I recently had lunch with a Huescan entrepreneur who sold his dad’s cows in the 50s to buy a car, but this is ridiculous.
[
Update: D confirms that Srecko Djordjevic is not an anagram of for example "jive jerks cod cord" and points out that he has form:

A man chopped his own penis off with a [...]

The King has unblocked YouTube, but Moroccan bloggers could do with a hand in encouraging him to restore must-haves like GoogleEarth and LiveJournal. Bono is recording in Fez, and I’m sure he needs this kind of stuff too.

The socialists in Madrid are bitching full time after being slaughtered in the regional and municipal elections. Miguel Sebastián, Zapatero’s disastrous choice as mayoral candidate, has announced his resignation. “What’s he resigning from?” enquires senior national colleague, the excellent Alfonso Guerra, “what was he?” Fellow loser in the regionals, Rafael Simancas: “I’m staying on because [...]

I always knew Spain’s tackiest songster, danceress and money-laundress reminded me of someone.

Back in September 2004 the Catalan regional police, keen to capture anti-terrorism responsibilities from their federal colleagues, carried out a spectacular raid in Barcelona in which a dozen Pakistanis were arrested and accused of planning al-Qaeda-type attacks on a couple of small towers and the municipal aquarium.
Evidence for this was provided by the suspects’ [...]

The Spanish official translators working on the ongoing Madrid bomb trial have said that 90% of the transcription of recordings alleged mastermind Mo the Egyptian has little to do with the translations carried by the Italians, which served as grounds for his extradition and on which the prosecution has been basing its case. Specifically, they [...]

Bit of fratricidal jollity from Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español (1897): “Confronted with the spiritual ruin of Spain we must put a stone where our heart is and throw a million Spaniards to the wolves if we all do not wish to be thrown to the swine.” No national stereotypes, please. Just trying to think of [...]

Manuel Blanco Romasanta (1809-?) was born Manuela because everyone thought he was a girl, and things went downhill from then on. After his wife died he became a travelling salesman of human fat and, when the law finally took an interest, he went on a CANNIBAL RAMPAGE, TEARING APART and DEVOURING nine innocents before being [...]

AMA once told me they were A Good Thing because in the 1930s they gave unemployed men in Britain somewhere dry to stand. It seems that Tomás Salvador spent the Civil War hiding in them, reading.

The pic is by MM, who has heard that this Nuremberg watering hole has nothing to do with Barcelona or even Celona. The Flash on the site is gruesome, so that may be the connection. Next wannahave: a photo of Somerset’s pride, FC Bathelona.
(Update: Ponz@Bloguras says that he prefers McDonald’s to English “tapas”.)

I’ve republished my OCR-ed and translated version of sections of a Barcelona municipal almanac from 1848 here. It’s still in a very basic form, but at least the PHP doesn’t go apeshit any more. I’d like to think of a way to include the texts relating to movable feasts, and Catalan translations and suggestions would [...]

The ad El País wouldn’t print.

In another bar in the village-over-the-hill aforementioned:
Lettuce in fearsome red wine vinegar
Little bony bits of baby goat wrapped in stomach in a mushroom sauce
Intestines of baby goat stuffed with rice and lungs, kidneys, liver etc
Roasted baby goat head
Pudding made of milk from the mothers of new-born calves
Red wine, coffee, tea and whisky
I think 15 goats [...]

Asturias is not Spain, or at least not in Bray, Co Wicklow, and bottom right are the toys thrown out of his pram by the author in order to underline his point. For those who doubt that I took the photo in Ireland, here are two more of a microwave designed by Korean anthropologists for [...]

Good–though weird–to see pioneering neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal coming in 6th in Antena 3’s absurd Greatest Spaniard in History survey. He made his discoveries opposite the den of Barcelona’s guardians of legal memory, the College of Notaries on Notariado/Notariat, who were kind enough not to try to have the competition outlawed.

You could try Clínica Cyclops in Barcelona:

They also have a tree surgery unit:

Update from Dave: a Scottish tree without eyes or mouth that nevertheless eats bicycles.

Someone said to me the other day that oh, of course, Catalan is nothing more than the language of the bureaucracy. That may be so, but it would be nice to have some numbers to back it up. Someone has had a very basic go at comparing register ghits for Welsh and English. (Via datblogu)

Sorry.
[
Alberto Lázaro has researched the effects of Francoist censorship on a number English-speaking authors, and there's a good piece by him on Joyce here. He recounts Joyce's trials elsewhere and then quotes testimony from the novelist Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and the translator Joaquím Mallafré as to the impediments placed in the way of would-be [...]

