Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión (1901): “su admirable sistema de irrigación por medio de acequias y canales.” There are few sights and sounds more satisfying than this system of horizontal soaks and vertical sluices in action.

Rollover. (Glowworm is freaky, WWWWontserrat accurate.)

We‘re away for a couple of weeks, playing here and drinking beer here. Photos and Libro verde items will continue to appear automatically, and there’s always the company song to cheer you up. Will the last one out turn off the lights?

Laura Gibbs is posting, translating and commenting Latin fables. Today’s is rather good: “The Birds were in a terrible Fright once, for fear of Gun-shot from the Beetles. And what was the Bus’ness, but the little Balls of Ordure, that the Beetles had rak’d together, the Birds took for Bullets.” Read the rest.

Response from Sales to one Peter Harvey re the new release: “We at google use our own tools and have been using this new interface for a while now and I have not experienced any dire loss of functionality with it. However, we do have requests for more sorting functionalities - by name, by file [...]

Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville. [...]

Apart from the end of the English Shadow, last night I read JM Castellet’s Els escenaris de la memòria. JM was a literary critic, which is French for vulgar gossip, whose occasional qualms regarding the persecution of Jews and sexual non-conformists in Russia don’t seem to have stopped him attending any number of well-catered Soviet-sponsored [...]

In 1927 the Catalan literary researcher and writer, Ramon Miquel i Planas (1874-1950; henceforth MiP) wrote a little book, published in a bibliophile edition, called La llegenda del llibreter assassí. In it he reflects on the origins and recycling of “Le bibliomane ou le nouveau Cardillac”, an anonymous tale published as if true in 1836 [...]

Tom Raikes, The Bibliophilist. In The gentleman’s magazine of June 1838. Source: GBS
This is part of the beastly bookseller of Barcelona series and is referenced here.
This needs annotation and will receive it in due course. There are a number of errors that one would not expect of a public schoolboy like Raikes, as well as [...]

The County Miscellany, 1,8, December 1 1836. Source: GBS
This is part of the beastly bookseller of Barcelona series and is referenced here.
BIBLIOMANIA, or “Book Madness,” has been exemplified to its utmost extent by remarkable and dreadful disclosures on the recent trial, at Barcelona, of an ex-monk, one Friar Vincente, a “lover and preserver” of old [...]

Message received from an intermediary re a service offered elsewhere: “Hla me interesa blah blah blah, si me envias un movil te lamo, gracias blah blah.” Magic LL!

Over at Michael Gilleland’s place. I am laid low by village water, which comes out of the hill unpurified, which is fine, but which ravages stomachs lacking the correct ecology of flora and fauna, which is tough on me and even tougher on the porcelain. Beware the great god Fart under such circumstances.

The RC rector of the church in Plan, Sobrarbe, Huesca, Spain blasts out his services over speakers, to the distress of neighbours without detachable hearing aids and to the alarm of sheep on the mountains. It’s not 140dB (source), but it ain’t good for tourism neither.

Someone’s passed me the English edition, with the usual gibberish-infested flap. The Scotsman describes it as having “a dramatic tension that so many contemporary novels today seem to lack,” while Scotland on Sunday says, “The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, mixing formality with poetry, so the rambling prose occasionally sparkles with lovely phrases … [...]

Some species sit still and others don’t. Lizards tend to the latter, usually only letting you close on them if they are petrified or ill. This one appears to be neither, and remained reasonably calm even when I almost fell off my log onto its.

For a while it sounded like Morse machine being boiled alive, something which probably hasn’t happened for quite a long time, and for sure it’s a terrible thing to be doing anyway. (You may need to turn up the sound. I’m using YouTube and accepting its lack of editing facilities because, like various other [...]

Front elevation:

Plan view:

These butterflies are incredibly lazy, and there are lots of them. Something wrong there.

Giant Haystacks would be more accurate but disrespectful to the memory of the great wrestler. This ain’t Barcelona, so no lonely farmers bumping themselves off at the sight of Heidi’s mountains.

Amando de Miguel is prof emeritus of sociology at Madrid’s Complutense University and is also employed by Libertad Digital as its language maven. He is regularly criticised for making extravagant and unsourced claims–his party, the PP, specialises in this–about immigrants, women, unmarried couples, gays… Here’s a bit from his latest language post:
Rajoy could on many [...]

April 1939, and the Valencian communist and later Mexican entrepreneur Arturo García Igual (Entre aquella España nuestra … y la peregrina, available in part on GBS) has, as a Stalinist commissar, been sent to the elite camp at Agde, France, where
night after night unsuspected talents [took to] an improvised stage: actors, comics, illusionists and cantaores [...]

A rebujito is a dry sherry (manzanilla, fino) or occasionally a white wine to which fizz (lemonades, …) has been added, typically in a ratio of 1:2, in order to give you a head-start on the alcohol. This is the lite version of whichever British drink it is that has you knock back a third [...]

Will this lead to revision of the etymology of filibuster?

El País claims today in a piece on Barcelona council’s attempts to use public money to drive private bike rental operators out of business that biologists say that insects survive because they are small, and that if they were to grow to the size of a cow they would suffocate. Would the new, updated Gregor [...]

El Niño de Tetuán singing fandangos (MP3s or him and a superb selection of others). We’re probably talking early 1930s, but I don’t know where–Seville or Jerez seems more likely than Tetuan :-):
A esa liebre no tirarle
cazaores de la sierra
a esa liebra no tirarle
porque está haciendo en la tierra
madriguera pa ser madre
y es sagrao lo [...]