Try it between 19:55 and 20:00 on Feb 1.

Here, via the seriously underfeeded but still gloriously defiant Iberianature. I’d like to see more photos of them eating stuff, but then I’m not a rat.

Good fisking by John Chappell of a completely nonsensical piece by a troll who calls himself Ignacio Russell Cano and who publishes in the Jerusalem Post. Has the author ever visited Spain? I doubt it, but there’s a considerable volume of native anti-Zapatero lying to deal with as well–check out RMF at fum i estalzí [...]

The hunt is on for the grammatically challenged Gerald Fitjohn.

The Moroccan Report has a fine example of the increasing global use in advertising of Angloisms by and for those whose understanding of its nuances is limited. Since half the population still can’t read, maybe it doesn’t matter.

Almighty personalised Google is having problems with syndication widgets:
No 10 denies ’secret email’ claims 1/26/07
Australia cruise to nine-wicket victory.
says the Guardian feed. Norm suggests voting for Blair, so I did, but only twice.

Heard on the bus, “I shit on the mother-in-law of your sister-in-law”, a fine new interpretation of the popular Spanish profanity, “Me cago en tu madre”, “I shit on your mother”.

A while back I posted a translation of a memoir of the use of sound in Jew-killing Easter celebrations in the 1940s in Torelló, about 90km north of Barcelona:
Then the monsignor left the altar and told us that we could start killing the Jews. And he had all the boys beat the planks that had [...]

It’s ridiculously and dangerously cool to be able to read the WNT (via the NRC) again without having to sit next to a load of drunks in the public library on Saturday morning. Here, in brief return for this post on Dutch words in Iberian dialects, and at the most basic level imaginable given the [...]

“The Catalan language was banned by The El Caudillo,” says Larry Mitchell, perhaps attempting to disguise his historical error. Jim Puplava on Financial Sense Newshour’s The big picture also criticises “the el caudillo”, although we’re now on to Hugo Chávez. Since Larry and Joe are unlikely to agree on which of Franco and Huge Chav [...]

The literal interpretation of the change is that Barcelona city council has ceased to concern itself with administration and now wishes to dedicate itself to the promotion of Catalan language and culture. The first I knew of it was when all my links all stopped working this afternoon. My guess is that Isabel Ricart, “Internet [...]

Mr B has been struck through and through by gastric flu. Let that be a lesson.

Great Lord Bus SL, from Cerdanyola del Vallès. Great lords may travel by palanquin, phaeton or Pullman, as well as on occasion by tumbril, but they don’t do buses, even when visiting casinos.

Apart from principle, there are practical reasons to object strongly to attempts by the Chinese government (via BB) to damage and destroy Marxists.org: it’s a brilliant, unique resource, the examination of the often weird premises, analysis and conclusions of whose content helps one begin to understand how great portions of the world, including China, got [...]

Why the curious reluctance (n = 0 at post time) to give the pillagers of the Napoli their correct name? The Spanish word is raquero, which the DRAE says comes from raque, which it describes as the “act of gathering objects lost on the coasts through shipwreck or cargo spillage.” Etymology suggested is Gothic rakan, [...]

Seven year itch has kicked in: I’m playing funk trombone at Harlem Jazz Club February 1 and 8 (extra date: March 1), assuming I remember how the damn thing works. If you come and say hello I will graciously allow you to purchase me a beer

Apparently once building stops Spanish slopes will cease to be profitable, at which point we can surely flatter® the whole freaking mess. This is immensely encouraging.

So this will be left at that.

It’s not just Spain that is cracking down on the re-dedication of buildings as temples and unregulated preaching.
[
I've been in a few mosques in Holland and in Barcelona (once, beer in hand, with a couple of Bangladeshis, to the concern of some of the faithful), and on aesthetic grounds as well as out of [...]

Bowman Ales have got their feeds working now, so if they just enable comments people will be able to read posts and write wonderful things about them without shifting from their, ahem, WiFi-enabled bench.

Molins de Rei boasts a demolition business called Flatter Grup. This morning they were flattering® a rather nice turn-of-the-previous-century house on the Paseo de Gracia.

