For reasons that are perfectly legit and PC, I’ve got to write some phoney Arabic. I am not, of course, the first to fool around with God’s own language. The Dan Rather story is still a giggle, and The Lost City is on my Christmas list.

I’ve been doing some research on The Next Stage. I liked the bit on Stuart Simmons site (merci, Freuzel!) where he says, “People often ask if I had to drink a lot of beer to build an Earthship. The answer is no but it sure helps.” There’s no way you’d get away with proper earthships [...]

Just a footnote to the Boris Johnson piece: I think BJ may have put words into Judge Harris’ gob when he has him remark
that it was all very well talking about a new café-style culture, where we all sit around like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, drinking slowly and moderately as we formulate new [...]

One of the words I missed yesterday was kletskop, apparently used in Antwerp to mean “baldie”. I’ve only seen it before in the sense of “chatterbox”, but here I guess that klets is onomatopoeiac, representing the sound made by smacking a bald bonce.
A while back a clown was operating outside Zurich on Plaza de Cataluña. [...]

Boris Johnson this morning has in his slightly misty sights
the new species of pissed ladette, profane, belly-flaunting, swigging shots of cocktail from brightly coloured and cunningly marketed bottles, and sweeping the streets in terrifying gangs.
For all the problems created by 24-hour drinking in Barcelona (the old town is full of well-established illegal bars [...]

The rest of the bullocks were taken off to be slaughtered this morning. The knacker sang to them as he walked into the yard. Some bellowed, one wailed, feeling what was coming; the vultures circled, just in case it didn’t.