kalebeul: anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2007 / 09 / 15 /

Barcelona manufacturer offers 3-in-1 billiard table + grand piano + harmonium

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.

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Time capsule

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 [...]

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The Basque race and the horse

“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 [...]

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Dog’s life

“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.

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This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:

People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family are nice so there’s hope yet.

A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:

At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:

More educational train journeys here.

The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:
poppy

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:

In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge hook at the end of it. The brown body, covered with turquoise blue splashes, was contracting in spasms. The joints moved, sometimes sliding over each other, sometimes turning sideways. Four huge transparent wings, covered with a dense web of
glittering threads, trembled in the air. A monstrous head hammered upon the window-sill.

This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, has been assisted by both the PSOE and the PP in government, trading the feasible need for the support of nationalist deputies for silence. It hasn’t found a commercial distributor in Spain. Maybe it will elsewhere.

Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.

  • Michael Meyer, Life in the vanishing backstreets of a city transformed in Destruction of old Peking
  • Yan Larry, The extraordinary adventures of Karik and Valya in Poppy
  • Anon, The Acts and Negotiations, Together with the Particular Articles at Large, of the General Peace, Concluded at Ryswick, by the Most Illustrious Confederates wit the French King. To which is premised, The Negotiations and Articles of the Peace, concluded at Turin, between the same Prince and the Duke of Savoy in Siege of Barcelona by the French in 1697

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