anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
I fear commissar Franco Frattini is not thinking of protecting radical anythingarianism when he proposes introducing self-censorship in Europe. Franco (that man gets everywhere!) has taken this new-old approach to quite an extraordinary degree on his personal site. Dear Boris, Mr Frattini is from the Italian right, friends of freedom indeed…
In Amsterdam Dutch the term boterbrief, “butter-letter”, is used for a marriage licence. In English a bread-and-butter letter is written to thank one’s ex-host (or -spouse, presumably) for that which one has consumed. The former has its origins in the Latin literae butyricae, a permit issued by the church enabling consumption of meat and dairy [...]
Under true socialism, plants will be without branches or leaves, just to ensure everyone starves. (Via TA)
I was cycling to a barrel organ meeting last night when I passed a group of Moroccans, one of whom threw something at me while another shouted “Nigger!” If I’d been slightly more awake, I’d have done a bit of ironic chromatic inversion on Blake.
From Barcelona’s Green Book:
In the year of Our Lord 1839 a surgeon of the town of Sancti Spiritus in the province of Badajoz made it known to the Provincial Deputation of Seville that he had discovered a surefire remedy for toothache, which consisted of biting on the neck of a guitar while someone else played [...]
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Barcelona. Shop no 1 is closed at 11:30, well within its normal opening hours. The iron street blinds are down and there’s no message posted, so I walk across town to shop no 2. Yes, no problem, pay now and we’ll confirm the delivery date in a moment. The call comes a couple of hours later:
- That model isn’t available right now.
- When will it be?
- We may be able to tell you later this month, so to save trouble why don’t you just buy this more expensive model?
- No thanks. I’ll be over later to get my money.
- Oh, we’ll have to see about that.
I tend to try to buy through foreign suppliers and I pray for the day when the Chinese will be running everything. Call me a racist, but it keeps me out of the loony bin.
It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of sovereign debt) informs us that it did so thirteen times between 1500 and 1900. I rather liked this Punch item on steps towards a more united Europe, dated September 1 1860:
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SPAIN, put up by France and Austria, as a candidate for admission to the United European, has been blackballed by England, who declines to associate with an Uncertificated Insolvent. Spain is so frantic that she is half inclined to pay her debts, but will probably think twice over so rash an act.
The Dutch haven’t got any genuine armed forces, so they’re sending in the bailiffs to repossess office furniture from the Dutch Icesave, which has also done a runner.
Classic nimbyism, enabled by Spain’s lack of effective central government: Castilla y León has lots of wolves, but other communities which, according to ecologists, should in historical and biological terms have some, don’t want to take the overproduction. So they’re being shot. I don’t suppose we could airlift them to the outskirts of Reykjavik.
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