs in full, pink, evening dress (with knickers, ladies) playing Arthur Pryor’s variations on The Blue Bells of Scotland on a Conn 8H tenor trombone. Having almost drowned in midstream after being hit by a large patch of floating sewage, I am most [...]

What has driven Margaret Marks to cook and, presumably, eat Indians? Since Ms Marks has quite clearly gone native, I suspect this of being some bizarre offshoot of Central Europe’s Orientalist anti-Tarzan industry:
In Germany after World War I, Tarzan’s sales were so vast that a disgruntled local publisher printed a counter-Tarzan tract called Tarzan [...]

One of Karim’s commenters is under the impression that Karim is a bad speller. Orthographic genius, I’d say: bussaharain clearly refers to that portion of the African continent that still depends on public transport. (Give or take a few prickles, we are, of course, all African hedgehogs.)

Since the publication of Memories of Hell in 1978, radical trade union leader Enric Marco has represented for many the suffering Spanish prisoners underwent in Nazi camps. Now it turns out (via Teresa Amat) that, like “Binjamin Wilkomirski” (although he lacks Bruno Grossjean’s research skills and literary bent), he made up the concentration camp experiences [...]

There is the weeniest bit of potential to frustrate the knavish tricks of those bad, bad Greeks and “their” precious feta: the Italianism feta is used in Argentina and Uruguay to mean a slice of cheese or cold cut, so all the Danes and the Germans need to do is slice up their product and [...]

Towards the end of part 2 of Quixote, Sancho Panza is hailed by a German pilgrim who turns out to be Ricote, a Morisco from Sancho’s village. Ricote was driven out of Spain by religious persecution and has spent his exile in France, Italy, and Germany, near Augsburg, where
I found we might live with more [...]

There’s a rather silly suggestion here (via Onze Taal) to the effect that, with English reasonably close to becoming the only EU working language, it’s about time the UK started paying for everyone else to learn English. I find this a weak argument: with the French Eurocracy converted to the delights of English, it will [...]