Old Tunisian fire engines
Karim’s got some photos of a civil protection open day, BUT NO PICS OF HUNKY TUNISIAN FIREMEN! I know a lot of men and women in Barcelona won’t forgive him for that.
Karim’s got some photos of a civil protection open day, BUT NO PICS OF HUNKY TUNISIAN FIREMEN! I know a lot of men and women in Barcelona won’t forgive him for that.
Emboldened by comments from John of CityHighlights, who was out on an in-town walk yesterday, I’m going to start offering Barcelona city walking tours via the website.
(John pointed out that Roman London also took shape on a modest hill between two streams–in Barcelona’s case, we’re talking the Rambla and the old Riera de Sant Joan, [...]
I have not the slightest problem with gay marriage (I’d go further and subsume marriage contracts etc under general contractual law so I can marry my bicycle without Mr Rajoy objecting) or adoption, but it is true that some much-loved and characteristic Spanish expressions will have to change along with society, as El Cerrajero notes.
Buenos Aires underground, anagrammed. I usually get off at Sajones, obviously.
Liberals believe that politics is about freeing individuals to live as they want within just bounds. Nationalists believe it is a tool for translating a sense of ethnic identity and a fondness for folkdancing into, respectively, sovereignty and national ballets. No one can remember what socialists believed.
For the rest of us, however, politics–I speak, [...]
Or why the Taiwanese or fast-food freaks or whatever will end up running the world. (Via MM)
Barcelona still gets a substantial volume of stag and hen traffic. This party consisted of a dozen supermen and a dozen ladies done out in Southend style. Note to tourists: Catalonia is not Krypton.

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:

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.