Is the name of a chicken grill in Mexico City. (For the uninitiated, pollo is Spanish for “chicken” and gilipollas is Spanish for “arsehole”, although as far as I know it’s only peninsular.)

Here from Braudel (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II/El Mediterráneo y el mundo mediterráneo en la época de Felipe II) is some context for today’s Libro verde item on the fall of Barcelona to Juan II’s great beasts:
At the end of the fourteenth century, the Mediterranean belonged to its [...]

Nick has a picture over at IberiaNature. Tony Jones has got some nice pics of vultures eating a horse in Botswana here.

Hardly seems worth cutting into vacation beer time for this, but here is the man referring to this over-aggressive post of mine:
Trevor has me claiming that the object-present participle form of compounding is a recent invention of the political right and originates with nigger-loving.
And in a new post:
I was hardly claiming, as Trevor seems [...]

El Vapor, a thrice-weekly newspaper dedicated the promotion of trade and industry as well as to romantic and regionalist sentiment, and viewed as a continuation of El Europeo (both were edited by Aribau before he became a street), was launched on March 18 1833 by A Bergnes from his bookshop at Escudellers 13, Barcelona. Here’s [...]

Showing her customary wisdom, one’s secret damsel on the hill has agreed to a temporary separation in order to allow one to tootle round Mexico in an automobile of some nature with three absolutely gorgeous women. Syndicated stuff on this site will continue to update, but posting will be light for the next few weeks, [...]

From the showbiz section of Balitang Pinoy, a newsheet for Barcelona Filipinos:
According to the grapevine, may illicit affair ang Sexbomb girl na si Jopay Paquia at ang Manouvers member na si Joshua Zamora. Nagkalapit diumano ang dalawa during the season one taping of Daisy Siete kung saan sila magkapareha.
Nabalitaan ding iniwan ni Joshua ang [...]

Or rather, to get slightly richer rather quicker than would otherwise have been the case. He gets a monthly Spanish government pension of €3. One of a series of profiles in El Mundo.

“It is found in the Catalan region of Pendeés, in the upper area witch rise 216 meters.” What you see depends on how much you drink, or on how much Capità Vidal is prepared to pay for translations.

Communist film-maker and translator Joaquim/Joaquín Jordâ died last month. One of his last productions was Veinte años no es nada, a red-tinted nostalgiamentary which traces the subsequent careers of some of the participants in the occupation and brief management by workers of the failed Numax fridge factory in Barcelona 25 years ago. Juan Manzanares and [...]

Tim Stannard at La Liga Loca suggests that coach Javier Clemente may not be the smartest bet for a Serbian national team in desperate need of an image upgrade. Dutch coaches seem to travel rather better.

“Overcome with remorse at having stolen a bicycle, a thief in Germany wrote the victim a letter and fully recompensed him for the loss, police said on Monday.” If other thieves were to follow his lead, I could probably retire.

Here, via Carlos at Las palabras son pistolas cargadas. Carlos has a good quote–”dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic”–and comments that the worst that can befall a language is to have passionate defenders in public institutions who get involved in political battles on [...]

Anglocabrón is a pun on anglosajón, Anglo-Saxon, and is used in jest or in earnest (here’s a more extreme example) to refer to an invented race whose enthusiasm for liberty and commerce imperils the eternal values of a bunch of chronically grumpy mongrels the noble descendants of Caesar.

The socialists of the PSOE are going to slaughter the conservative and occasionally liberal PP in at least the next two sets of elections. This is not so much because the socialists are perceived as being competent or well-meaning as because the PP, which had a decent record in government, has clearly lost all interest [...]

Photo: Dolors Sans. More from the Festive Beastie Association

Buy into Spain’s only true national religion and double up ballot papers as lottery tickets. Like Arizona.

Or El meu aerodesllissador està ple d’anguiles (Via Onze Taal)

At the Filmoteca tonight (Monday) at 19:30, Tuesday at 22:00, Wednesday at 19:30, and Friday at 20:00.

At JA Millán, via Spy’s spice and Boing Boing, with thanks to MM@Transblawg.

Sez he:
The fact is that the right owns those object+present participle compounds, as surely as it owns values, media bias, the lapel-pin flag, and sentences that begin with “See….” In fact you could trace the whole history of the right’s campaigns against liberals via those compounds — from tree-hugging and NPR-listening back through the Nixon [...]

