Sez our foreign correspondent of Bar Agujas d’Ouro in Estremoz, Portugal. Its radical eclecticism picknmixery suggests the architect may have mistakenly interpreted the lack of aesthetic coordination in many cathedrals and other large, old, respectable buildings as the result of a synchronic design choice rather than the typical diachronic process in which committees regret [...]

Best writing there for ages, too:
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John Chappell must have stayed up in conservative, nationalist Gracia if he had a quiet night. We were with friends on Carretera de Sans, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many Spanish flags. Delicious detail: two young ladies, their prodigious assets barely concealed, beating up a violent pimp-ish type and immediately seducing some [...]

Mr Wu has added our Weird Shit Guarantee™ to the Baldie Tours FAQs in response to a suggestion from some New Jersey clients following a conversation with a rather unusual street-organ performer. It may deter as many as it attracts, but what the hell.

San Juan de Plan, Huesca, Spanish Pyrenees. You’ll have to twirl your machine 90º until Google Video start doing online rotation:
Tiny Tim started out as the Human Canary and died in the arms of Miss Sue after playing his appalling hit, Tip-toe thru the tulips, at the Women’s Club Of Minneapolis on November 30 1996. [...]

Photo 7 on this page shows a lamb being carried by refugees from villages on the Spanish side of the central Pyrenees as the Stalinist-led 43rd Division prepared its famous last stand–the Bielsa Pocket/la Bolsa de Bielsa–against Franco’s advancing Navarrans in spring 1938. Bielsa was completely shattered by the latter’s artillery, but the scorched earth [...]

Many thanks to Javier for introducing me to the Cantabrian Quixote, which devotes a whole chapter to a duel resulting from a disagreement about who should dexar la acera, give the wall sidewalk. Not surprisingly, like the cognate discussed in the linked post, it doesn’t turn up in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. [...]

The Spanish DVD is poorly produced but this error was probably planned:

George finds sanity through lunacy, monarchy through dethronement. The film is as fine in its own way as the original play was, and Nigel Hawthorne is divine. Handel was George I and II, not III, but period films normally inflict far greater musical torments.

Samuel Johnson reports on making acquaintance with London in 1737 that
In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked me, [...]

Over at Carles Miró’s place. There’s a bit of it around in Anglocabronia, and machine-generated fakevertising sites (insert James Joyce joke here) are getting into pubic light, as in “Two inches, three, four, five and just the twirled pubic lamp shades teen of jake tickled his bulky route pocketing.” Good porn lighting must be worth [...]

The usuals are flooding us with mail calling on us to halt work in Spain next month in order to remind politicians that it is their solemn duty to provide each and every one of us with a mansion, a fast car, and a ready-rolled joint. Bet that strikes terror into the Chinese.

Over at Amigos del Circo.

The taz has been obligatory reading for the thoughtful German green-left for the last 30 years. It has no particular sympathy for airline companies or Joachim Hunold. Highlights from a piece published June 14 (via MM):
It is true [actually it isn't--but Tobias Büscher isn't the only one to make this error]: Franco prohibited regional [...]

I tend to concentrate on the Catalanist language nuts because they’re closer to hand, but Madrid has its own share of nationalist loons. For example, Amando de Miguel over at Libertad Digital is given to making unfounded claims about the dangers of English. I showed a while back that there’s no statistical basis for his [...]

Dolce vita pin-ups and spaghetti circus over at Raffaele De Ritis’ Novelties and Wonders.

Check out some local talent (@Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya) over at Morbid Anatomy. (Via Tecnología Obsoleta)

Se trata de un primer intento de hacer un transformador fonético español-andaluz con el propósito de facilitar la producción de textos en diversos dialectos andaluces. Utiliza un algoritmo casero basado en las normas especificadas en el artículo sobre el andaluz en Wikipedia, me parece en gran parte el trabajo de Antonio M Romero Dorado, y [...]

People tell me that emission reporting is routinely fiddled in Barcelona, as is monitoring by local authorities, and the true location of Spanish polluters–crucial for studying health effects–seems to be vague at best, but this (quite old) collection for GE gives us a handy way of discovering interesting stuff like, oh, the Gonvarri metal treatment [...]

Our entrance is barred by a little man with a beret and a moustache:
–You know this isn’t a bar?
–Of course!
–No problem then, I’ll get the landlady.
Later, in conversation with the landlady:
–Aren’t you worried by the EU ban on making your own vermouth?
–If this isn’t a bar then why the fuck would we be making our [...]

Over at WFMU, probably the best music station in the world. Not much from this neck of the bosque, although they’ve got Los desechables, who I didn’t know, and the vile Eléctrica Dharma, who I do know and whose only merit is in having given rise to our freestyle pakrock outfit, Eléctrica Shoarma.

Someone just sent me this job ad to illustrate the kind of shite people suffer in Barcelona. It’s a six month contract in a city centre branch of a chain of cafés. The morning shift is Mon-Sun 06:00-15:00 with alternating Sat and Sunday free, which adds up to 54 antisocial hours a week (the EU [...]

The British Sardine Racing association (popups) is “dedicated to breeding a better Sardine, revolutionising training methods, and the breeding of both pedigree fish, and Hybrids, such as the Sardine/Shark crossbreed.”
The Living Age (1919): “… eagerly bending over a long, narrow tank on the floor. They were racing sardines, taking them out of a tin [...]

In English:

Dubbed into Spanish:

If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has ended up [...]

Being Barcelona Council’s corporativist scheme to marginalise private bike ownership and bike shops:

59euros is going round chaining random stuff to lampposts in protest at the council’s policy minimising facilities for non-council bikes and then removing perfectly roadworthy examples from the streets to make way for yet more council bikes and illegally parked motorbikes. Saltada Popular [...]

Here’s most of the second half of an article dealing with the Air Berlin affair in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a MOR German daily:
Hunold said … that he was proud that on internal Spanish flights they managed to have at least one Spanish-speaking stewardess on board. Introducing another language would be impossible. “Am I meant to [...]

Here (thanks MM). So are you with Joe or against him? Does the Guernica page header mean the author identifies Air Berlin with the Luftwaffe? I thought only racists indulged in that kind of generalisation.

Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and [...]

Surely the first two stories are in reverse chronological order. More news from beyond the grave: Frank Drake plans to talk to alien civilisations in 100 years; is El Draque still after Nova Albion?

Some Civil War street plaques sound a dissonant note with respect to the official Popular Front “historical memory” dogma. St James’ chapel dates from the 17th century and, we are told by Sant Martí de Centelles council, “like the majority of churches in the Congost valley, was sacked and burned in 1936. Subsequently the chapel [...]

More on the hacker who briefly brought baldie enterprises to a shuddering halt the other day. The problem is now fixed and I haven’t got time to investigate properly, but I no longer have any reason to believe that the attack was purely permissions-based, exploiting the tendency of most of us to 777 /wp-content/ directories. [...]

Apologies for any (continuing) inconvenience and thanks for warnings. The degree of technological sophistication involved suggests John Chappell

Three South Asian-British professionals (down from four last time, one having fallen to feminine wiles in the intervening biennium) emerge blinking from the forest at the end of this walk. My God, says one looking down, is that a mosque? And then remembers seeing a photo of it during his physics degree:

The idea seems perfectly [...]