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 [...]