anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
Off to see À bout de souffle at Cines Méliès, where you get to see old rubbish for next to nothing in the company of vaguely camp Barcelona. Last night was–by mistake–Persona by Ingmar Bergman, which is basically slow and boring Lon Chaney for people who are aware they’re too smart for the real thing. [...]
Some guys have asked if I want to buy a shooting licence for a village up in the hills. No way. (Also: I’ve got a rough idea what to do with handguns, but I’d wreak havoc with the kind of weapons these folks use, particularly in a dark forest full of men full of brandy.)
Update here of Myles na Gopaleen’s book-reading and annotation service. It’s basically a premium version of what blog spammers already do.
I was going to post about the Davey Paxman engine in Monzón, but Paul Adkinson beat me to it.
When I went back to live in Ingerland a few years ago, it took a month before I felt I knew what was going on in meetings where people used new expressions like “the dog’s bollocks” and “a load of arse”. This time I’m preparing my trip and today I discovered that England spin bowler [...]
Jesus was the door, but now we all are. (Gizmodo > Tenser, said the Tensor)
Comments
Barcelona. Shop no 1 is closed at 11:30, well within its normal opening hours. The iron street blinds are down and there’s no message posted, so I walk across town to shop no 2. Yes, no problem, pay now and we’ll confirm the delivery date in a moment. The call comes a couple of hours later:
- That model isn’t available right now.
- When will it be?
- We may be able to tell you later this month, so to save trouble why don’t you just buy this more expensive model?
- No thanks. I’ll be over later to get my money.
- Oh, we’ll have to see about that.
I tend to try to buy through foreign suppliers and I pray for the day when the Chinese will be running everything. Call me a racist, but it keeps me out of the loony bin.
It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of sovereign debt) informs us that it did so thirteen times between 1500 and 1900. I rather liked this Punch item on steps towards a more united Europe, dated September 1 1860:
LATEST CLUB NEWS
SPAIN, put up by France and Austria, as a candidate for admission to the United European, has been blackballed by England, who declines to associate with an Uncertificated Insolvent. Spain is so frantic that she is half inclined to pay her debts, but will probably think twice over so rash an act.
The Dutch haven’t got any genuine armed forces, so they’re sending in the bailiffs to repossess office furniture from the Dutch Icesave, which has also done a runner.
Classic nimbyism, enabled by Spain’s lack of effective central government: Castilla y León has lots of wolves, but other communities which, according to ecologists, should in historical and biological terms have some, don’t want to take the overproduction. So they’re being shot. I don’t suppose we could airlift them to the outskirts of Reykjavik.
open source and uses Linux,
Apache, MySQL,
WordPress, PHP · Sing along with Moo Way (MP3) · 47 in 0.398
