José Antonio Martínez Torres, Prisionero de los infieles. Vida y rescate de los cautivos cristianos en el Mediterráneo musulmán (siglos XVI-XVII), says (PDF) that Christians captive in Oran and Algiers could go to the pub and church, as long as they paid.

“The first day of this month will be remembered throughout the centuries because of the earthquakes and fires that have destroyed a large part of this city; fortunately, the safes of the royal exchequer, as well as those of many private citizens, have been recovered from the ruins.” (Taken from an article by André Belo [...]

There’s an interesting thing here by Estibaliz Amorrortu on bilingualism up in the Basque country. I think the following situation also applies with respect to Catalan:
Full immersion Basque learners easily acquire the written, more formal registers associated with the acquisition of literacy. However, unless they are involved in Basque-speaking networks, they hardly learn any register [...]

Missed it. I was into the music before Mr Kusturica started færting around, and it looks a lot more interesting than Glastonbury. Dear Guca, will you invite our gay tea-dance orchestra to play at next year’s festival? (Thankyou, Mr Toenail.)

She’s tabby, about 9 months old and starving up near a spring on Collserola–the drought means there’s very little to eat. From the delicacy of her manners I’d say she is domestic, and my guess is that her owners dumped her when they went on holiday. I can’t take her in, so I’m going to [...]

In This Week this week. I am immensely lazy when it comes to marketing Baldie, Inc, but I’ll get my Beeb series one day.
(A while back I ran a Militant-style campaign to infiltrate and take over a sympathetic Dutch broadcasting organisation, which had a theoretically democratic structure based on ill-attended regional caucuses. It foundered because [...]