The notoriously dangerous N340 highway takes survivors halfway round Spain. How come no one seems to have written a cultural history?

I just read Beth Marie Kosir’s interesting paper on the British codpiece and thought I’d have a quick look through some Spanish stuff. The Hispanic bragueta (I guess it comes from the French braguette, which is actually not a combination of baguette and bragas, “knickers”) seems to have been used first (in the late 15th [...]

Last night I had the privilege of singing at Ferrari driver Marc Gené’s wedding reception, held in a neo-Renaissance palace (built 1940-50) called Bell Recó (something like “Beautiful spot”–it’s tucked away behind some absolutely splendid trees on a hillside up near Argentona).
Apart from the kitchen, I found the building of interest principally because of [...]

I only found out yesterday that people refer to €500 notes as “Bin Ladens”, not because they have his portrait on them, but because you never see them.

… suggests Nando Caballero here. A certain Bakunin comments below that the same thing happened to us (coral de la guasa = “humorous choir”, kind of) during a July concert in Barcelona. However, the highlight was not the hassle we did indeed get off the liberhairians, but a drunk who climbed on stage and [...]

On Winterson.com (scroll) via MemeFirst.

The right’s out on another freemasonry scare. The kind of paranoia popularised by Franco’s official historian (whose work is often quite as bad as anything produced by the left-wing historians who came to power in the 80s) and his mates may explain why at least three people try to run me down every time I [...]

A friend once impressively tried to play the trombone in a London cab, but the prize goes to the small lottery kiosk containing a middle-aged woman several sizes larger who was dreamily squeezing away at her accordeon this afternoon. Her dog was crammed in there as well.

Gencat.net in English is sad, sad, sad (and the Catalan version also forgot the stylesheets). Don’t they do testing?

I’ve been having problems with some vowels recently, so I wish this kind of stuff was available for more languages. The doggies and birdies are particularly welcome. (I once worked for an insufferably conservative company with a phenomenally rear-end approach to corporate comms. One day it was discovered that, rather than wait for the official [...]

That’s what Urs Dürmüller of Berne University says, and Switzerland.isyours explains why in greater detail. English became popular in Brussels, partly because it was viewed as a neutral language, exempt from the rivalries of the supporters of Flemish and French (German princes were invited to take up Balkan thrones in the C19th for much the [...]

According to Colin Davies it rains thrice as much in the winter in Galicia as in Manchester, but he still looks remarkably cheerful and Thoughts from Galicia is a great read. Per Svensson sounds like a man I could do with talking to right now: his Fundación Instituto de Propietarios Extranjeros is there to fight [...]

Another blog with a strong local focus I just found. The author covers a number of things and is following the hilarious tale of how the local socialists got too big for their boots and tried to fix the Catalan football federation elections.

José Miguel’s out of the closet. I hope he’s wrapped up warm.

I’ve never really thought of myself as a tourist guide, but the guilds do and they want to close people like me down. I’ll bet they made up half the scam stories, but I could identify with the Russian guide who allegedly mistook the Sant Adrià power station for the Sagrada Família.

Death row / Fila de la muerte by Pedro Patricio Escobal sounds like a good read. I’d also know more about football trainer, Mr Petland, who apparently engineered some kind of “English revolution” in Madrid and in the Basque country.

The Guardian got a “panel of experts” to take a look at the Wikipedia. Here’s what Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World, said about the Basque people entry:

It says: “Aquitanians spoke a language which is proven beyond doubt to be akin to Basque.” I am not familiar with the Aquitaine [...]

At a recent match Barça unveiled a map of what the local ethnic supremacists call “The Catalan Countries”. The president of the Valencian region is not happy at Catalan nationalists’ desire to colonise other allegedly Catalan-speaking zones, compares his situation with Czechoslovakia before the Anschluss, and says that “Catalan fascists” have less following down his [...]

The Spanish parliament recently decided that stutterers could no longer be turned away by public employers. Dutch commenters at FOK! think that thousands will now die as stutterers take over air traffic control and the police, while Blonchi hopes that the Spanish lisp will finally be abolished.

A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive [...]

I’ve bumped into a number of Moorish poet-princes, but I’d never heard of poet-princess Wallada bint al-Mustakfi (994-1091). There’s a sensible, sourced account (in Spanish) here, and then there’s this. I had my doubts about Wijdan al shommari, and thought I’d be able to nail him/her on the basis of his/her (?) version of a [...]

Just found out that “go fry asparagus” is an invitation to depart and engage in some other activity. Unfortunately it’s not an accurate translation of what Alistair Campbell actually wrote (3rd para).

