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 [...]

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.