Walter Raleigh and Nigerian scammers
Being yet more foolish speculation.
Xavi Caballé’s got an excellent pic of an Auna-Menta box in Terrassa. Now you call Jesús in El Papiol, but it wasn’t always like this.
Re chav, here From a lexicon of flamenco song terms derived from Caló and thieves’ dialects (germanías):
Savage Minds links to The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920 by Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer L Haldane, GCMG, KCB, DSO, author of How we escaped from Pretoria and A brigade of the old army. It’s almost as entertaining as Gertrude Bell and includes gems like the following two, taken from Appendix IX - Notes on modern Arab [...]
I take it Arcadi Espada is joking:
We have obtained an impressive victory: citizens who write to European organisations in Catalan will have to send their letter to the Secretary of State for European Affairs, who will send to Brussels the text in Catalan and a copy in Spanish. The answer from Europe will [...]
Vincent Pinte, commenting at Technologies du Langage, suggests that the “de” between the “Dominique” and the “Villepin” that denominate France’s deranged and disastrous prime minister need not necessarily evidence noble origins. Apparently–I certainly wouldn’t know–medieval prostitutes customarily used only one name, their first, and were subsequently assigned surnames on the basis of their location, eg [...]
This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:
People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family are nice so there’s hope yet.
A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:
At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:
More educational train journeys here.
The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:
In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge hook at the end of it. The brown body, covered with turquoise blue splashes, was contracting in spasms. The joints moved, sometimes sliding over each other, sometimes turning sideways. Four huge transparent wings, covered with a dense web of
glittering threads, trembled in the air. A monstrous head hammered upon the window-sill.
This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, has been assisted by both the PSOE and the PP in government, trading the feasible need for the support of nationalist deputies for silence. It hasn’t found a commercial distributor in Spain. Maybe it will elsewhere.
Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.