I’m still not very good at birds, so, until I can do a vulture like this, here on the edge of some scree is a species unique to Iberia: it looks like a sparrow, has a call like a chaffinch, and the English name is spaffinch. Behind me to the right, under a small group [...]

Anecdotal, from some film or other:
Teacher: Agua, guoter.
Lola: Agua, guoter. Y esto de guoter, ¿cómo se escribe?
Teacher: W-A-T-E-R, váter.
Lola: ¡Qué guarrada!, ¿cómo pueden bebérsela?

Whether you like it or not, the best Catalan writers write in Spanish and, with few exceptions, have done so for the last 500 years. Excluding them from the Frankfurt Book Fair’s celebration of Catalan culture (unless they pay their tickets and shut up) is like leaving Kafka out of a celebration of Czech writing, [...]

Santa Coloma has named a street after one convicted murderer Catalan patriot. Does this mean that, if and when they are convicted of terrorism, it will also name streets after the Islamists picked up there? Or is this a whites-only thing?

I don’t think Malta has a nuclear stash.

Those tree-hung disks aren’t really for scaring off the deer, silly. Take one home with you and, when you’ve had all you can bear of Hits of Hits or Dirty Dancing II, or when you figure that installing BitWare for Windows wasn’t that smart anyway, take it back and hang it on the correct tree.

Hilaridad is increasingly ilaridad, while partner import hello is still universally jota-ised as jelo. Has this got anything to do with the availability of undubbed Ali G?

I’m unreliably informed that Real Zaragoza star Ewerthon Henrique de Souza’s dad couldn’t spell Everton rather than Erewhon (buy USA/UK). Not that anyone gives a feck, but by all means keep the tips flowing.

First encounter with this one was a few weeks ago when a Dutch-speaking client insisted I use it in some insurance copy. When I declined, he googled it and came up with the following supporting ghit: “And since the betas apparently go out to people who aren’t familiar with the fucking Tribes universe while I’m [...]

Here he is, confirming the old adage (or is it a new one?) that the only sure way to tell a Spaniard is to hear him denying it.

“We can afford this because we don’t waste all our money on nationalism,” said a spokesman. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the link.

Click on the thumbnail over at Pyrenean Notes, part of the Population Six empire.

What is the connection (if any) between the symbol on this house in Sin, Huesca, and that of the Día supermarket chain?
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Sin really does exist. Here’s the sign:

One would obviously like to live in it, at least for a while, but owners are reluctant to sell.
)

Like Antonio Navarro he was steering with his mouth when detained. Apparently Chang-hyun Choi is going round the world, so presumably his brothel and beer budget is bigger than Antonio’s.
(A kind correspondent points out the practice of bed racing in Germany. However, and surprisingly, given the sophistication of the German car industry, these are [...]

I’ll bet AP management didn’t refer to stereotypes of Spain in selecting to report the Civil War one Edward Knoblaugh.

Full points to Mr Antonio Navarro, who wanted nothing more than a peaceful beer in a brothel. (Via Absurd Diari) (I am saving my commas for a more appreciative audience.)

Ñ is the cultural supplement of the Argentine daily, Clarín (here, via A&C, attacking norms established by the Spanish Royal Academy for a language spoken in 20 countries). Someone told me the other day that I should look up some numbers of a 40s Falangist publication called Y. Happy I was, till I discovered its [...]

Lovely phrase, something along the lines of “lavish in life, eager in death”, used here to describe the Spanish, although you will doubtless recall similar elsewhere. It’s from the discourse by the Count of Portalegre which rounds off the BBG edition of Guerra de Granada, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza’s chronicle of the disastrous rural uprisings [...]

I rather like the idea of going up the M6 one day and finding an elephant where Manchester used to be.

Against all the considerable odds, in November the new anti-nationalist party, Ciutadans, won three seats in the regional assembly. So how much time was devoted to it by the nationalist-run regional telly station in January? Six seconds.

Sorry but it’s the only photo of Sarkozy I could find this morning. And who says a spider won’t rule France one day? This sounds like a chimpanzees’ charter.

Unusually, the Spanish entry is more complete than the English one, mentioning the numerous illegitimates he fathered in Yegen, so numerous, in fact, that it is said that he resisted returning for fear of finding more. Was their omission from South from Granada an editorial decision, or was that just the way the upper classes [...]