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.