The otherwise excellent Margaret Marks has ruined a peaceful Saturday afternoon by pointing out that St Columba was, apart from the first person to meet the Loch Ness monster, also on the wrong side of the first copyright case–or so says the Catholic Herald.
Columcille copied a Jeromian psalter belonging to Finnian, King Diarmit made [...]

Abdou Diouf, “Secretary-General of la Francophonie and former President of Senegal”, responding to Chirac in the former organisation’s first meeting outside France, in a Ceausescu palace in Bucharest:
the notion of culture from a US standpoint is understood to mean entertainment rather than the expression of peoples’ souls and identities.
I’ve read quite a lot of twentieth [...]

So wtf happened?

Excellent to see John Chappell back in action. If he fixes the page-top link, I’ll renew the licence on the tag.

I’ve been translating quite a lot of elderly Flemish over the past few months. Here’s an excerpt from some manuscript memoirs found in the municipal archives of Ditverstaanzetochniet:
An ivory trader on the Congo River has been suffering severe depression as a result of harrassment by an inquisitive steamboat captain speaking defective French. He decides that [...]

Google is sponsoring JA Millán’s blog. They probably pay more than the CIA. Time for a rethink.

This autumn’s public walks feature barnyard comestibles as well as the customary tarantulas and bagpipes. Private requests are becoming increasingly obscure and bizarre, but I’m just fine, mum.

Dear City of Vic, I’m sure you’re serious about Europorc–I certainly am–but no one would guess so from the English translation of the convention site. (Vic has more problems of this type.)

Check Victoria over at The Great Escape on whangdoodleland.

The Dutch cartoonist LJ Jordaan seems to have enjoyed portraying Francisco Franco as a woman. Here he is receiving US aid from Eisenhower in parody of the Dutch tradition of Santa Claus being a Spanish bishop who arrives on a steamboat, and here Don Juan (de Borbón) seeks to win him (in German translation of [...]

Amando de Miguel says that Zapatero is Spain’s worst ever ruler, with the possible exception of Fernando VII, Witiza and someone else. Wittiza was very naughty and nasty indeed–he “taught all Spain to sin“–and, to crown it all, he invited the Moors into Spain to help him fight Wodewic. Maybe there’s a Visigoth somewhere who’d [...]

Someone’s passed along a story by La Vanguardia’s plagiarist-in-chief which apparently bears ridiculously strong resemblances to a Guardian story from last year. Thanks, but yawn.

Not much doing this year. Here, nevertheless, oneself and the local deity, with thanks to C&P. There are some good and affordable wines to be had in the Manchuela, the pocket-plain extending between the rivers Júcar and Cabriel (hence “the Manchegan Mesopotamia“, with Villatoya presumably corresponding to Baghdad) and tucked away between Cuenca and Albacete.

Time, August 17 1936:
Along the dusty roads of Lusitania Spanish peasants last week saw a sight that white men had not seen in 450 years: Moorish tribesmen, bearded and burnoosed, swinging their long brass-mounted rifles on the way to fight in Spain. News of the march caused grim chuckles to a ginger-bearded fat gentleman on [...]

We all know, don’t we, that riffraff is from
Middle English riffe raffe, from rif and raf, one and all, from Anglo-Norman rif et raf, rifle et rafle : Old French rifler, to rifle; see rifle2 + Old French raffler, to carry off (from raffle, act of seizing; see raffle1).
So, nothing whatsoever to do [...]

That’s surely the long-term implication for the Spanish constitution and the Catalan statute of autonomy of this European Court of Justice ruling re lawyers’ linguistic obligations:
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) yesterday (19 September) threw out the requirement for a lawyer to speak the language of the country he wants to practise in.
The ECJ handed [...]

More theatrical and, I think, rather better than Joan Clos. (More old Spanish telly, via Barcepundit)

And very nice it looks, too. There used to be a music shop down Paseo de San Juan in Barcelona with its windows stuffed with accordeons, concertinas. One day I went in and asked to try a few. Oh no, said the man, they’re not for sale. In fact, we don’t sell them at all.

“Narcisista-leninista” is what Andrés Oppenheimer calls our dear friend Hugo Chávez. I’d better call Ken Livingstone one too–he hates being left out of this kind of thing. (PS: Chávez’s shrink, Edmundo Chirinos, says the paramilitary pres isn’t clinically unstable. Second opinion?)

Amando de Miguel’s made a collection here. The Central Americans perform well as always, with their Supermen, Stalins, Ceaucescus and Roonies, but my fave’s the army recruit called Felicísimo Lindo Condón, Really Happy Pretty Condom.

