I think I can show that the term guiri is traceable to Semitic roots, and I will do at some stage, but I’d just like to add a little bit of very vaguely circumstantial evidence to an alternative hypothesis discussed here. At the time I turned over in bed and muttered:
So was the term guiri [...]

As prices soar, Ayesha Christie’s got a handy 10-point cultural history of olive oil. Things are tough here: the first blackberries were dessicated horrors, deciduous trees are losing their leaves like it’s November, and Boo Peep has had all her sheep carted off to the knacker’s since there’s nothing left for them to eat. One [...]

Of course it is the fault of those damn Muslims:
The Marchenero is one of the oldest pouter breeds, and it is a breed that was developed in Spain in a period of time covering almost on thousand years.
In order to understand the beginnings or ancient history, a brief history lesson is in order. During the [...]

On the bus this afternoon I had some French girls in front, as it unfortunately were not, and an old Andalusian couple (I think they were from Córdoba) behind. At a certain moment someone in both groups said they were looking for something, the French using chercher and the Andalusians using buscar, or rather bujcar, [...]

Whisking wife and whim, I notice that Karim has discovered the oldest and most disgraceful marketing trick in the book. Interestingly, one of his ads is for Godloves-you.com. I don’t think I want God to love me if he can’t afford two hyphens.

Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined [...]

Amando de Miguel notes the commonsensical notion that two people will tend to speak the language that supposes the least combined effort for them (all other things being equal), and proposes naming this law for his correspondent, Candela Zamora. You all know what a candela is, of course.
De Miguel refers in the same piece to [...]