Spike Jones and Pérez Prado suffering communication difficulties. Prado was famous for his grunts, but here his personal interpreter does the the talking.

Thanks to Margaret Marks for pointing out this excellent article by Dídac Pujol of UPF. What I miss in his suggestions and in Catalan obscenity and Catalan in general is the sonic violence of “fuck”. Spanish is fine, with its jódete velar fricatives, but Catalan swearing just isn’t scary. (The Journal of Specialised Translation looks [...]

Advert (in English) on telephone kiosk in Mexico City: Best Rites.

Somehow I thought I’d head back from Mexico brown and fit instead of white and fat as usual. As it happens, the ladies preferred shopping trips and cheap shoes to Pacific beaches and my magnificent physique, dropping me off most days at dirty bars full of güero-haters.
The widespread dislike among Mexicans of (male) blondes, even [...]

“Zulu is a very poetic language. Unfortunately the Zulus take it literally.” (I am still on holiday.)

I went into the excellent and apparently men-only Cantina La Fuente in Guadalajara, Jalisco this morning and ordered a beer. An aggressive-looking youngish guy further down the bar started mouthing off loudly about gringos, so I went over to see what his problem was, and it turned out he was a frustrated sysadmin looking for [...]

Here.
(I am still alive, on holiday in Mexico and become increasingly expert in the details of mezcal production–maybe one day I’ll get a diploma from mezCalTech. After the local police ran away from rioting Stalinists and extreme nationalists in Oaxaca, the feds have come in and there has reportedly been shooting. The situation is [...]

The 1390 slaughter of Barcelonan Jewry, natural disaster and ritual combat constitute today’s Libro verde items. The following bizarre anecdote from R Coltman Clephan’s excellent and ridiculously cheap The Mediaeval Tournament combines all three:
In La Vie de Bertrand Du Guesclin is an account of a singular legal duel between Jews, named Daniot and Turquant, which [...]

The police have left town and the revolutionary teachers (beardos with baseball bats trying to blackmail the administration into giving them cushy jobs) have hung up great big portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, along with placards calling the governor a murderer, and they’re breaking up folk dancing in the barrios and intimidating the [...]