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 [...]