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kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2006 / 07 / 18 /

Anonymous bike thief pays compensation

“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.

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Valencian spelling and pronunciation dictionary

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 [...]

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Anglobastard

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.

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The Madrid bombings/the van in Alcalá de Henares

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 [...]

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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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