Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei.
What was news to [...]

This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just [...]

Over Santa Coloma way, taking in Puig Castellar, which I’ve been doing informally for a while. Here are some photos:

This is looking back over the river towards the bits of Barcelona no one visits.

Badalona

FECSA

Badalona

FECSA and Ryanair

Barcelona
There are other attractions, but the best bit about it for me are the views of the power station. I [...]

Mal aparcado posts photos of absurd and illegal parking. There are often so many cars and scooters parked on the pavements in Barcelona that the only place left to walk is the road. Barcelona shots include a nice one of three Mosso-mobiles illegally parked nose-to-tail to go snacking in a bar. Anecdote: The other day [...]

I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the [...]

Meet the guys who make the shirts you buy in Gracia on Saturday afternoons.

From George Ticknor’s superb History of Spanish literature
… a Gothic remnant fled from the Moors into the Alpine Asturias, carrying with them race, name, creed, language, and country—scotched but not killed. In that rocky school, and amid storms and war, the infant Spanish language—eldest child and heir to the Latin—was slowly brought up; seven [...]

This afternoon I have been booked to appear as the Bishop of Myra. This is one of the songs I will not be singing, zoophilia being out of fashion in Barcelona’s Dutch community (but for how long?): Sinterklaas kapoentje, geef de kat een zoentje, geef de kat een likkie, trek hem aan z’n pikkie.

Bizet (2006), by Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955), which went for around €12K + 20% government commission at Brok the other day:

Hypotheses:

Mr Plensa, a covert musicologist, has discovered extraordinary connections between Hector Berlioz, master of the grand and the imperial, and author of the works listed, and Georges Bizet, who dabbled in local colour several decades [...]

BS has kindly pointed out that Lérida has a selective digitalised press archive going back to 1896. With ref to this, he notes the existence of similar commemorative genocidal banging by children in the city in the early twentieth century (?):
–Where are you off to this early?
–To kill Jews, mum!
–Don’t you know that that’s in [...]

For people who don’t like typing day/month numbers into the address bar

I love this Jaén olive oil cooking competition, which is held not in Jaén but in San Sebastián, at the other end of the country. Is this because Jaén-ocrats want an annual freebie to the north, or because they’re ashamed of their home town? S, currently designing a collection of wedding accessories for the metropolis, [...]

Javier López (Estella, Navarra) and Amando de Miguel are unable to locate alcanduz in any dictionary. I think they mean a tree dictionary, because, see, there’s this thing called Google. The definition given in Webster’s English to Aragonese Crosswork Puzzles is “sewer”, so maybe the socialists in La Rioja were hoping to highlight problems with [...]

Orhan Pamuk: Yes, until I was 30 I didn’t earn a single kopek, and I lived at my divorced mother’s house. I lived the strange life of a crazy boy who might one day become a writer. My friends had real jobs. I just wrote, and I could never get published. I was so ashamed, [...]

This had been turned off because I assumed I was going to have to hack WP quite extensively

The format used to be /mm/dd/, which made a little bit of sense but not much more and would have meant a load of pain with WP. Now it is /?mes=mm&dia=dd, which still involved a small hack to solve date problems but enables individual items to take /yyyy/mm/dd/ . Examples here if you’re confused.

Rate: percentage of advertising and any other revenues accruing from this site or publication in any other form or medium. So that’s probably about €2 over the next 50 years. Talk to me here.

El llibreter quotes and comments a couple of marginalia re the Catalan purification project undertaken at the beginning of the last century by Pompeu Fabra and others, with varying degrees of xenophobia, folklorism, medievalism, and sundry other fuckedintheheadisms. I find it curious that furies continue to be focussed on the big brother, Spanish, when the [...]

A helpful response in the debate between Petrarch (what’s the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same) might go something like this:
Petrarch. I have indeed a great quantity of books.
Critic. Leave them in a warehouse about 45mins cycle-ride from your house, and get rid of any you haven’t touched in [...]

What Catalan imperialists forget: all their dialects are simply dodgy Limousin, and all the territories they claim (Valencia, the Blearies, the gypsy quarter of Perpignan, several hamlets in Albania) are actually part of Greater Occitania. Quite what this adds to GNP is unclear, but ain’t it fun!

An amply dimensioned gypsy lady is vending six small cacti in pots and two bunches of cut chrysanths outside the municipal market building. An impeccably dressed faux-blonde pija approaches.
–Three cactus for five euros! lovely flowers! three lovely cactus for five euros! lovely…
–I want three cacti, that one, that one and that one.
–That’ll be ten euros, [...]

