From the NYT:
A small number of [Sarkozy's] plainclothes police officers are wearing dreadlock wigs, hoods and Palestinian kaffiyehs to try to blend in with the street toughs.
I do hope they remember not to wear their black shoes.

Would someone be an absolute darling and send me an MP3 or WAV or whatever of Dr Kitsch in the original calypso version? Talk to me here, and I will love you forever (or at least until that gorgeous girl comes back from work on her scoot-scoot-tricycle). Solved: thankyou Dave.

Someone told me once that the best brothel in Spain, ever, was a mythical one run in medieval Valencia by one Rei Arlot under licence from the King of Aragon. The reality is slightly more predictable: King Harlot was the popular name given to the government official charged with regulating prostitution, and the office was [...]

David Rennie notes a popular reactionary meme:
Her piece picked up the great buzz-word of the current French protests, “précarité” - which means something like bleak uncertainty, and carries a sense of horror at life outside the state’s swaddling embrace.
I don’t know where or when it was born, but it’s been painted on the walls of [...]

I suspect Dani Sanchez Llibre has not been following the case. There’s a moving interview with the coastguard here and with a survivor here. The image of the bodies lined up by the tide is one that lingers.

Someone told me last night about Jonny McGovern. Our next show’s going to be even worse.

I’m getting about 3,500 visitors a day now & am moving over the next couple of days to a more reliable provider with better rates. I’m taking none of the recommended precautions, so things may get messy.

Here’s a very funny thing by Pedro de Miguel on what to do during the contradiction in terms to which we are to be subjected starting midnight.

If you speak English, and even if you don’t, this is deeply surreal. It is difficult to imagine a Bond villain acquiring an atomic bomb in broadest Estuary, but times have changed.

Neither the terrorists themselves nor anyone else is in disagreement about who murdered 851 fellow citizens, injured thousands more, and drove tens of thousands from their homes over the past 38 years, but the BBC has some lingering doubts:
Eta is blamed for killing more than 800 people in its four-decade fight for independence for the [...]

Permanent: ondulació artificial dels cabells que dura molt de temps, sez Pere@Saragatona. I think it would suit Otegi.

I don’t know how easy it is to do this kind of thing on stage, although it has obviously been done in real life. I had originally considered using a vaguely Edwardian toy lamb on wheels, but a poodle (or a ferret) sounds more interesting. I guess it depends on the poodle; I guess also [...]

Shame they didn’t take this step before, sez Arcadi. Shame, too, that the conditions are inacceptable to anyone who accepts constitutionality as axiomatic in political life.

I struggle terribly with English, so I feel particular sympathy for the people who wrote, “But never before have we experienced as creative a phase in language as we are now in our age of modern media”, even if they are the authors of the Cambridge Grammar.

Josep Maria Fàbregas notes that the remit of the campaign to “recuperate historical memory” doesn’t appear to extend to Radio Liberty, to which Gorbachov listened during the 1991 coup, and which is to be demolished today to make way for the developers. It would be most surprising if it did: in Catalonia, at any rate, [...]

It doesn’t really matter whether Columbus was that posterior construct, Catalan, or not; the Mings got there first, using trained otters.

There’s a ways and means discussion over at MemeFirst. If Spain hadn’t more or less abandoned its space programme–mentioned in the Voz de Galicia edition plugging Franco’s hon doc–we’d have been able to sell Chávez stuff like this. Not.

If Spanish universities are giving honorary degrees to one thug and taking them off another, does that mean there’s a finite supply of funny hats? What is this thing universities have with dictators?
(More dodgy awards: Westminster, Sindh, anywhere in China or Korea (1, 2), Michigan State or–worst by far–Long Island.)

The way this is going it’ll soon be respectable to be a Francophobe (which of course one is not).

Here’s something (via Lucia@Polifônica) to palliate the onset of spring which, as usual, is turning out to be fairly knackering.

I didn’t know I even had Premium Bonds, but apparently I’ve just won £50 on Ernie, or Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment for long. Meanwhile Buddha has run away with £500,000. It’s that destiny thing, dammit.

Is it true that Maoists used to sing of the capitalist military-dairy complex, “Say, it’s only a paper moo”?

On Thursdays, after this, I like to cycle round the buildings of the Industrial School/Can Batlló to the Guastavino chimney. On moonlit nights if you glide the last 50m while staring at the 60m chimney top, it’s like coasting down some baked clay Milky Way. There’s a picture here of his Oyster Bar at New [...]

Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya/Republican Left of Catalonia are changing their name to Esquerra/Left. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes down on Mallorca, where esquerrà also means repulsive, difficult, unpleasant (Alcover/Moll).

After struggling for 10 minutes, a well-dressed young man manages to set fire to a container just off Carmen, steps back, takes out what looks like an expensive video camera in order to film his work, and is immediately robbed by two Moroccan lads. Try explaining that to Mummy and Daddy. Other faves:

Several hoodies breaking [...]

Nando’s acquired one, and here’s the video. The world is about to be swept by yet another théremin craze, and I hope to bring you tidings more thrilling yet soon.

Kalebeul hopes to avoid the widescale unrest we believe will result from police action against nocturnal street drinks parties by implementing two preventative strategies:

30 years ago three gentlemen in Bar Manolo were given a monthly allowance on condition they drink all the alcohol in Spain. Project delivery date: 20:00 17/3/2006.
All streeting from the Rambla del [...]

Check today’s agenda. (The story of José Antonio Romero Polo, the Andalusian boss of the new dustbin company, is worth a read, however.)

There’s still no article on Chistabín in the Oiquipedià, the Occitan version of Wikipedia, believed to have around 1,832 legitimate pages (Arabic = 11,824).

Currently doing a bit of literary translation out of one very strange dialect into another, and here’s something not so completely different: a basic grammar of Chistabín, the well-preserved (whatever that means) dialect spoken in the Chistau valley in northern Huesca. There’s a small lexicon, sorry, lesico. I like words like agila (águila in Spanish) [...]

Today’s Libro verde entry (front page, right bottom) has Fernando VI in 1758 undoing various stuff done by Felipe V in 1714, including reëstablishing the right of imperiage. I speculated that “this must be some kind of feudal arrangement governing property and revenue sharing between landowners”, but a description has turned up (thankyou JA) in [...]

A spokesman for the new channel said: “Eighty per cent of our target audience will be anglophone. If we want pluralism in the field of international television news, we cannot ignore this. Our viewers will be opinion formers, journalists and people who travel a lot, and the language most common to them is English.”

Surely of interest to someone. The scrawl on the front page says “Royal Veterinary School”.

Life will be so much easier now I have found Molly&Edu’s Diccionario de rimas.

The inhabitants of Llobatera, Venezuela call stomatitis (sores and/or inflammation inside the mouth) “tener sapos en la boca”. I don’t know if this is related to having a frog in your throat, and I imagine there’s no way of finding out.

Mind your medication, Arnaldo. Two in a week would be too good to be true.

I submit that this is a poor choice of headline in the trial of a psycho.

A good friend of progressive bent had planned to improve life in a minor provincial capital by setting up a gay brothel (currently the locals have to make do with a weekend of madness in Barcelona every couple of months), but his accountant now tells him that the government’s new subsidies for employing women will [...]

I’d spell it with a nn to banish all thoughts of bedspanish.

Governments use studies to find out if they’re doing the right thing, but in democratic countries I think there’s a consensus that (a) they should be made public (we pay, after all), and (b) expenditure should be moderate. The revelation (here and here) that our nationalist-socialist regional government has been spending €0.5M a week over [...]