Processing is underway into diverse preserves of the considerable quantities of blackberries and figs gathered this afternoon with la Primitiva Hermandad de la Primera Sueca on a variant of this walk. Some of the blackberries are being turned into liquor, and I found this whilst fishing around for a more unsuitable recipe:
A very laughable story [...]

A popular photography course, copied from a neighbourhood magazine produced by Alejandro Pérez, an enterprising Nou Barris estate agent, encountered on this walk:

I imagine the Bayeux Tapestry was planned in similar fashion.

Apparently some ladies & gents with whom I sing when the big geezer is off doing other stuff are going to be on the telly quite a lot.

Apart from the odd bit of arranging, the barrel organ is the thing at the moment, when I get time. It’s a somewhat more lonely path, but I’m [...]

Kalebeul wouldn’t watch a hagiography of a faghating totalitarian fuckwit like St Paul, so it sees no reason this weekend to take cinema seats away from Barcelona’s chiliastic masses in their nostalgic lust for Hispanic dictators and good-looking saints. Paul Berman’s piece from 2004 applies. Even the regime sociologists seem to have noticed that Cataloonia [...]

Graffiti of Camarón de la Isla and guitarist, somewhere in Barcelona, I think in Carmelo, so overlooking the place where he died:

More here.
Kabe-Otoko/Wall Man, neither human nor demon, observes the world from within walls:

“Velen verzeggen Schiedam, maar sluiten dadelijk een verbond met Barcelona.” Is it about drinkers swearing by Dutch gin/jenever, only to turn to Spanish wine and brandy?

The “Tengo 4 ijos” is bit of a give-away. The calligraphic differential is impressive, and it’s a shame some of the Arabic got marginalised.

(On Hospital, Barcelona)

The Emperor Wu says that small office space is fetching around €650/m² pa on Fleet Street at the moment, so €37,200 pa is probably buying the separatists 50-60m²’s worth of plural reality and national character. It’s an encouraging sign of faith in the underlying strength of the Spanish economy that its regions are expanding such [...]

Bar Los Baskos on Ramelleres, Barcelona:

The interior is a curious clash of old CNT/anarchist graphics with neo-fascist skinhead children. I’m not particularly fond of the one or the other, but I quite like the bar. I suppose, not being Spanish, that I could buy it and turn it into a Hayek shrine. Not sure how [...]

More panic-mongering from the linguacrats: Carme Junyent, director of the low-activity Group for the Study of Threatened Languages at Barcelona University apparently believes that UNESCO says that any language with less than 30% social use is on its way to extinction, and that since the social use of the official language of Andorra, Catalan, is [...]

The excellent Mauro Baglieri writes: “The Placito Capuano or Placito di Capua is the first in a number of acts, also known as Placiti Cassinesi. They were written in early Italian between 960 and 963 A.D. : court proceedings allowing the Benedictines from four abbacies to reclaim their lands from squatters that had occupied them [...]

Someone just wondered whether this walk was an anti-tour. Um, not according to Daniel Kalder, aka the first international congress of Anti-Tourists at the Shymkent Hotel, Shymkent, Kazakhstan, October 1999:
The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable.
The anti-tourist eschews comfort.
The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.
The anti-tourist seeks [...]

I think it’s actually a slow worm, but here’s Thomas Decker’s Honest whore anyway:
Lord Hippolito. Scarce can I read the stories on your brow,
Which age hath writ there: you look youthful still.
Orlando Friscobaldo. I eat snakes, my Lord, I eat snakes. My heart shall never have a wrinkle in it, so long as I can [...]

From today’s post:
Manuel Gago García es el jefe de la Brigada contra Anglicismos Extravagantes. Su último trabajo es el seguimiento del autobús que llevaba a los jugadores de la selección española (la de fútbol, claro) en su marcha triunfal por Madrid. Don Manuel se fijó en esta frase que estaba pintada en el autobús como [...]

So interested was one in the almonds:

… that one failed to see perceive twixt the branches:

… the incipient eclipse:

Most of the almonds could have done with another week or two, but if we hadn’t got there first, hordes of bloody Manchego pensioners would have shaken and whacked down every last one.
The quote is from [...]

The belated price for being unable to govern oneselves: “The Commission states that the awarding of the Integrated Action Programmes (IAP), an urban development measure established by Law 6/1994 of 15 November, Valencian Law on development activities (’LRAU’) and its successor, Law 16/205, Valencian development law (’LUV’) relates to public works contracts which should be [...]

“I think the sherry trade could learn a lot from their cousins in Portugal. But of course that’s only if the sherry trade sees any benefit in visitors to their bodegas. I often wonder if they really do.” It’s the old Spanish paradox of shops whose owners seem prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths [...]

Easy: in a country prone to civil war it’s important to have something everyone can agree on, regardless of their local ethnic and linguistic allegiances. The Balkans form the obvious comparison: chronically incapable of even vaguely democratic self-government, they imported German princes in the nineteenth century and are now erecting statues of Bob Marley. So [...]