A linguist is voted the world’s top public intellectual, and Language Log has nothing at all to say about it. Since Liberman, Pullum et al are known for their complete lack of respect for sacred cows, does that mean they regard Chomsky as simply irrelevant?

We’re doing a short show in Llantiol on Sunday December 18th at 23:00. It’s a cute, *little* theatre, with only about 70 capacity, so book etc etc. OK, it’s Sunday night, but no one does any work on the Monday before Christmas anyway. New repertoire will probably include a satire on language policy, Tom Lehrer [...]

Don’t worry about all the new anti-pi$ssing/vomiting/nudity rules in Barcelona (thanks to The Electrician): the mayor says (via el cançoner de la lola) the police shouldn’t enforce them.

I think a public intellectual must be rather like a public house, where over-consumption of what seems so attractive at the time shortly and surely leads to idiocy and ruin. All that glitters etc etc (via Barcepundit).

“Chávez … expressed solidarity with ‘president Robert Mugabe and the people of Zimbawe, because both blacks and whites have rights.’” So will Venezuelan land reform also end in famine? (Aside: I fear that those who hope Chávez will do something about the notorious correlation in Venezuela between status and lightness of skin will be grievously [...]

Via today’s NYT. http://print.google.com accesses exactly the same content as http://print.google.es and delivers the occasional gem (the amount of material published is still quite small):
Here, wrote Maragall, is something living, governed by something that is dead, because death weighs more than life and drags it with it in its fall into the tomb. (Carlos [...]

Re a post by Amando de Miguel in his interesting, if fairly Pleistocene, language column for Libertad Digital, I’ve compiled a little table of hits over time from Mark Davies’ corpus for several Spanish versions of the Great Satan (no hits in there for el Gran Satanás unfortunately). I’ve omitted

USA = América because I’m interested [...]

This would much better news if the Zapatero and Villepin, instead of merely consenting to allow citizens to use the nearest hospital, had agreed to enable them to choose the best. That would, however, means providing information to patients. Aragon is having a go at publishing waiting lists, Catalonia isn’t, and in France waiting lists [...]

Dani Pedrosa has won the world scooter championships, but has betrayed The Nation by doing so in the wrong language. (I’m singing in a couple of weeks at a do for a gentleman who depresses accelerator pedals for a well-known Italian brand. His site is available in Catalan; the prizes will doubtless follow.)

… when you discover that Telegraph columnists have experimented more widely than you have.

Here.

Following the news about a Galician politician-trombonist, here’s a Louisianan trumpet-playing coroner:
The first time Dr. Minyard ran, in 1969, he lost to the incumbent. But four years later, he and a slate of other candidates viewed as reformers - including Harry Connick Sr., the “Singing D.A.” - were swept into office. Another of those candidates, [...]

I hate the flag-waving and military parades around October 12, particularly when accompanied by the sight of the Spanish prime minister and king embracing a man who clearly regards himself as the next Latin American Mussolini. In it had been left to the church, the ceremony might have been rather different. Here’s part of a [...]

There’s a curious rant over at the Guardian by A Sivanandan, “a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner” (does concealing one’s first name make one seem more intellectual?), in which he claims that
Margaret Hodge, the Work and Pensions Minister, blamed a surge in white, working-class racism on its black victims’ failure to ‘integrate’…
In fact Hodge [...]

This morning we went looking for gypsies and birds at the northern end of Collserola. When it suddenly started looking like it was going to rain very heavily–it subsequently did–we came down off the hills, overtaking old men carrying mushrooms and the occasional deckchair, and did a quick improvised tour of bars (Chuck Norris on [...]

Nineteenth century nationalism and anti-Papism made it easy to forget the extent of Spanish influence in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Much of this influence was literary, with translations and localisations of Spanish classics appearing rapidly and serving as models for several generations of Dutch authors, but Iberia’s greatest gift to the Provinces–like [...]

David E Vassberg (Land and Society in Golden Age Castile) writes:
There exists also an old proverb (of unknown vintage): En tierra de señorío, almendro o guindo; en tierra real, noguera o moral (In seigneurial lands, almond or cherry; in royal lands, walnut or mulberry), which the editor of the collection of proverbs [Bergua, Refranero español] [...]

puntCAT’s application for the sponsored top level domain .cat clearly states that its purpose is to serve the Catalan linguistic and cultural community. All 67 supporting organisations and all examples given of eligible entities are of this nature; none are state entities whose purpose is public administration in its general sense, which is a rather [...]