Andrew Scull digs up and burns Foucault in the TLS:
Foucault’s account of the medieval period fares no better in the light of modern scholarship. Its central image is of “the ship of fools”, laden with its cargo of mad souls in search of their reason, floating down the liminal spaces of feudal Europe. It is […]

Sorry, but this is not big news where I am this week, and the upstairs/downstairs arrangement is normal too. I used to play in a band with someone who lived with his elderly parents and a dozen pigs and cows in a one-storey Saxon loshoes in a German border swamp. From the rich sounds that […]

Doubts re the wisdom of using UN and EU texts aside, it seems to me that Franz Och is being unduly modest about the current state of affairs–the free Google service is already better than a lot of the €0.04/word Spanish-English guys out there. (Via the excellent Onze Taal)

They’re photoshopping Jane Austen, so where will it stop? One writer who could do with some help is Al-Jahiz (776-868). Now known as something of a medieval Gollum, he killed and sold fish along the canal in Basra as a small boy, progressed into being a “notably ugle writer with ‘goggle eyes’” (hence جاحظ العينين) […]

Last autumn the US government, concerned at rising addiction, passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act. Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of that, it’s a journey to India and back away from the Spanish government, which is using its Telecentro programme to encourage country folk to sign up with an online gambling provider.

My hosting provider is blaming yesterday’s down on Telefónica fooking oop the DNS. Conversation the other week with shop assistant employed by Movistar, the Telefónica mobile subsidiary:
- Hello, I want to change this phone from Vodaphone to Movistar, keeping the number and using pre-pay.
- OK, let me take your details and you can come back […]

With transportation delays of as much as six to nine months and very limited shipping capacity, this is surely a project less suited to MIT than to Correos, the Spanish postal service.

No Magyar interface yet of Europeana, but Paris’ Hungarian partners may have decided to be good Europeans and shut up.

Here, with a flurry of thanks to the hermeneuticists of Bavaria, is the odd one out amongst tales of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German commercial activities in Iberia and the Maghreb:
One of the first German missions was that of Colonel von Conring to Marrakesh in about 1878 to present to Mulai Hassan some […]

Arthur Kenyon in Letters from Spain (GBS), in an otherwise standard mid-19th century account of the sherry trade in Jerez (“Zeres”), writes:
A good deal of the wine makes a voyage to India and back before it is mixed in the way I have described and sent to England.
Maybe the guys over Catavino will be able […]

I guess Esterella is a play on Esther, as in Lambrechts, and the Spanish estrella, star. The obvious connection is in the Sephardi community, but it would be interesting to know why Russian immigrant Charly Schleimovitz thought this stage name would work for his client and wife, the Antwerp nightingale, the Belgian Zarah Leander.
Godzjumenas has […]

Cool post by Carlos Ferrero on linguistic maps of Spain and Portugal that appear arbitrary or ideologically driven. Power, preference and politics in the linguistic mapping of the Romania: representations of reality or the reality of geolinguistic representation?, Erin M Halm’s UPenn dissertation, looks like a really interesting followup. Unfortunately the download is USD37.

… where the little boys are playing Monster Truck Trials and searching for “pictures of sheep farms” and “sheep in abundance” and such. Tralala!

It will surely be taken as a compliment if I say that Youp van ‘t Hek reminds me a bit of Tarragona’s finest:
Gelukkig was ik in Spanje en niet alleen in Barcelona. Zondag zat ik ruim op tijd in de trein naar Tarragona. Op naar de topper Nastic tegen Sevilla, de koploper op dat moment. […]

I’m terrible at collecting testimonials, but here, with permission, is an extract from a thoughtful longer piece by a Chicago woman who came out on one of my hikes a while back:
I was taking a long and difficult hike through the back hills of Barcelona. Upon meeting my tour guide, Trevor, I wasn’t surprised to […]

Lots of sites promise, but I still haven’t found one that delivers serious historical weather data outside of the US, the UK and other dominions of Anglocabronia. I’ll roast a baby lamb for the winning respondent.

I hope they’re working hard on the bar-call module, but the second sentence could revolutionise my social life:
A robot blob that dances “soulfully” to different tunes could pave the way for machines that interact more naturally with human beings, researchers claim… It can also track the rhythmic motion of a person or another object and […]

Interesting bit in a NYT review of David Crystal’s The Fight For English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left (buy: USA/UK) (via Conversational Reading):
Crystal is … especially good on the Middle Ages. When printing came to Britain in 1400, English was a merry old mess. Choices had to be made, he says, and typesetters […]

Juan Pedro Quiñonero links to an IHT story suggesting the beginnings of a crash in Spanish second home valuations. I’ve seen how they’re built and I think there’s a fair chance the buildings will fall before prices do.

Here’s a view from just round the corner.

The internet cafe I’m working from won’t let me see the video, but apparently it features the glistening thighs of Jeroen, chief engineer at the excellent Bike-Tech in Gracia.

I’ve been out and about rather a lot recently, so warm thanks to MM for pointing out a post by Carlos Ferrero at Las palabras son pistolas cargadas on new(-ish) translation blogs. The most interesting one from my perspective is the Arab-Spanish Turjuman árabe, whose contents include a link by Khaled Musa to the online […]

Surely there’s a law against it.

Posted by ex-novo, via BB. Check me following last night’s encounter with Ms G & Co.

I want to do something quite simple: change from Vodafone to Movistar or Amena-Orange so I get reception in the Pyrenees, while keeping the same phone (a stream-personalised Nokia 3310), number and pre-pay accountability. When I say this shop assistants laugh uneasily and reach under the counter for the bat, and online things are no […]

Here’s why I had a bugger of a time trying to imitate with compass, ruler and pencil the more complex designs I dug up after my first trip into parts Islamic. And it’s got a name that’s new to me and a whole host of experts, it has. (Via Stefan Geens, and do read the […]

“Boynamedsue is a collective of Italian anarchists living in a tunnel below the Condis supermarket on Plaça Maragall.” Apparently. Can you visit them? (John lived in a tunnel near Bath for a while. What’s the posh word for a tunnel-dweller?)

Over at the regional stats service. I haven’t found anything useful to do with it, but others will. A hearth tax has always seemed to me like a fiendishly difficult thing to administer, if easier than sheep.

Margaret of Fürth comments on the online edition of Ronald McIntosh and David Fawthrop’s A discussion of the changing principles of word division, now implemented by computers, in British English and American English, with notes on hyphenation of 39 other languages, which is even longer than its title.
The notes on hyphenation in Spanish observe that […]