Apparently there is a multi-ethnic casa de barrets (hat-house, from the number hanging there) at the top of the John Lennon Musical Garden–there hasn’t been any music there since people used to pop outside the city walls to have a crap:

Here’s the pricelist:

Argentines: 80€
Blacks: 30/60€
Catalans: 50€
Romanians: 30€
Columbians: ?
Ecuadorians: 25€
Pigs, bitches, cocksuckers, whores in general, etc: [...]

A revealing note from Fran Harper’s Spanish phrasebook (1963, “text by Joan I de Corvera”):
If you stay in a hotel or private boarding house which has no all-night porter, and return after 10.30 p.m. in winter, or 11 p.m. in summer, the outer door will be opened by the “Sereno,” who is a kind of [...]

This falls into the same category as the revelation by Arenys de Mar’s thriving community of dope-fiends historians that the three kings were all black. Dunno where that leaves trite lyrics like Siempre que pintas iglesias/pintas angelitos bellos/pero nunca te acordaste/de pintar un ángel negro. (On this walk. Critical discussion of inocentadas here.)

The end of an anonymous piece entitled “The English and Christmas” found in the bilingual Spanish-Catalan Christmas 1949 issue of Colegio Condal’s school mag, Condal (more here):
The evening is devoted to innocent games in which young and old participate, one of which is called “snap dragon” and consists of fishing walnuts out of a dish [...]

I’ve only ever been a witness of vomiting and fighting at midnight mass, but none of this is new. One of today’s Libro verde items records that until a few years [before 1848], mass was sung at one in the morning, but that the irreverences of the ignorant made it impossible. Henceforth it was celebrated [...]

The papers are running their usual “worst weather ever” stories, but 163 years ago here massive floods signalled an end to a period of abnormal cold–snow lay on the land around town–and a Norwegian brig was lost in storms at the mouth of the Llobregat.

16/9: I purchase El último pirata del Mediterraneo from this gent on Abebooks for 17 quid, shipping speed 3-7 business days.
20/9: Book apparently sent via Correos, ETA 27/9. (That’s 16 business days after the order, but why be pedantic?)
6/11: Still no book or notification, and bookseller has had nothing returned by Correos. (You can cycle [...]

Re this, some results. The comments in Dutch are grossly libellous, so don’t even try to translate them. I finally managed to get the mitre on my head–Spanish bishops don’t have much between their ears–but the only way the beard would stay on was to jam it over my nose with half of it in [...]

Calla, perru maldito, gocho esfociador; calla y non protestes más y engualdrápami el caballu de una vez. Dunno where the rest is.

Graffiti art outside the nursery of the Coves d’en Cimany (Cimany’s Caves) primary school on one of the variants of this walk. Sendys, who I take to be the author, says that his friend Zoen said, “Man, it’s like a meringue smeared with sugar.” I seem to have lost the accompanying photo of the work [...]

14/12, Octavi Martí 1950s gossipwank in El País: “Pero hay quienes aseguran, sin embargo, que [Rachida Dati] es una de las ministras más cercanas [a Sarkozy] y a ninguno de los dos les importa que se note.”
18/12, more gossipwank in El País, this time from one JM Martí Font: “El presidente francés Nicolas Sarkozy, de [...]

“Neighbours and neighbouresses, this man injured a woman at knifepoint with the intention of raping her. We don’t want rapists in this neighbourhood [Gracia, Barcelona] or anywhere.” What am I meant to do if I meet him? Kneecap him?

TRANQIL·LITAT → TRANQUIL·LITAT, actually TRANQUILITAT. I suspect the Italians. “What’s this, then? ‘Romanes Eunt Domus’? ‘People called Romanes they go the house’?“

I suspect their algorithm is rather crude, and the seasons are rather vague along the Barcelona coast, but these are meant to emerge in spring (typically late January here), not late November. “The pine processionary caterpillar is a pest whose northward spread in France is being fostered by climate change. INRA researchers in Orleans are [...]

If learner drivers get subsidies in order that they may sooner screw up our living environment, why shouldn’t we cyclists get a new bike for free?
[
Patricia is apparently setting off shortly to cycle from Irún in the north to Tarifa in the south. Um, it's snowing all across the north at the moment.
I [...]

Wikipedia suggests that H’Angus the Monkey (cartoon) may have been voted mayor first time by local gamblers attracted by the high odds against him. Stuart Drummond failed to honour his “free bananas” pledge, but was re-elected.
On this walk.

None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician:

Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark:

All on this walk.

