I used to make music with Leon and Jurgen (2003), and that rather nice sceptre was promised to me one evening by Hennie the painter. Henk (1982) played a mean snare-drum and is greatly missed; I think I would also be dead by now if that life had continued.

At least in Catalonia you’re still allowed to run a private school in your language of choice. Algeria’s jefe just removed that right from those who chose to educate their children in French. Let’s hope his gastric ulcer makes a swift return.

Mark Liberman wonders whether Cinderella slipped two dead squirrels round her tootsy-toes that night, while Chris Waigl does not. I think glass is a reasonable interpretation, although it may not have been the material used.
DH Green (Language and History in the Early Germanic World) notes that both Pliny and Tacitus used glaesum/glesum to refer [...]

Zara’s had to withdraw this stuff (via Nihil Obstat) to avoid a new cartoon affair. I hope no one will mind my telling you that it used to be possible to sleep in Cologne cathedral.

Spain is to be represented in Eurovision by Las Ketchup, three daughters of Cordoban flamenco singer El Tomate. Their number is called Blody Mary–at least by El Diario Montanés; Spanish TV describes it as “a perfect cocktail which combines [a] smooth and elegant melody” with “the happiness and colour of the group”.

If QEI didn’t like Catholics, then in harsher economic times she wasn’t too keen either on black people, many of whom also came from Spain, with, for example, Catherine of Aragon. Here’s her deportation order. It’s not clear where they ended up. The site is interesting and includes the usual conjectures about the origins of [...]

Here’s what QEI had proclaimed:
The King of Spaine, for furthering of other intentions against Englande, has dealt with Cardinal Allen and Father Persons to gather together with great labour uppon his charges a multitude of dissolute youthes to begin this seminary of Valladolid and others in Spaine.
The Royal Scots College in Salamanca is of a [...]

It turns out people are performing all the stuff I wrote at college.

… but it looks good.

Unlike the hairdressers of Clonycavan and Croghan, Egil ( “an ugly, irritable, brooding individual … deaf, often lost his balance, went blind, suffered from chronically cold feet, endured headaches and experienced bouts of lethargy … unusual disfigurements of his skull and facial features”) was clearly a trombonist

Everyone always knew that the previous, “moderate”, nationalist government was engaged in a campaign to remove, step-by-step, Spanish and its users from public life. However, due to its clannish habits, strategic smoking guns were scarce. Now a bunch of illegally-funded, Stasi-like surveys and reports have been found in government house providing information on “traitors” and [...]

“The official organization of tourist promotion of Barcelona invites you to know and to discover the attractive principals of the city.” Outsource it, for Pete’s sake.

So will La Caixa ask Montilla for its money back if Gas Natural fails to get Endesa or ends up paying more than bargained for? (e.on’s bid mini-site includes the revelation in the Discurso de Dr. Wulf H. Bernotat that they have a programme called on.top. If German-based concerns want to appear international, then maybe [...]

Here, from 1957, is Cádiz Renfe’s stationmaster using the regional Information and Tourism-crat to get a carnival club to change the title of their mini-show from “The Stationmaster and His Subordinates” to “Infernal Train Emigrants”. Here’s an equally hilarious case from 2004, in which the mayoress and assistant of Archidona (Málaga) obtain a court order [...]

Andoni Alonso, Inaki Arzoz, and Nicanor Ursua don’t provide sources for any of their often startling claims in this piece on “neo-vernacular” architecture in Navarre, so there’s no way of checking up on their thesis that Franco was responsible for the destruction of 75% of what they refer to as “genuine vernacular architecture”, damaging “profoundly [...]

Shame Guy Bellamy (A village called Sin) wrote about Compton Sinton instead of Sín, Huesca.

I’m glad they’ve taken the plunge, just so long as it isn’t abbreviated CDC…

“For brevity, all references to plaintiff’s current name will be shortened to ‘I am the Beast’.” (Via MM)

Estoy en el tren… Cosas íntimas… Me quedo sin cobertura… Adiós…

This Torygraph reference to Blair’s determination “to hurl the full force of the law against anybody who dared to ‘glorify’ terrorism” had me imagining constables being trebucheted into Luton. Not, fortunately.

