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Unión Progreso y Democracia
kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2006 / 03 / 15 /

Spanish rhyming dictionary

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

Toads in your mouth

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.

We DO hope Otegi won’t do a Milosevic on us

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

Prosecutors hamstrung in Moussaoui trial

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

Brothel news

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 [...]

Bedpanish

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

Tripartite’s secret studies

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 [...]

Playing base

Wynand Myburgh may be part of the Mark Liberman/Chris Waigl “base” eggcorn complex. The 28 “base guitar” ghits in Google Books include such sterling refs as Asante & Mazama’s Encyclopedia of Black Studies, and the following passage from Black Ice by C Rowe Myers seems to confirm that in some cases writers are using it [...]

Splog
New piano shopping Calvary (2)

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.

“Zapatero announces a bank deposit guarantee of €100,000 per saver” (0)

Man: What’s that?
Woman: A bank deposit guarantee?
Man: No, a saver?

Spanish sovereign debt default (3)

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:

LATEST CLUB NEWS
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.

Adopt a wolf (0)

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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