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 possibly less dangerous.
The Scandinavians seem to have deserted the peculiarly unappetising Gimnasio Nórdico in a rain gulley in Horta near the Casa Regional de Navarra, or whatever it’s called:

I occasionally visit [...]

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 [...]