This is sooooo old, but posting it is the only way to stop S telling me it again every few weeks.
Q: Translate to Catalan the phrase, Debajo de la cama tiene la mano María, Mary’s got her hand under the table.
A: Sota la taula té la mà Maria, which is to say, the same, or, [...]

Hey, it makes me happy. Is that a golf club up there?

“Thousands of years of existence,” claims Jaume Sobrequés i Callicó, enthusiastic member of the National History school and director of the craven and absurd Museum of History of Catalonia. Move over, Babylon.
[History quiz: Which urban project in Barcelona involved the demolition of more dwellings, the construction of (a) the Citadel/Ciudadela/Ciutadella fort by the victorious Bourbons [...]

That’s Mr Chambers’ 50cc Harley scooter parked in the foreground.

I hadn’t noticed that the Catalan Greens were on the December 1 demonstration demanding more roads, airports etc. Funny old world. (That’s a socialist salute, not a fascist one, on their web page, just in case all their xenophobic gibberish had you confused.)

The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20 [...]

The other day, on this walk, an elderly Englishman from G. Speaking with an Andalusian accent, he claimed to be one of a group of Brits who, following the abortive Algiers putsch (aka putsch des généraux) against De Gaulle in 1961, fled the Marseilles barracks of the French Légion étrangère and crossed the Pyrenees to [...]

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei.
What was news to [...]

This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just [...]

Over Santa Coloma way, taking in Puig Castellar, which I’ve been doing informally for a while. Here are some photos:

This is looking back over the river towards the bits of Barcelona no one visits.

Badalona

FECSA

Badalona

FECSA and Ryanair

Barcelona
There are other attractions, but the best bit about it for me are the views of the power station. I [...]

Mal aparcado posts photos of absurd and illegal parking. There are often so many cars and scooters parked on the pavements in Barcelona that the only place left to walk is the road. Barcelona shots include a nice one of three Mosso-mobiles illegally parked nose-to-tail to go snacking in a bar. Anecdote: The other day [...]

I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the [...]

Meet the guys who make the shirts you buy in Gracia on Saturday afternoons.

From George Ticknor’s superb History of Spanish literature
… a Gothic remnant fled from the Moors into the Alpine Asturias, carrying with them race, name, creed, language, and country—scotched but not killed. In that rocky school, and amid storms and war, the infant Spanish language—eldest child and heir to the Latin—was slowly brought up; seven [...]

This afternoon I have been booked to appear as the Bishop of Myra. This is one of the songs I will not be singing, zoophilia being out of fashion in Barcelona’s Dutch community (but for how long?): Sinterklaas kapoentje, geef de kat een zoentje, geef de kat een likkie, trek hem aan z’n pikkie.

Bizet (2006), by Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955), which went for around €12K + 20% government commission at Brok the other day:

Hypotheses:

Mr Plensa, a covert musicologist, has discovered extraordinary connections between Hector Berlioz, master of the grand and the imperial, and author of the works listed, and Georges Bizet, who dabbled in local colour several decades [...]

BS has kindly pointed out that Lérida has a selective digitalised press archive going back to 1896. With ref to this, he notes the existence of similar commemorative genocidal banging by children in the city in the early twentieth century (?):
–Where are you off to this early?
–To kill Jews, mum!
–Don’t you know that that’s in [...]

For people who don’t like typing day/month numbers into the address bar

I love this Jaén olive oil cooking competition, which is held not in Jaén but in San Sebastián, at the other end of the country. Is this because Jaén-ocrats want an annual freebie to the north, or because they’re ashamed of their home town? S, currently designing a collection of wedding accessories for the metropolis, [...]

Javier López (Estella, Navarra) and Amando de Miguel are unable to locate alcanduz in any dictionary. I think they mean a tree dictionary, because, see, there’s this thing called Google. The definition given in Webster’s English to Aragonese Crosswork Puzzles is “sewer”, so maybe the socialists in La Rioja were hoping to highlight problems with [...]

Orhan Pamuk: Yes, until I was 30 I didn’t earn a single kopek, and I lived at my divorced mother’s house. I lived the strange life of a crazy boy who might one day become a writer. My friends had real jobs. I just wrote, and I could never get published. I was so ashamed, [...]

This had been turned off because I assumed I was going to have to hack WP quite extensively

The format used to be /mm/dd/, which made a little bit of sense but not much more and would have meant a load of pain with WP. Now it is /?mes=mm&dia=dd, which still involved a small hack to solve date problems but enables individual items to take /yyyy/mm/dd/ . Examples here if you’re confused.