Amid Catalan witches in Murcian pantomime and calls in Catalan tabloid Avui for the killing of anti-Catalanists, here at Nihil Obstat is Catalan central government minister Jordi Sevilla saying that Catalan colleague José Montilla (mayor of Cornellà for years) is a charnego and thus unsuited to be president of Catalonia. Charnego is a racist term [...]

Used to publish sensible stuff, but now…

Go see squires tapdance in DC on the 25th. A tapdancer came to audition for this the other day and I was bowled over: I hadn’t seen a proper dancer since I was playing in a pit and there was this hirsute lead in fishnets who made quite a deep impression. When I drink cubatas [...]

Se trata de una versión cantable de “At the ball, that’s all” de la peli Way out west:

In my case they got me with an email address obtained from la Marató de l’Espectacle.

I probably don’t agree with Marc Belzunces about very much, but I’m with him on bike paths and poseur Jordi Portabella. Incidentally, my nominations for the two worst bike paths in Barcelona are those on Tuset and the tiny one on the northern corner of the junction of Diagonal and Paseo de Gracia. I know [...]

The Cataloonies are running a campaign to de-Castilianise Google Earth. Stick your oar in too, should you feel so inclined…

I do like the Dutch foreign ministry desk diary, although more for its furry cover than the tired and overwhelmingly western images reproduced. One exception: Co Westerik’s Snijden aan gras (Westerik’s site -> enter -> Schilderijen -> scroll down or Ctrl-F to Snijden aan gras I). Fingers that are cut in Spanish culture tend to [...]

I think it’s safe to assume that none of this will be going to Madrid.

If the council can deal with the Ukrainian prostitution mafia, why can’t they cope with Peruvian panpipe terror? This is not, by any means, to say that we should imitate the Californians and execute guys who dress up as Indians. We are Europeans! We will do nothing!

The only way to stop the people of Barcelona bashing you with their brollies and pushing you off the pavement is to make them speak English (from Robert B Bechtel, Environment & Behavior: An Introduction):
Rosenfeld (1982) measured the distance between bilingual subjects and found they sprang apart going from Spanish to English but moved closer [...]

Good post by Megan Saltzman.

From the The Hai-Lu (1783-1797), as quoted on this page on this excellent site, again via TdiT:

Portugal (called Ta-hsi-yang, or Pu-luchi-shih ". . . has a climate colder than that of Fukien and Kwangtung. Her chief seaport [Lisbon] faces the south and is protected by two forts manned by 2000 soldiers and equipped with about [...]

Good to see civic leaders lining up to praise local rag, La Vanguardia, on its 125th, particularly since the former have just pushed through a crackdown on prostitution, while the latter derives a substantial proportion of its revenues from prostitution- and sex-related advertising and services.

OK, Jordanian Starbucks customers (via Taccuino di Traduzione). More on Arabizi and language death from Jordanian blogger Lina. I know an Itsi-Bitsi-Teeny-Weeny-Honolulu-Strandbikini bit about East African Arabic creoles, but this is new to me. I guess that there must have also existed Romance-Arabic creoles at some stage (Mozarabic was, of course, not one), but I’m [...]

… is on the way, and will be used by these folks. One of the guys behind it is Carlos Casado, who also runs this excellent Badalona blog.

“Du bist Deutschland” was widely acknowledged to have been an embarrassment, so why isn’t the blogosphere ripping the zike out of the Catalan Generalitat’s even more wasteful and embarrassing “Com tu” campaign? And why aren’t the equally incompetent & similarly inspired Renfe Cercanías suing for plagiarism?

Looking forward to better news re the Islamists, and to their being allowed to participated in free elections in Libya.

The Catalan Audiovisual Council, the politically appointed regional regulator, is about to announce how the referendum on the bloody Estatut should be reported “in order to avoid what happened in the Euro referendum.” If you ignore them, they’ll close you down. (The solution: house your server in the free state of Valencia, watch these particular [...]

It helps them speak.

–Hola, soy Trevor.
–¿Cómo?
–Trébol, como la planta.
…
–Hola, soy Trébol.
–¡Como la planta! ¡Qué bonito!
…
–Hola, soy Perejil.
–José María, encantado.

