An interesting proscription is to be found in the description of a Barcelona Easter week pageant in Joseph Townsend’s A Journey Through Spain in the Years 1786 and 1787:
In the processions of the present day, practices which had crept in when chivalry prevailed, with all its wild conceits, practices inconsistent with sound morals, and offensive [...]

Baron von Gizman (or whoever) threads his way round the that/which dilemma by using both on the No Kill I site. (No Kill I is a band thatwhich I have never heard, and thatwhich has been involved in a disturbing voodoo chicken situation.)

Weather and currency stuff has been evicted and rehoused here to stop it slowing this demn thing down. Even proper caching didn’t help.

If history, culture, economics and a lack of soothing medication mean that Galicia is entitled to bits of Asturias and Castile & Leon, then Andalusia should hurry up and bang in a claim for the Baix Llobregat, Santa Coloma, and large parts of Barcelona.

‘“Bush is worse than Stalin” -Hitler’ gets 30 ghits while ‘“Bush is worse than Hitler” -Stalin’ gets 822. Is this because the people who make this kind of comparison (a) haven’t heard of Stalin; (b) think Stalin was uniquely awful, an ÃœberBusch; or (c) think Stalin was actually a nice guy with some bad press? [...]

Here are photos of the Wiebe bus. Can I have this side, please? (Here’s the Stroadlfest brochure, for if you’re in Oldenzaal 31/12.)

When Philip IV (III of Aragon and Portugal) came to Barcelona for the first time, he paused at the Valdoncellas/Valldonzellas convent, which was then outside the city. There they dressed him up in rosa seca (surely more than dry rose), hat (Iberian, not Mexican), feathers and diamonds (from the finest of which hung a pearl [...]

From The Tatler, 1709:
THIS is to give notice, That if any able bodied latine will enter into the Bonds of Matrimony with B[illegible] Pepin, the said Palatine shall be settled in a Freehold [of] 40s. per Annum in the County of Middlesex.
I wonder if this is an in-joke, because 40 shillings isn’t very much–around £180 [...]

Middle class Catalan-speakers on their 5th post-prandial gin:
- You know what Maragall wants?!
-
- Us all in a mass grave!
The civil war finished in 1939.

A case of Foreign Accent Syndrome, via LanguageNews. Wikipedia says the first recorded case was in 1941.

Mare de Déu Fumadora, Mother of God Smoker, is a local name used in Arenys de Mar on Catalonia’s Maresme coast for the day before yesterday’s feast of the Immaculate Conception, la Purísima. According to the much-maligned Jordi Bilbeny, this is the day when children were allowed to smoke by their parents (picture of kiddie [...]

I don’t think author and diplomat Juan Valera (“Good should always be in fashion”) will mind me revealing his smoking fetish, now he’s been dead 100 years. Here’s a quick tranny of an 1850 letter from Russia:
On May 8th, Russian style, I left Saint Petersburg for Moscow on the noon train, accompanied by a German-speaking [...]

…was that they usually blew themselves up.

Re shepherds, Pío Baroja says that in the Navarre village inhabited by Silvester Paradox, hero of The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox (Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox, 1901) that the local guardians of public order were called ministers (ministros). (Silvestre Paradox is very strange and very funny. It’s a disgrace that [...]

Who says student jokes never go big-time?

The Guardia Civil isn’t quite the same as Hitler Youth, but I guess Jordi’s just enjoying his holiday.

An El Punt hack (900€/month, I’m told) has noticed that, with Atlantic Basin hurricane namers almost through their standard list, the Greek reserves may be required, leaving Spain open to a storm named for the 7th letter of their alphabet. (The Mediterranean is part of the Atlantic Basin, in case you wondered.)

Amando de Miguel says that Aura Grandal says that people in Ferrol, Galicia call policemen “chepas”, and that this derives from “shepherds”, which is what British engineers called the watchmen in the naval arsenals. I’m going to believe it, whether I do or not.

The only useful feature of the new local search tool Noxtrum is the free SMS feature. Unfortunately the enterprise belongs to Spain’s disastrous, dominant phone company, Telefónica, so the service is of course unavailable.

Here via Papel continuo is an official Fraga-ite guide to Spain. Since this is all that anyone cares about at the moment, it says that “apart from Castilian … Catalan, Basque and Gallego are spoken in their respective regions.”