“A [Manx (via Mithridates)] game in which one boy gave a back as in leap- frog, the other boys then leapt over him four times– fore and aft and from each side—each calling out as he did so, spanish fly. The process was then repeated, varied by the cry ‘tip on the bot, spanish fly,’ [...]

Check out and contribute to Joan Ducròs’ compilation of literary extracts based in Barcelona (via Carles Mirò). It includes inexplicable exclusions from a similarly themed book I read recently (eg Max Aub), and I’m sure it will shortly add great stuff like self-confessed con-artist Jan Cremer’s encounter with the Guardia Civil and the prostitutes of [...]

Installing chips on bikes (via meta-blogger John Pawlenko) in order to reduce soaring theft rates (PDF) sounds great, but one suspects that deputy mayor Jordi Portabella is, as usual, more interested in a sexy headline than a workable solution. For example, there’s no point in having bike chips without creating a (Euro-)regional or national register [...]

Some Pakistani boys spent Saturday afternoon on the beach burying each other in hermaphrodite sand castles, and so it was that I learned about hijras.

Franco Alemán has noticed that the mosque on Hospital, Barcelona is called after the aristocrat who led the Moorish hordes into Iberia and who got a special mention in the video made by terrorists celebrating the Madrid bombings (“We will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarik Ben Ziyad”). I’m sure that [...]

Several mediocre foreign writers make a reasonably good living here by providing cosmopolitan validation for the fears and superstitions of the Catalanista rabble. Artur Mas, heir to Jordi Pujol’s Catalanista crown, goes one better in this morning’s Retaguardia and cites Francis Fukuyama, a foreigner everyone’s heard of, to support the decline-and-fall picture he paints of [...]