“Basically, the old woodsy was fat and went running around in the woods with no shoes on. Someone decided that this was a bad message to send to kids.” This kind of stuff doesn’t bother the Asturian government, which has (mis)spent €6M on an unshod, fire-raising, drunken Yogi campaign featuring this astonishing piece of creativity. [...]

Wikipedia currently notes the disappearance of the d from the tail of past participles in Spanish (estoy cansado → toy cansao) and corresponding hypercorrections in which a redundant d is inserted into -ao endings. The following passage dealing with syncopes is from Avelino Herrero Mayor’s 1967 Diálogo argentino de la lengua (source: Corde)
Profesor. - Señorita, [...]

Captain Al Cohol (via Papel Continuo; more superheroes) has nothing to do with Al Pernales. I’d hate to think how long it is since I was last ravaged by a bare

I couldn’t care less (Ctrl-F Kalebuel) now I’ve got me cycling proficiency certificate?

Found whilst hunting help for a tiny bit of Judæo-Spanish/Sefardi/Dzhudezmo/Judezmo/Spanyol/Spanyolit/Ladino-English translation I did for someone. The book is The Lives of the Right Hon. Francis North …, The Hon. Sir Dudley North …, and The Hon. and Rev. Dr. John North (Roger North, 1826, available on GBS), the year is 1680, and the great English [...]

Look more like subtitles to me, some of em. (Via Unze Toal)

RAE 2.0 is a cool little gadget if you’re sick of the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española’s clunky interface: append the word you’re after to the URL and http://rae2.es/abracadabra or http://rae2.es/abraxas or whatever. (Via JPQ)

After a dessert which was actually 10 desserts presented on a kind of satellite dish thing. I had a rough idea of what I was getting, but feigned surprise to calm anyone with cholesterol conscience. The preceding steak was pretty damn big too, so I’m a happy man. One of the worst days in my [...]

ABN AMRO have come up with a boring version of stuff I and another gent were trying to get an extremely boring software company to embark on ten years ago. Back then the thing was to generate structure, content and views dynamically, which was neither particularly difficult nor costly but which didn’t chime in with [...]

Would the benefits of a link have outweighed the risks of getting clobbered toute suite by Go Daddy activists? Probably not, so this counts as a favour.

This illustrated tour of the 1809 Siege of Gerona may be of interest to folks who wouldn’t normally follow the baldie.

David Millán notes that while autoodiar appears in neither the Spanish nor the Catalan standard dictionaries, it forms part of the rhetoric of Catalan nationalism. Autoômnibus is present in the above works, but autoodio is of course self-hate rather than a pathological dislike of cars. I haven’t checked, but I suspect that the word and [...]

Excellent news, with an interesting addition to the library’s name. The Library of Catalonia is … the national library of Catalonia, clarify those vile Spanish.
(Recently when I went to pick up my new membership card the guy on the desk looked at my ID and then at the card, and snipped up the card with [...]

Lepe Urbana must have considered what would happen if they ran this story.

Fernando Savater suggests that, since the Basque nationalists always say they want a peace process like the Northern Irish one, surely the Madrid truce bomb means it’s time to suspend autonomous government, which is what the Brits do every time the parties in Ulster relapse into “hey, but fratricide is just so much easier” mode.

The guys Geoff Pullum is looking for are http://www.translationgold.com/–just google the phrase and check the source of the result pages. The priority audience for their translations seems to be machines rather than humans and their primary aim is to boost Google rankings for pages written in the original language. Since you can achieve the same [...]

Mr B may be between jobs, but there’s no end to the man’s industry. Here he is in action up at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
[
"The world is inhabited by two categories of people," anticipated officer Fumero to himself as he slunk after the couple through the Plaza Real and into the Calle de [...]

MMcM at Polyglot Vegetarian (via Transblawg) is rightly surprised that the latest OED update only manages to take portobello mushrooms back to 1990. They appear in 1989 in Bruno Ellmer’s Classical and Contemporary Italian Cooking for Professionals (buy: USA/UK) and in the 1942 edition of Agriculture Decisions, a publication by the US Dept of Agriculture, [...]

Not many people know this, but apparently (background) he went up to his host Patijn and demanded something that better reflected France’s phenomenal contribution to European society. “What kind of thing had you got in mind?” asked the mayor. “Well,” said Chirac, who had noted with envy the PR points scored by Mitterrand with the [...]