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 [...]