anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
It may not have worked, but nineteenth century medicine often sounds rather fun. This from An Epitome of Braithwaite’s Retrospect of practical medicine and surgery (1860):
M. Lallemand, of Montpellier, has great confidence in aromatic bitters, to which a small portion of brandy has been added, followed by active friction of the loins… As internal medicines [...]
And where’s the sheep?!
Brief visions of two tongues being fitted, enabling one’s bilingual brain to slot the correct one into place as and when. (Aside: The Sufis say that two tongues of fire await those who speak with two tongues here and now.) I’d like to understand how this kind of stuff pans if the brain has doubts [...]
Go here and hit English. And this the guy who said that he didn’t regard someone who does everything on a pushbike as a serious client. Right…
Ethiopia. Looks rather nice - not many roads.
Quite a lot of these around. I though we had automatic page turners.
From John Drummond Hay, Morocco and the Moors: Western Barbary, Its Wild Tribes and Savage Animals (1861):
There are descendants of the Moorish families of Granada now residing in Tetuan and Fas [Fez], who still preserve the keys, and it is said also the title-deeds, of the houses of their Mauro-Spanish ancestors, in the hope that [...]
Fining businesses for using Spanish is a crucial element in the neo-Francoist campaign to outlaw public use of the mother tongue of half of the Catalan population. La Razón lists (via Bye, bye, Spain) various examples dug up by Daniel Sirera, including a 1,200€ penalty for a business displaying “No Smoking” in Spanish. If only [...]
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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.
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:
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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.
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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