I’m now doing most of my work from locked-down government machines in rural internet centres, which means using online applications for almost everything. I used to be reasonably good with stuff like Premiere, but, though tool-blaming is bad manners, I can’t get online video editor Jumpcut to very much useful, even fades being beyond my [...]

The EU says that you have to take animal carcasses found in the high mountains down to the bottom, truck them half-way across Spain to an abattoir to make sure they’re really dead, and then, to stop the vultures starving to death, you are allowed to bring them all the way back and leave them [...]

Apparently the four corners of a square reel used in this Huesca village in hemp yarn production represent four horses bound for France. I wonder which horses these were: those that awaited the Duke of Calabria, when he sought with three others to flee the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon, or others? (If folksy [...]

Check out the extraordinary selection of animal-love videos on sale at Guirilandia’s local Chinese supermarket in Barcelona.

By my almost-neighbour EJH, who, having discovered Daniela’s 120 tits, seems to have stopped posting.

Check out these wonderful cylinder recordings at the Donald C Davidson Library at UCSB.

Amando de Miguel says it owes its name to the colour of Capuchin friars’ habits, both concrete and abstract–apparently they were notorious sybarites. I find the colour hypothesis slightly unconvincing, but it’s confirmed here. Evidence of their bizarre taste in this serendipitous find, a description by Nathaniel Parker Willis (Summer cruise in the Mediterranean on [...]

Would those who say that we should hang on to a few Francos because it was how things were, weren’t it, say the same of images of Marx? I’m something a fan of the Roman custom of leaving statue torsos intact and swapping heads as each dictator came and went.

Transhumance is in the air, so here’s a smutty song from a commie from Zaragoza:
Los pastores se van, se van,
Los pastores lloran, lloran:
¡ay de mí, pobre pastora!
¿con quién follarás tú ahora?
Rejigged:
The shepherds are going, they’re going again,
The shepherds are weeping, they’re wailing this strain:
“Alas, alack, oh Phyllis my dear,
Who will you fuck now you’re in [...]

There’s some excellent decorative stonework in the posher parts of Barcelona’s Eixample, but the Italians are in a different league.

Guirilandia has translated one of the most inappropriate flyers ever.

A post by Mr Millán reminds me that a couple of weeks ago I received flyers for the new combine, Uniliber, from a bookseller in Bilbao. Here’s a head-to-head with its competitor, Abe Books/IberLibro, for a few second-hand books I want. I’ve gone for the cheapest each time and have excluded postal costs because, unlike [...]

Here, via Papel Continuo.

Cowslips
My old camera was stolen last summer by Chicago baggage handlers, but thanks to a handy tip from Pep L I’ve now acquired a ridiculously cheap Panasonic TZ1 with 10x OZ and am going to start posting photos again here, using Picasa for storage and Online Image Editor for online image editing (other editors either [...]

If only this had been written by an engineer and not a novelist.

Improvised Spanish village street sign.

Of no interest, except to Christian socialists, who may wonder if Mr Jesus was behind the distribution of supplies to strikers:
OROTAVA, September 17 1934. (By telegraph.)- The Orotava Valley agricultural organisation continues the general strike begun August 31 past without an accord having been feasible thus far. The civil governor has kept the organisation’s offices [...]

I’d rather like to buy or borrow a copy. Talk to me.

Over at señorita Charlotte’s place, with a brilliant review, at least if you speak Dutch, which ends “Trevor is THE man to take you along and have you experience all the ins & outs of real Catalan (country) life.” If only I dared to write that kind of thing

Re a reference@Amando de Miguel: that the expressions are interchangeable (“Capulino frotó suavemente el respaldo de una silla; acarició después el metal de un llavero, por expresa recomendación de Juana. Y sonrió.”, or here for the English) suggests that Frazer was wrong to point to iron’s novelty as the source of its taboo status. Intriguingly, [...]

Did the serpent deflower Eve or merely provide professional consulting services, thus relegating humans to a subsidiary role in creation?

Cool cartoon, translated by Carlos, who has unfortunately decided that there is no future for him as a professional translator.

Fabio Montermini’s excellent granny, who says in dialect (no army or navy in sight), “I can’t speak dialect and never have,” reminded me of a hilarious moment the other night during a meet-the-people TV show featuring the not so excellent Mariano Rajoy, struggling leader of the allegedly non-nationalist Partido Popular. Why, asked some poor mum [...]

Check out the excellent Guirilandia. I recently commented on the mob of thieves that awaits you at the ferry port and was accused, seriously, of racism. Tangier is just horrible, and I suspect that Mr Bowles wasn’t much nicer than his fellow residents.

The first interesting election piece I’ve seen, suggesting why Sarko might still lose, and even more bad news in prospect.

To take a stage version of a mad Ukrainian novel to Edinburgh this summer (budget here). If I had the money, the time and the talent, I’d try to buy myself the part of Junkie.

Given the spectacular contribution of Iberian merchants to the spice trade, why is it that none of my local friends will go anywhere near a lamb vindaloo?

If you believe that Brussels is more than happy to see powerful member states neutralised by internal division–as is increasingly Spain’s case–then it becomes easier to understand the promotion by official EU “news” agency Eurolang of a French electoral lobby devoted to obtaining official status for the country’s smaller languages. Like all European initiatives of [...]

Check Bert Teunissen (via JPQ). For me it’s less Spanish-country-house than displaced Vermeer with the light and life sucked out of it, but maybe I’m missing the miserable side of life.

Re the trials of Josh Bell (via FiE): what happens if you put a bad violinist in a penguin suit? (I have a couple, just in case you wondered.)

Ramón J Sender’s La tesis de Nancy is the account of an affair between strawman and strawwoman, in which Curro, Work, a part-gypsy ingénu-cynic from the Seville town of Alcalá de Guadaira “who devotes himself to the resale of bullfight tickets in the summer and to wine-tasting for the rest of the year” leaves Dutch [...]

… because the tunnel is closed.

My dentist in Holland used to lower a telly over the chair and you could watch all manner of goings on, but this level of customer care is apparently considered offensive in Mexico, of all places.

If we take it as axiomatic that books with blue and pink covers are published by nutters, then McClaine Lee’s book will contain few surprises. However, a bit of Nostra-madness does no harm, surely.

If ‘bilingualism poses “long-term dangers to the fabric of our nation”‘ (via Unze Toal), then less national fabric might be just what the USA needs. Never did like all those flags.
(I was talking to this gentleman the other day about this kind of stuff. His mum speaks one language, his dad another, they communicate in [...]

Alphabetical list (via GBS unless otherwise indicated), and with no particular attention paid to the Greek vs Lybian business, to the Roman/West Mediterranean cult, or to anything else for that matter:

“ABDERA, ab-dé’-ra, a maritime city in Thrace” (Beeton’s Classical Dictionary)
Alesia, an ancient town of the Man« dubii in Gallia Lugdunensis, said to have been founded [...]