Since both Spanish prostitution and Henry Mayhew came up yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to combine them and copy-paste from the excellent (though slow) Perseus database at Tufts the latter’s view of the former. I assume his street prostitutes who “traffic for the bare means of subsistence and submit to any and every [...]

A double reflection makes up the man who was born on the thirteenth day of the moon, lost his
throne on the thirteenth day of the moon, and fought the battle of Waterloo on the thirteenth day of the moon:

I wonder if Josephine’s astrological babblings didn’t cause Napoleon’s natural military interest in the moon to be [...]

At the beginning of the last century one Professor Max-Bembo published La mala vida en Barcelona: anormalidad, miseria y vicio, which in authentic Daily Mail style vaguely enjoined the government to do something about the social and sexual degradation he profited from in such loving and lascivious detail. Here’s the section on wankworkers, copy-pasted from [...]

Is one of the slogans on this package of Schwarzkopf & Henkel (Black-head & Bomber) Professional Quality Nordic Blonde highlight potion:

Lowlights are cheaper and probably less dangerous.
The Scandinavians seem to have deserted the peculiarly unappetising Gimnasio Nórdico in a rain gulley in Horta near the House of Navarre, or whatever it’s called:

I occasionally visit a [...]

José M Camarero@ABC: En principio, la mayoría no pensaba que lo que ardía era precisamente un avión incendiado… Pero fue la caravana de ambulancias que pasaba por delante de sus casas, en la autovía M-14, la que les puso en alerta. «Esto me huele mal», llegó a decir Manuel a su mujer. «Aquí ha pasado [...]

With the vaguest of references to i-shepan-im here’s Kirby’s wonderful and scientific museum in 1820:
The fecundity of the rabbit is truly astonishing ; it breeds seven times in the year, and generally produces eight young at a time ; from which it is calculated, that one pair may increase in the course of four years, [...]

Henri Weber’s panacea for French social-democracy. When, btw, are the Irish going to be allowed to correct their referendum mistake? It all makes the old “destroy the system” dogmatists look positively innocent.

Re the War of Jackson’s Sneer, Colin Davies notes the presence of trolls in Spain but suggests they have still not discovered the woods and grottoes of the Royal Academy. Not so: it’s just that the RAE, for reasons that are logical but probably doomed, calls them trol.
If their behaviour is anything like that [...]

Apparently immigrants are being denied access to virtually all night bars in Barcelona’s popular Raval district. I’m an immigrant, and I’ve never had any problems getting in (getting out is a different story), so I guess El Periódico is using the same definition as one of my ex mother-in-laws: “You’re not an immigrant, you’re white!” [...]

Code-swapping, rather than Gibraltar-Andalusian. This week’s instalment comments on the stateless national soap opera, maritime conflicts and confusions with Spain.

Amando de Miguel’s blog contains myriad hoards of fascinating localisms, but, as has been observed in the past, as soon as thought of the English language enters through one ear, reason appears to exit via the other.
Re criticisms of the poor Catalan spoken by José Montilla, the Catalan president, de Miguel writes that “ethnic [...]

Yesterday the state-approved and -subsidised competition to Baldie Galactic was observed claiming that trencadís was yet more proof of the quite extraordinary originality of the Catalan mind, etc etc. Not so: it has been around for centuries, and any connoisseur of English cathedral windows will be familiar with my favourite application of break-it-and-mend-it–the new/non-sense created [...]

Here.
The film is by the Barcelona film-maker, Ricardo de Baños, whose oeuvre, produced for an audience including Alfonso XIII, combined Barcelona storm scenes with early flamenco, as well as porn flicks like Consultorio de señoras and anti-Protestant erotica like El confesor. (BTW I wonder whether the otherwise excellent Ferdinand von Galitzien is not mistaken [...]

“Nosferatu in Bremen is essentially a flitting liminality … the German soul instinctively prefers twilight to daylight.” Way too many bloody Teutonic incorporeal materialist graffiteros lurking around on c/ Molist, Barcelona.

MM posts re the alleged use by German lawyers of American law. I think it might actually make sense to adopt US law in other jurisdictions (including Louisiana, ho ho): Hollywood achieves far greater public scrutiny of controversial legislation than, for example, Spanish democracy. (But is Hollywood law the same as US law?) National pride [...]

foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.” (via Norm). Still all a bit of a fuss about Sweet Foucault.

Why else would the tender to manage the municipal pools of Cuéllar, Middle of Nowhere (pop 9,500) be published in English?

Opposite, another: Valle-Inclán’s neighbour lived here.

The marvellous world of almost, or what a difference a letter makes:

(Click thru to post page to see text)

The Emperor Wu is very pleased with his new toy. Now all that needs to happen is for someone else to enter all the walks we actually do and correct the details of the ones already in there.
The purpose of this kind of stuff is to enable inclusion of walks and similar activities run [...]

B forgot one in the freezer. I quite like the redesign. Opening it was mildly implosive, nothing like as interesting as a butane canister explosion.

Over at Manuel Trallero.