Here are the maps created by French surveyors in the face of extreme weather, demolished triangulation points (church spires had a bad time) and bloodthirsty mobs in order to calculate, with what we now know was an extraordinary degree of accuracy, the physical length of the 1791 commission’s definition of the metre as one ten [...]

Addenda & Corrigenda links to Hoygan.info, la Real Academia del Español Ofuscado.

Here. This is a variant of the famous review2 attributed to Reger, Brahms and others: “Sir, I am seated in the smallest room of my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”

Check the absolutely gorgeous photo by Santi Cogolludo of Albert Rivera in La Paloma, The Dove, on today’s El Mundo front page. The hall opened in the 1890s as a vice den called The White Camellia but changed its name and image in 1903, taking its interior design from Paris and its new name from [...]

Most sad that Barcelona’s Hogar Extremeño (Extremaduran Centre) was unable to host “Yo soy aquel negrito” last Friday. The show’s title comes from a popular 1956 advertising song for the chocolate drink Cola Cao (check the 1962 cinema ad here), which has “a little negro” from “tropical Africa” singing the song as he works:
Yo soy [...]

The story of the Moroccans with keys to houses in Granada is well known. La Cruz, The Cross, a Catholic periodical carried what sounds like a variant of this in 1854, claiming that Prussian Jews were about to petition the Spanish court to abolish the 1492 expulsion decree. Léon Carbonero y Sol wrote:
In truth it [...]

Pleasingly, Bable is used as a synonym for Astur-Leonese, aka Leonese etc. The name was apparently popularised by someone called Xovellanos in the C18th and taken from someone else I’ve never heard of called González Posada. Its origin is (still apparently) unknown but its use is widespread and it appears in the inevitable references to [...]

Thanks to the still blog-less Dave for the link.

Cool Italian graphic over at Deakialli DocuMental. (Via JA Millán)

Documented here (Excel) and commented here.

There’s a piece on Barcelona pickpockets by Laura Nicolás over at Avui (MT English here–don’t worry, they’re not actually stealing postmen). I don’t often use the metro, but my impression is that the police are considerably over-exaggerating their success, and that the problem is actually increasing.
Metro Line 5 isn’t hugely popular with thieves, but the [...]

Anyone out there got a DVD or the original novel by Pierre MacOrlan? Talk to me in the usual place.

RMF@Fum i estalzí notes that the CIA thinks that 26% of the Spanish population can’t speak Spanish (0% would be closer). Since denial and sabotage of bilingualism is one of the principal strategies of Catalan separatism, does this mean that the CIA is being run by our fascist friends? Is Esquerra Republicana’s extorsionist ex-terrorist, Xavier [...]

Here. Unfortunately I haven’t got sound (and that’s not because my ears are shrinking), but Aspen II it ain’t.

I continue to think “mystifications” is a better translation than “hoaxes” of mixtificaciones. Gerald Howson in The flamencos of Cadiz Bay writes of a 1950s carnaval pregonero preaching against the use of “mixtifications, modernisms and orfeonic banalities” in carnival songs. He wouldn’t have liked Silvester Paradox either.

Next month at the Filmoteca of Andalusia they’re putting on what they call an international congress under the title “Uros y Eros. Erotismo y Tauromaquia”. There’s some good stuff over at Burladero. Here’s a piece in which Albert Boadella calls–as he has done on various occasions–for the reconstruction of the link between bullfighting and the [...]

In some cases the frequency of Anglo-Saxon surnames is related more to the descendants left behind by old British mining concessions than to current emigration of retired Anglo-Saxons to the Andalusian coast.

This is a translation of part of the chapter on Romance languages in Marius F Valkhoff’s 1943 study of De expansie van het Nederlands. The text is annotated–probably excessively and untidily so–with [additional or contrasting information] and [???] where Valkhoff has clearly found something I haven’t.

I should be listening to the Hot Pocket Blues Band and Gazpacho and whatever else Ciudadanos have planned, but unfortunately I’m off to sing in deepest Lleida, in the Auditori, no less. (I think “less” is the correct word.)

This one’s from an Eugenio tape from the early 1980s, although it also seems to be a standard Lepe joke. It relies for its effect on a homophony created by a dropped consonant, a typical characteristic of Andalusian dialects:
Dos andaluces van andando por la selva y uno le dice al otro:
- ¡Mira, una boa!
- ¡Vivan [...]