I’ve just read chunks of White on Black by Ruben Gallego (available in Spanish as Blanco sobre negro), an extraordinary collection of glimpses of a childhood spent struggling with cerebral palsy in Soviet institutions. The author was dumped there, aged 1, by his maternal grandfather, Ignacio Gallego, secretary-general of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE), who [...]

Don’t think Osama Ladenson turned up.

Here’s a good bunch of Pontevedra photos by Colin Davies chronicling the frenzied destruction of those not-particularly-interesting buildings that nevertheless make Spain look the way it looks. If your dwelling is in a pre-1850 zone, then the chance is that things will stay more or less the way they are, but most everything from the [...]

Elche Council is looking for one, and why not.

Over at Court Interpreter.

Ray Girvan has found a rather special car lease site. I particularly enjoyed her robust views on the FT. If only she’d start doing bikes.

Hannukit reminds me of Grandad’s Last Erection, done with three matches, although unfortunately I can’t remember exactly how.

Where muffled squid was once only to be found in exclusive establishments like Hotel Termes Montbrió, today it is merely one of 1,043 featured specials at the Chinese snack on Jovellanos in downtown Barcelona. Kalebeul Research has established that the worldwide glut of squid is due not so much to overfishing of predators like tuna [...]

Don Jaide over at Rasta Livewire thinks they’re closer than most others do. If Bill Clinton’s black, then I see no reason why Helen of Troy shouldn’t be too, irrespective of what the original texts actually say.

I know much more about Maghrebis and Africans in colonial Spain than in the period up to 1936 and I’d like to correct that. Any books or articles out there? I’d be most grateful if you’d talk to me here.

A kick in the goolies for narrow-minded gits who want some kind of flag-wrapped municipal ordnance to prevent entartete sombreros and Osborne bull t-shirts being sold down the Ramblas in what you can just about get away with calling pakishops (check Gwyneth Dunwoody vs Eric Forth on retail opening hours): Barcelona’s second mariachi festival. (Useful [...]

I did my first Follow The Baldie wheelchair outing the other day without anyone getting killed or alarmingly drunk. I think this makes me the first walking provider in Catalonia to cater for this market, and all without a cent of public money. (I used this The Ramblers limited mobility info as a starting point [...]

I once cycled over the Dutch border into Germany wearing a ballgown and was quite fiercely stoned by small children, so this study by Ian Walker may not provide a panacea to our problems.

Abogánster = abogado (lawyer) + gangster. Here’s some good stuff by Carlos Monsiváis about legal culture in a country where justice is generally viewed as the belonging to the rich. He says that abogánster is a 1940s term whose archetype was Bernabé Jurado, legendary for eating evidence, buying witnesses, overseeing torture leading to false confessions, [...]

Following the post on Mexican organ grinders, someone kindly sent in the following anecdote, posted by Mark Williamson over at the Mechanical Music Digest:
The Italian composer Pietro Mascagni was sitting in his study one day when a street musician stopped outside and began to play one of Mascagni’s pieces on his hand-cranked barrel organ. [...]

Via the Royal (Dutch) Library: “Spanish newspapers say that the real inventors of the Paris Gun [vèrdragend kanon / Pariskanone / Gran Bertha (sic)] … are two Spaniards, who offered their invention to the German consulate in Barcelona. Thereupon they were taken in a U-boat to German to show their invention to Krupp.” (NRC, April [...]

‘Jones is convinced, for example, that Jesus was wandering through ancient Mexico around AD 600, paying calls on various Mayan villagers. He has published “evidence” that the Mayans were well aware of the “resurrected Lord” centuries before the Spanish priests crossed the Atlantic and gave them the Good News.’

MP3 of Burl Ives’ recording of Lavender Cowboy (”He died with his six-guns a-smoking, and only two hairs on his chest”). Talk to me here.

Pere@Saragatona notes Mexican zombie president López Obrador’s proposal to create a losers government alongside and in opposition to winner Calderón’s official one and suggests its neo-Ottoman application in Catalonia. If Pere could arrange this for me, then I’d quite like to pay my taxes in Andorra, providing of course that I didn’t have to marry [...]

Good to hear that wannabe Catalan nationalist-socialist leader José Montilla sends his daughter to the Deutsche Schule in Esplugues. There they give equal recognition to Catalan and Spanish in teaching, which is precisely what he is trying to end in the public sector. What’s the point of his daughter learning German, however, if daddy doesn’t [...]