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kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2006 / 02 / 11 /

Porland

I thought “Porland” was just Spanish for “Portland”, as in cement, but it turns out that it’s a registered trademark in Turkey…

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Leader (not) wanted

If we really need a hero in this strange struggle to impose the rights of living Catalans over those of the (principally mythical) dead, does it really have to be Tarradellas? (Via Virgulilla)

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How to get Valencia to agree that Catalan and Valencian are the same

Antoni Puigverd posted a cool piece, Lenguas como cuchillos, over at LaVa the other day, calling for an end to the curious and archaic 1 language, 1 nation obsession of the nationalists. The principal parties in Valencia aren’t going to budge, so the only way of achieving the nominal unity of Catalan and Valencian seems [...]

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Ésadir.com

This must be good for something, but I haven’t yet discovered quite what. (Found it.)

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Toponymical totalitarianism as a source of variation

Differences between standard Catalan and Spanish orthography mean that Catalan toponyms that are pronounced more or less identically in both languages are often written differently: for example, there is no significant phonetic difference between Penedès (Catalan) and Panadés (Spanish). One of the intriguing effects of the removal from public life of the Spanish variants is [...]

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Press excerpts for language learning

This is cool: BebaManno reads the Guardian, which means I don’t have to, and I get to learn Italian at the same time. (I see Italian as a kind of easy back door into Provençal.) BM’s previous post links to the Mandarin section of Corriere della Sera. I am not sure whether this is aimed [...]

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This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:

People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family are nice so there’s hope yet.

A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:

At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:

More educational train journeys here.

The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:
poppy

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:

In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge hook at the end of it. The brown body, covered with turquoise blue splashes, was contracting in spasms. The joints moved, sometimes sliding over each other, sometimes turning sideways. Four huge transparent wings, covered with a dense web of
glittering threads, trembled in the air. A monstrous head hammered upon the window-sill.

This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, has been assisted by both the PSOE and the PP in government, trading the feasible need for the support of nationalist deputies for silence. It hasn’t found a commercial distributor in Spain. Maybe it will elsewhere.

Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.

  • Michael Meyer, Life in the vanishing backstreets of a city transformed in Destruction of old Peking
  • Yan Larry, The extraordinary adventures of Karik and Valya in Poppy
  • Anon, The Acts and Negotiations, Together with the Particular Articles at Large, of the General Peace, Concluded at Ryswick, by the Most Illustrious Confederates wit the French King. To which is premised, The Negotiations and Articles of the Peace, concluded at Turin, between the same Prince and the Duke of Savoy in Siege of Barcelona by the French in 1697

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