Me gusta lo de los leperos:
Está el alcalde dictándole una orden al secretario:
- Convócame una reunión para el viernes.
- Señor alcalde - le replica el secretario - ¿Viernes es con “v” o con “b”?
- Aplázala para el lunes.
Últimamente en Barcelona veo mucho desalluno. Es yeísmo–y análogo a la relación tipo LAT que viven la /b/ [...]

Looks like phoney Catholic Catalanista candidate Montilla imploded today (via Barcepundit). But who/what the heck is Barrocs?
(Check Rivera getting an easy ride over on CNN+.)

In Spain it’s a cubana, a Cuban, the Uruguayans call it una paja rusa, a Russian wank (not to be confused with a Russian mountain, una montaña rusa, which is a big dipper in the nicest of senses), while José João Dias Almeida’s excellent dictionary of Portuguese argot (calaõ) and idiom informs us that his [...]

Has a pretty comprehensive list of online dictionaries and the like. It’s a French site, and that’s what I was looking for. I wonder about the interpretations of some of the proverbs in Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 French-English. “Ce qui est venu par la fleute s’en retourne avec le Tabourin/What the pipe hath gathered the Taber [...]

A performancer is someone who gives performances. I am one–or so a Barcelona booking agency told me this morning–and googling demonstrates that there are more of us, spread across the domain dominated by Eurenglish. Performers of the world, adapt or die.

Gerry Studds was, as far as I know, the only Portuguese-speaking member of the US Congress. His name always made me think of that bit in “My old man’s a dustman” which goes “He wears gor-blimey trousers/With the studs sewn down the back.” Googling I find “He wears cor-blimey trousers/And he lives in a council [...]

Wtf’s he got against the sackbut?

Penile art. (Via Enschede aan Zee)

Here. The thought of any of this alphabet soup of criminals, racists and idiots–I include CiU–participating in government again is so distressing that people are going to vote in great numbers for these people. I hope. (Artur Mas once marched up to me in Vic market and shook my hand, but I was prepared. I [...]

Over at Toni Ibàñez, via Carlos Ferrero. A lot to learn–people only say nice things to me.

BCN Week Publisher Jennifer Cross “also soon discovered the value of having sales staff who speak the Catalan dialect of Spanish.” If she thinks Catalan is a dialect of Spanish, then she’s grossly ignorant; if, however, she’s referring to the differences between Catalan Spanish and the standard language, then she’s got the linguistics right and [...]

Liseuse posts on the difficulties of selecting from coffee menus and of translating coffee specialities from German. It would be nice to be able to purchase this kind of stuff in Barcelona–Starbucks don’t do liquor shots, so one boycotts–but first priority for most cafes is to start using decent coffee.

Translator Carlos Ferrero quotes bit of a piece called Aprender a ser libre (Learning to be free) by Jorge Edwards, whose work had the singular distinction of being banned by both the Castro and Pinochet dictatorships:
I recall a Venezuelan poet of Arab origins who was contracting as a translator in North Korea. The documents he [...]

‘Sídí Abú Yahya, who had been governor of Cordova, said of its people, “They are like the camel, which fails not to complain whether thou diminishest or increasest its load, so that there is no knowing what they like.”‘ (Gyangos, History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain, quoted in Adolphus, Letters from Spain in 1856 [...]

I’ve cycled south from Albacete via Yeste twice. On both occasions it would have been really nice to have had a direct road or track from Parolis / Parolix to Los Arroyos, but there just isn’t one, whatever all the maps say. The road from Miller up to the sierra does exist, but those extra [...]

Anyone know if there are any online? I’m interested in knowing in detail the extent of the road network.

Neither an aficionado of la Tomatina in Buñol nor a shooting victim in Millersburg, Ohio, but a follower of the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas:
Si hun religios es bon thomatista, a tot sera bastant a satisfer. Per ço, nostre senyor Deu, ans que vingues esta saviesa en sent Thomas, ja li anava davant per profecia e [...]

I’d never thought of it in that way, unlike Canal Rancio in comments over at Javier Caraballo.

Bicycle sticker in the port: “Computer Asisted Design by European Engineer Group for Riamo Bikes”. Were computers really involved? Do either of these entities actually exist?

Tunisia’s first private TV company doesn’t seem to have any elephants. (Via Karim)