Spam this morning from Hairbrushes G. Brunhilde, Witticism H. Miscasting and Waistbands M. Doctors, among others.

Someone told me the other night that Joan Maragall’s little jingle is metaphorically cunnilingual, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the explanation. I guess you could make a case for lines 1-4:

The other day I was having a beer with Simon Hughes when he suddenly said, “Trevor, I want you to know that I’m gay,” and then tried to cover it up by asking the barman for yet another Freudian Pils. (Thanks Paul. Furt is appearing April 3rd in Norwich and April 22nd in Leeds.)

I went through a phase in which I agreed (although slightly less volubly) with R Hughes re R Rauschenberg, but then I found WS Burroughs playing with similar ideas with more aggression and originality (although with less skill) and I changed sides. Further, Rauschenberg couldn’t write, while Burroughs’ Tangier stuff is better even than that [...]

I’d like to see Guus Hiddink take over England asap, but then I was supporting Mark Oaten (go on, get me one for my birthday!) to run the Lib Dems until he started chasing the England job, leaving Boris Johnson as the LDs’ only potentially electable leader.
(Apparently the Koreans gave Guus a villa on [...]

It’s extraordinary that there’s no discussion of the UK in the paper by György Frunda (via Arcadi Espada) being debated today in the Council of Europe (countries without formal constitutions obviously don’t count). I’m of the view that cultural nations, like religious sects and Ruby programmers, should be self-financing and not be allowed anywhere near [...]

The NYT editorial Army Troglodytes in Spain is misguided and reactionary (as well as being factually inaccurate re Spain’s history and constitutional order). Troglodytes are good, forward-looking people whose choice of housing reflects a concern for energy conservation; unlike nomads, troglodytes rarely form armies and are generally nice, romantic things like shepherds, brigands and Ruby [...]

Nightfall in Madrid, which was apparently notorious (Pérez Galdós, Rosalía, ca 1872):
In the house a sepulchral silence reigned, but outside the noise was unbearable: carriages came and went without cease; a girl cried the lottery every five minutes, informing the public, “Tomorrow’s the last day to get your tickets. 10 reals for a décimo [tenth [...]

Another multipost by Amando de Miguel, in which he suggests that the Galician-Castilian creole of El Bierzo in León appears so close to Catalan simply because both come from Latin. I wonder whether that isn’t underestimating the role of later, intra-peninsular trade in dialect formation. Anyway, the strangest lexical item to turn up so far [...]

These Andalusian caves have been for sale for ages. I’d be tempted by the one that needs work, but it’s a bit far away.

La Cabota has come up with an ingenious scheme to help mums find children asphalted over by mistake by those speedy Valencian developers: implant chips in their posterior ends.

There’s a good organ miscellania page here. The Sultan and I anecdote was one of the few useful pieces of information I knew as a child. The Spanish connection lies in the Novelda rock organ, of which more here, and the information that “Spanish organs of the 18th century include a number of mischievous sound [...]

When I worked in an office, one day someone in a suit came in to sell me something IT-based. It turned out that she was a horror porn star (this genre) in her spare time, which was much more interesting. I believe revelation of this information to have been partly responsible for a colleague’s heart [...]

Carod, hair awry, to bored barman: NO ESTATOT EN EL ESTATUT. Or something like that, in El País.

At Taccuino di traduzione.

Disappointed to discover that Fats Waller’s taties in All that meat and no potatoes are not as grubby as Seamus Heaney’s (“Are your praties dry/And are they fit for digging?”/“Put in your spade and try,”/Says Dirty-Faced McGuigan.)
(The previous post contained a link to Alan & Jenny’s site for the St Louis Zipper Washboard Band, which [...]

Erik Dams links to an intriguing little thing by Bill Horton, editor of Offbeat Magazine (“not the New Orleans one”) about musical hand signals. I’ve bumped into about half of them, but there are many others–jazz is much more formulaic than most folks think, and it’s not difficult to communicate which ending you’re going to [...]

Apparently there’s an urban legend in circulation in which, as a cult initiation ceremony, the occupants of an unlit car pursue and murder the occupants of the first car to beep at them–and they’re not actors.

Apologies–I know who brought the site down, and I know that they did it deliberately, but I can’t do anything about it and I can’t tell you about it here.