Apparently FollowTheBaldie.com is in the 1st edition of Frommer’s Barcelona guide. If it’s not a right old slagging, then I probably owe someone a drink, collection here. I may be in other guides for all I know, but as a guide I feel slightly guilty reading the things.

Pere at Saragatona has photographed a building with two texts carved on its front, the first of which reads,
CHARITY ENNOBLES
LABOUR DIGNIFIES
Graffiti in Barcelona’s Sans/Sants district expresses a different point of view:
Labour doesn’t dignify, fire does
I can’t remember which (piss-)artist it was who said that if Madrid’s Prado museum were burning down, he would save the [...]

Silmarillion’s got a post over at Après moi, la déluge about tinkers and Jenisch and … quinquis. Here the following perfectly reasonable explanation of “kinky” is given:
Kink, nautical term, from Du. kink “twist in a rope” (also found in Fr. and Swed.), probably related to O.N. kika “to bend at the knee” (see kick). Figurative [...]

If the sentence “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever” does actually mean a cessation of drug dealing, beatings and other criminal activity, then the IRA have scored today’s big news. However there are still plenty of bad people in the world. Pedalling along this afternoon, on my way to see hear fellow-biker [...]

Spelling pronunciation–rendering in sound a word’s spelling–is for obvious reasons a creature of literate societies (see posts by The Tensor and Bill Poser). Spain was until recently generally illiterate (unrelated stat: only 1 in 3 Spanish had cotton underwear in the 30s), and pronunciation spelling predominates. I referred a while back to some old examples [...]

The nationalist mayor of Guecho in the Basque Country, Iñaki Zarraoa, wants to introduce badges for Basque speakers, he says to enable them to figure whether their conversation partner is capable of speaking with them in Basque. This would be somewhat less disturbing if an estimated 200,000 people hadn’t been driven into exile in the [...]