Knights of the Holy Ghost
If you thought Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa was unlucky, try Pedro Fernandez De Quirós, who didn’t discover Australia and thus wasn’t an Afghan Muslim. Fortunately he was nuts.
If you thought Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa was unlucky, try Pedro Fernandez De Quirós, who didn’t discover Australia and thus wasn’t an Afghan Muslim. Fortunately he was nuts.
I did a little customised walk for some people this morning, taking in planned and unplanned (ie gypsy shanty and troglodyte) housing developments at the point where Barcelona crests and breaks on the Collserola ridge, and ending with drinks at my favourite spouse-swapping club. We started amid the tower blocks of airy, light Nou Barris. [...]
Our favourite Gibraltan gamblers have already been discussed at Fark, but thanks anyway to my usual forwarder of filth for the tip. (See yet another f*$#&@! learning experience for a name-game perspective.)
Gerald Howson’s The Flamencos of Cadiz Bay is a damn good book that stays well clear of the “Andalusia, soul of Spain” myth-making that poisoned much foreign writing from Washington Irving on. Catalonia was for a long time the home of Spanish bull-fighting and I reckon it also houses more of what I in [...]
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.