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kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2006 / 07 / 10 /

Materazzi and Zidane

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

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The only Spanish-speakers in Badalona are tourists

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.)

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EU Latin, thanks to the Finnish

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

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How the Swiss saved Spain

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 [...]

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Political mood music

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 [...]

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Public brothel in Barcelona

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 [...]

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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:
poppy

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.

This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, has been assisted by both the PSOE and the PP in government, trading the feasible need for the support of nationalist deputies for silence. It hasn’t found a commercial distributor in Spain. Maybe it will elsewhere.

Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.

  • Yan Larry, The extraordinary adventures of Karik and Valya in Poppy
  • Anon, The Acts and Negotiations, Together with the Particular Articles at Large, of the General Peace, Concluded at Ryswick, by the Most Illustrious Confederates wit the French King. To which is premised, The Negotiations and Articles of the Peace, concluded at Turin, between the same Prince and the Duke of Savoy in Siege of Barcelona by the French in 1697
  • José Ortega Munilla, Chispas del yunque in Pejorocracy, government of the worst

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