Fraternal greetings to someone else who has alighted in Barcelona and started using the Oreneta tag. I’m the one on a bicycle: no boat yet.

Village bullfighting is far more exciting and beautiful than the formalised crap on offer in big rings like Barcelona’s Monumental, but if the photo above gives some idea of the upside, the downside involves stuff like dwarf bullfighters cutting fillets off animals as they race past because they’re too short to plunge the sword in [...]

(Via LL)

It turns out that an occasional commenter here has a blog of his own, From Catalonia to Caledonia, in which, from a Catalan nationalist perspective, he whinges about the Spanish, the English, ungrateful immigrants and stuff. However, his family turns out to contain the odd cockatoo cuckoo too:
My parents are just another example of this. [...]

‘It is said that on inaugurating the great ENSIDESA steel concern, Franco exclaimed, “And to think that this cost nothing more than two kilos of paper…”‘ (Manuel Ortínez, Una vida entre burgesos. Memòries (1993)) How can people still get so worked up about a vulgar thief?

James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters, Domestic and Forren (1688, on GBS):
There is a Tradition, that there were divers Mines of Gold in Ages pass’d amongst those Mountains; and the Shepherds kept Goats then, having made a small Fire of Rosemary-Shrubs with other combustible stuff, to warm themselves, this Fire grew along, and grew so [...]

– I haven’t brought the component I need. I’ll come back tomorrow, but I’ll bill you now for today.
– But you haven’t done anything.
– Sorry, company policy.
– OK, give me the bad news.
– Right, that’s 20€ travel and one hour’s labour @ 35€, 55€ plus VAT.
– But you’ve only been here five minutes.
– Sorry, company [...]

The normal spelling in Spanish bars is donuts or doughnuts, but there’s bound to be some kind of market for cojones de perro in a place with as liberal tastes as Barcelona.

Just out of interest, I emailed an advertiser on Loquo.com similar to this one. He has replied:
Thanks for your email and it is my gladness to hearing from you.I am Gandy [...],the owner of the house you are making enquiry of.Actually I resided in the house with my family,such as my wife and my only [...]

It’s been done before, but here’s soundman, producer, director Luis Jimenez (if he really was any of these, and not a mere video-ripper) in footage of Maria La Sabina:

Letters of Alexander Von Humboldt to Varnhagen Von Ense (GBS):
On the 9th of June, 1839, Varnhagen writes in his diary: “Humboldt agrees with me in the assertion made by me at different times, that too much cannot be inferred from the silence of the historians. He refers to three highly important and undeniable facts, which [...]

That’s the view of La Vanguardia, Barcelona’s quality paper. Barcelona is trying to promote its new biomedical research centre, but the University of Barcelona, the city’s best, is way down at number 94 in the European rankings. Maybe some decent public education would be in order.

Mr. T. was struck with the number of lunaticks confined in the several provinces of Spain:

SQ is onto the mysterious case of RalphAnderson1987@yahoo.com, who is landlord of absolutely identical “funished” flats situated in Athens, Barcelona, Brussels, London, Paris, and Mexico City. I wonder from the style whether this particular conman is not Nigerian.

Ah, Spanish engineering in the 1860s! Since the factory only turned out two billiard tables a week, it’s difficult to see how they would have got round to satisfying the demands of smaller establishments with this kind of device, but never mind.

Just found in a cabinet in an uninhabited house in the central Pyrenees: a concealed drawer that doesn’t appear to have been touched since the 1960s. Contents: a will from 1818; pages dealing with testaments torn a reprint of a revised (1930s?) version of the Spanish 1888-9 Civil Code, including annotations detailing regional variations (in [...]

“The Basque type is, amongst all the human races, that which is most different from quadrupeds. The posture of the head and the form of the jaw is in the Basque the least animal of all in existence.” Telesforo de Aranzadi, ¿Existe una raza euskara? Sus caracteres antropológicos. San Sebastián, Imprenta de la Provincia, 1905 [...]

“The main reason you like my boyfriend is because he feeds you large quantities of grilled lamb, and the main reason my dog likes you is because you give her the bones.” Can’t see what’s wrong with that. I hope my eyes don’t go as dazed and watery as the dog’s.

Jacques Brel’s appearance suggests that he shares substantial quantities of DNA with George Formby and Francis the Talking Mule. His scripts are even stranger:

I’m doing a little something for an NGO and it’s boring the tits off of me.

Some Friday morning cheer from Dubin & Monaco in a recording by Xavier Cugat, one of Hitler’s more unlikely faves:

Perhaps the prototype for the behijabbed suicide who asks, “Does my bomb look big in this?” Perhaps not.
Lina Romay, the sensational Catalan horror-porn star of films by the great Catalan director, Jess Franco, chose her stage [...]

Manuel Capdevila occasionally comments here but now has his own blog, Revised Catalonia History, whose goal is to remedy what he believes is the deliberate obfuscation of the Glorious History of the Catalan Nation and its Contribution to Civilisation and create a correct, Catalan-centric view.
One of his early claims is that the English paper [...]

Emanuel del Mar, Nuevo guía para la conversacion, en español é inglés (1839, via GBS):
Una golondrina no hace verano. One swallow does not make spring.
Both spring and summer are used in both languages, but you’d kind of expect northward migration to take swallows to Spain in spring and then England in summer. Perhaps we don’t [...]

The other night I stayed with a neo-peasantist Catalan hippy couple living in a grace and favour masia in the hills, for which you and I and anyone else without the requisite ethnic badge would probably have to lay down something in the region of €750K. The guy, son of Andalusian barkeepers, agreed that affection [...]

Over on eBay, via the ever-vigilant Xavi Caballé. Burning is the most suitable fate for paper dictionaries now digitalised, but it seems a bit silly to spend 30€ (inc p&p) acquiring them on eBay for this end.

One of the things that shocked me about the primitive exchange I came across in Binéfar four years ago was that, 300 years after the Japanese started using forward contracts for rice and 150 years after the spread of rail communications through the American West laid the basis for futures trading on the Chicago exchange, [...]

Tutto Pavarotti was the title of the great man’s best-selling album, but even this proved a linguistic step too far for Spanish audiences. At concerts on the tour he was alarmed to see them rise en masse and chant “Tutto! Tutto!” in the belief that this was his first name.

Along with stuff like the banning of the sardana and of Catalan, this is another of the absurd lies told about the Franco regime by Catalanist victimists and by those they manage to con, typically left-leaning Brits and Americans. Here, for example, is the Lonely Planet entry on Barcelona, which is presumably taken seriously at [...]

An innocent bystander might imagine Mr de Miguel was writing about Mr Espada.

Guy of Warwick is the original of the soldier-saint Guillem de Varoic in Tirant lo blanc, as Wikipedia surely soon will say. I almost drowned near where he fought the giant Colbrand as a consequence of too much water without and cider within. I hope Xavi will be wary of him.

From the baldie:

Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain to [...]

P tells of an interesting upcoming case in N in southern Albacete. The Forestry Commission planted trees on substantial areas of private land in the vicinity without asking permission and now wants to sue landowners for the value of the lumber. The latter submit that in 12 years none of the trees has grown above [...]

Some classic PP fuckwittery (PSOE guys keep this kind of stuff private) here from Luis Suárez Fernández, who wants to defend the thesis that Spanish nationalism is not nationalism. Duh. Beats me anyway why commentators think they can come up with something smarter on the subject than PJ O’Rourke’s notorious contribution (via John Chappell).