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.