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 Guaranteeâ„¢ 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.