Another view of Barcelona, this time the centrefold from the magazine Triunfo in September 1962. Other photos on pp35-53, of which I enjoyed this one, a sanitised reminder that we are witnessing the final phase in Barcelona’s transition from a small town surrounded by villages and fields and, latterly, monstrous slums, to a great city; [...]

Most southern European theorising re that poorly defined construct, Anglosaxonia, is corny racism dressed up as sociology or socialism or whatever. This, however, from one of my favourite reads, is amusing, if somewhat flawed:
Lampedusa aroused in me the suspicion that the only country in which law and order are, pregonament, synonymous with civilisation and democracy [...]

Exhibit 1 features Die Verdammte Spielerei and some blonde and was recorded in what will presumably be the Republic of Flanders by Monday. I suppose France will get Brussels.

Exhibit 2 is Tango gitano, which “forms part of a group of field materials documenting Maria Garcia performing unaccompanied Spanish songs from Asturias, Spain on January [...]

This old bar in Badalona appears to be named after someone who doesn’t have a second surname or a business partner (there’s no room for a second word, so it can’t have been painted out) but who uses the conjunction anyway. I don’t see what’s wrong with being a brazen lover of conjunctions. They are [...]

A fine example of Spanish enthusiasm for the heavy metal umlaut, downstairs in the bus station in Hellín, Albacete. The -ado -> dipthongised -ao shift is common in Spanish dialects, and what you’ve got here in the last example is actually kind of diaeresis-ish. On my next visit I will communicate this information to the [...]

Nerpio is a truly astonishing place, something of a contemporary Las Hurdes, particularly on a Saturday night.

This (thankyou, MM) is actually just about hair. Residents are to be ordered to drop the Croydon facelift and adopt the Barcelona mullet.

Leoncio Urabayen (La tierra humanizada, 1949) says that the dung beetle (escarabajo pelotero) is to a hive of bees as the pyramids are to the Empire State. This is unfair:

“The American Institute of Biological Sciences reports that dung beetles save the United States cattle industry an estimated US$380 million annually through burying above-ground livestock [...]

From the SPCK’s Saturday magazine in 1823:
During the siege of Barcelona by the Spaniards and English, in the war of the succession, in 1705, an affecting incident occurred, which is thus related by Captain Carleton, in his memoirs. “I remember I saw an old officer, having his only son with him, (a fine man about [...]

It’s all about flowerpots, says D the photographer and cook. I think the Romans did something similar. So it’s definitely OK.

Update: This is my flowerpot, actually a glazed Moroccan cookpot (you put the meat on the bottom and the veg on top). D says I may need to drill a whole in the top using [...]

In Gracia, on the corner of Fraternitat and Tordera.
From outside it used to appear a filthy hole, with an elderly couple behind the bar and a couple of clients ripe for the taxidermist. Inside, round to the right, was a secret dining area, with yellow walls, a couple of exceptionally bad paintings, and the cheery [...]

I am building a bird table so I can catch tasty little birds with a net and fry them in bechamel for breakfast. Its leg consists sturdy spring, which will cause pigeons, goats and other creatures undesirable for this purpose to fall off before they get to the bait.

Walking down the escalator at Fontana metro, I pass a undistinguished-looking middle-aged woman just as she skilfully inserts her hand into the bag of the girl standing, unaware, on the step below her. I grip her arm and say, Gotcha. Oh no, she says, it’s my daughter, but you’re right to do it: there are [...]

Apparently if you go to the Barcelona real estate trade fair and say you want to buy a parking space, they’ll throw in a free flat. If you can get a mortgage. (Of course, the sector is not in collapse. That only happens in other countries.)

Sergi Belbel’s A la Toscana, last night, first night at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, of which Mr Belbel is the boss. It was well staged, the music was well done, and the actors are the ones who get all the work on the nacional circuit, and none the worse for that. But, like the [...]

Opposite the district offices in the Gardens of the Prince of Gerona on Lepanto. Far better than the real thing, which is only fun to visit if you pretend to be a stone mason.

“‘Mexico vs. Spain,’ the first scene, shows the rejected Mexican suitor, in a jealous rage, watching the love-making between Carlos, the Spaniard, his hated rival, and the beautiful senorita. With drawn stiletto, he pounces upon the Don, but the senorita seizes his arm, thus saving her lover from a horrible death. After a terrific hand-to-hand [...]

The Catalan regional government’s found a new way of wasting money: compiling a blog directory (search for “follow”).

This is still a major problem, even from authors and publishers that appear to take themselves seriously, and even though automatic generation is now pretty good. Is it evidence of (a) the continued importance of rote learning, as over critical appraisal, in Spanish universities, or (b) the realisation, hundreds of years ago, that digitised search [...]