If you google “Swedish tits” in Spanish, the second listing is for “FAMOUS CHICKS WITH BIG SWEDISH TITS”. A search for “with Swedish tits” turns up nothing, but “with * Swedish tits” uncovers “amateur chicks with good Swedish tits”, clearly outnumbering other contenders (eg “with * Russian tits”). So why on the Spanish-language WWW do [...]

Funny from a piece by Lamya Tawfik illustrating Egyptian anti-Western paranoia: “Responding to claims that the language used by the youth plays a role in the distortion and erosion of the Arabic language, Nabeel Farouq, a famous Egyptian author of adventure stories for youth, said that this fear is baseless because, to begin with, Arabic [...]

Here’s the final piece of a series by Uruguayan proofreader Pilar Chargoñia calling for the creation in Argentina of a new Spanish language academy to reflect River Plate variants and promote a standardised language. This strikes me as completely deranged. Rioplatense Spanish, including characteristic traits such as voseo, already dominates institutional and commercial use in [...]

Standing first shows up in the CREA corpus in 1976 in its normal Spanish usage (apartamentos de elevado standing, later appearances typically alto standing). I think its application to real estate is a phoney Anglicism–the first couple of pages of usage in English@Google all appear to be by Western Romance dialect speakers–so I’m very slightly [...]

For residents of Barcelona’s old town an affair way up in Sarrià or Sant Gervasi is probably the best way of surviving the summer. Ensure beforehand that your new friend’s flat is high in a modern block overlooking gardens, and you can enjoy coffee and parrots (barbecued, if you’re lucky) on the balcony before drifting [...]

Today’s Libro verde item (13/7/1714 The troops of Felipe V enter by assault, with which ends the War of the Spanish Succession.) is surely a mistake. From a Barcelonan perspective the war ended on 11/9/1714, although Spain didn’t sign the peace treaty until 1720.

Here. (Thanks Fenian Mark)

He can’t remember if he’s a Catholic.

Without resorting to stereotyping, explain why the Brazilians lip-read “sister” and “prostitute” while the Brits went for “terrorist” and racism.

Go to the council’s website and hit Castellano. (Badalona is one of many nationalist-run councils which, with the connivance of the governing body, are violating the conditions (cultural/language promotion etc) for using .cat.)

‘The miserable Common Agricultural Policy becomes the majestic ratio communis agros colendi, which literally means “common scheme for cultivating the fields”.‘

Far from welcoming Napoleon as a liberator from the evil Bourbons, Catalan irregulars inflicted some of the most significant and discouraging defeats suffered by the French in Spain. However, things were not always as they seemed. Here’s a bit of Antoni Moliner Prader’s dossier, Popular resistance in Catalonia: somatenes and migueletes in the French war:
Beyond [...]

Amusing that the Catalan-Spanish bilingualists of Ciutadans-Partit de la Ciutadania rounded off their congress with a song in English, which one of these years will overtake Spanish here as the principal intercommunal language. Amusing too that one of Ciutadans’ principal bogeymen, Artur Mas, also used “Ain’t no mountain high enough” a couple of years ago [...]

The public brothel opened in Cañet street in 1452 by Simon Sala with a licence from the king (see today’s front page Libro Verde excerpt) seems to have been public in the sense of being licensed and providing a service to all and sundry rather than having been publicly owned and run. Here’s more from [...]

“I’m a strict believer, in fact, a Witness, but I never trust the airlines from those countries where the pilots believe in the afterlife.“

Daft slogans are, for tourists, the most visible evidence of Barcelona’s role as a Disneyland of absurd and forgotten ideologies. The success of the dominant ultra-nationalist caste in Catalonia in stamping out Spanish and non-standard Catalan from public services is clearly reminiscent of that of Mussolini’s lot in mid-1920s Italy with respect to regional dialects [...]

This fragment from Pío Baroja’s memoir, Desde la última vuelta del camino, reminded me of much contemporary Barcelona graffiti:
As we approach Reinosa the fog begins to clear and we see the lights of the village shining.
I awake in the morning and lean over the hotel balcony. A gray day; foggy and cold, in the mountain [...]

It’s difficult to believe that this Telegraph headline wasn’t selected with Google in mind.

This Sunday, from Barcelona to Bellaterra. Check the blog front page.