“For example, if you call yourself an ‘artist,’ you will need to express yourself as an artist in some manner in this lifetime, or else you may feel restless, incomplete or unhappy [in the next?]” There is a downside, however.

This is the moral of a remarkable tale told here by Narasimhan Raghavan.

My favourite enemy is hearing alarm bells going off in his head. Do his ears face inwards or what?! He also regularly has lunch with Willy J. Now, that I am prepared to believe.

“the bodies of the” causes my mind to slip through several different types of space and emerge from a badgerhole in a pleasant spring breeze. (Via MM)

Lisa Spangenberg posted a while back on the recently publicised find of two 2,300-year-old bog bodies at Clonycavan and Croghan near Dublin. The BBC says of Clonycavan man that
he had been using a type of Iron Age hair gel; a vegetable plant oil mixed with a resin that had probably come from south-western France [...]

Twas a commercial promotion. And here, in Catalan, is the story of the armed robber in Malaga who, fleeing the police, went into a hairdressers and had them dye his blonde locks black.

Michael Quinion says it’s a weird word, so I guess I read weird books. Some early models had the benches raked so that everyone could see forward without standing up; accidents must have been spectacular. Spaniards travelled in char-á-bancs, as well as char-á-banes and charabáns (see porlan), and Cuba may have had the odd chalabán. [...]

Maxime calls it an anaphoneme. Pig Latin is more complex, but voice confidentiality tool Babble appears to be anaphonemic:
Babble is a desktop device that connects to the telephone and sends the user’s voice out in multiplied and “babbled” form through proprietary speakers arranged in the work area. It achieves confidentiality without distracting the user of [...]

Arturo Pérez-Reverte sez (via Órdago):
As I type this I still don’t know whether the ultranationalists will succeed in making Catalan the only official and obligatory language in the new statute of autonomy. I should add that I neither know nor care, and that everyone should speak how he facking wants. But the problem is [...]

Oil slick publicity made us rich, say Galician realtors.

One of my linked-tos has died. I used on occasion to read his blog and dip into his La persecució política de la llengua catalana, and I’d take comfort in having found someone substantially more paranoid than me. It’s difficult to imagine him resting in peace.

That’s how Barcelona waterfront dealers in over-priced junk on the waterfront transliterate. I don’t know how long they’ve been doing it or how we can stop them. It is not particularly amusing.

This may just be one of those hateful things people here say about the capital, but someone the other day told me that, in the first part of the C20th, the number of barrel organs per head of population in Madrid far exceeded that in Barcelona. Armando Palacio Valdés’ autobiographical La novela de un novelista [...]

I think it would make an excellent carpark and supermarket, but the faithful have different plans. (Via Alianza entre Mamones)

From Videoshop Gracia: “ON LINE INTERNET”.

I’m not sure if presidentmaragall.cat was such a smart choice of domain, with voters apparently keen to kick out the idiots and reelect the thieves. (The blog link seems to have stopped working. This can’t be because the system doesn’t let him post when he’s drunk, because, as we know, he doesn’t have a problem.)

From El llibre de tres (“The book of three”):
Tres plers són en aquest món: beure en taverna, jaure en bordell e cagar en prat.
Or:
Three are the pleasures this world us doth yield: to drink in a tavern, to screw in a brothel, to $hit in a field.
The edition currently available of this late C14th parody [...]

This has got to be Issandr’s best find yet.

El santuario no se rinde, on at 10 at the Filmoteca. Released in 1949, apparently it has the besieged Guardia Civils sing fandangos while they wait for the red notary to desert the French International Brigades and die honourably. The big question: will it be worse than Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, seen the other week?

Just in case you thought Sephardic morality tales were all doom and gloom and putrid canines, here’s one in which true love triumphs over promiscuity, dodgy geology and a thoroughly nasty little weasel:
A girl fell into a pit while on the way to her father’s house. A young man appeared in the mouth of the [...]