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 [...]