An interesting piece by the always interesting Ilan Stavans in a new French literary mag on the doormat describes briefly how in the States, with the success of Junot Díaz’s killer novel The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao and other stuff, Spanglish has moved from the rebellious, designed-to-be-misunderstood fringe to the mainstream. What we [...]

Over at Crónica Verde, about the ongoing destruction by the Andalusian PSOE of the Doñana National Park. This is quite different from the abuse of natural space during the dictatorship because (all together now!) Franco was of the right, while Chaves is of the left, and the people’s friend to boot.

Other old media may be bolder liars, but you can always rely on ABC for the grossest cheese, as in this drooling retrowank re Felipe González’s new bit. How can you write a thing like that, even if it is a double entendre? Or am I just too much of a curious puritan?

I thought ETA’s man on the run had lost it when he went AWOL from a Subject Nation of an Evil Empire with generally excellent weather to a Subject Nation of an Evil Empire where it never bloody stops raining, just in time for winter. But then it started snowing across northern Spain, and even [...]

Check out the excellent Mr Butler on how our “socialist” government is handing over, more or less for free, a substantial stake in a nominally Spanish energy business to a Russian oil business with allegedly major mafia participation in order to save a big construction company and hence rescue the domestic financial sector from overt [...]

I struggle to believe that Graeme@South of Watford really believes that the PP is the only rampantly corrupt political party in Spain–maybe I just haven’t read enough of his posts–but here anyway (thanks to El Ciruco) is another nice example of PSOE trough management from their Andalusian fiefdom.
One suspects that few politicians here would [...]

JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes:
The stamps (29,800) [...]

“This incendiary message was broadcast from Berlin to hot-blooded Spain by dazzling, blonde Brita Brager. It had a coldblooded purpose: to persuade Spaniards that signing up for work in German munitions plants would be a short cut to a life of opulent lechery.” According to this Time story from 1943, Ms Brager was the 23-year-old [...]

Barcelona students are occupying universities and fighting with police in a titanic life and death struggle against the prostitution of universities to Capital. Meanwhile Google UK news produces only five ghits for “Bologna Declaration“, three of which are in English, one of which concerns the accord signed in 1999 and designed to make it easier [...]

IT a profession for generally peaceful, libertarian innovators sans frontières? Not in Andalusia, where they’re demonstrating with the ultimate goal of excluding those without the correct government diploma. The OECD wants flexible labour markets. Spain wants guilds. Yet I’m sure this kind of thing must happen somewhere else–Gordimer would surely have had some if there’d [...]

CC says that Telva says that Jaume Plensa is simply panting to design some sets for Verdi’s Macbetch. I blame Telva’s legions of copy editors this time–they get Toulouse wrong too–but there’s no reason why not: “So this is the story of Lady Macbitch and her husband. The Queen stimulates herself with the props of [...]

Geo-sensitive porn chat ads cope as well with multi-key characters as the average wanker. I doubt not that Cornell University is a chattering of cheeky chicas, but at this time of year the weather’s rather better in Cornellá, Barcelona. Not that I’m in Cornellà, but you get the picture, and if you don’t then I [...]

As we go into recession the governments of two mini-“nations”, one with a state, the other with considerable autonomy, both worse afflicted by the downturn than might reasonably have been expected 20 years ago, have, within days of one another, rediscovered vaguely Biblical and distinctly 1930s strategies to disguise their failures of economic management: blame [...]

For a long time I’ve avoided the centre of town, where the keywords are minuscule and mediocre, but even in quieter districts it’s difficult to find a decent traditional menu for a sensible price. Ca la Flor (Secretari Coloma 10, metro Joanic) is just the job: €8.50 for three generous home-cooked courses with free-flowing booze, [...]

PATIO ANDALUZ, conde del asalto 120, PRESENTS SPANISH FOLKLORE if you want to see the come along BEAUTIFUL GIRL’S will sing an dance for you… slow prices. A human adboard, but no pictures of US sailors sloping off into alleys with Spanish prostitutes on the 6th Fleet’s historic visit in 1952, although Bagdad was the [...]

Increasingly huge on the net, but whose script/voice is it? (Via Josep Tarrés. More on “Funiculì, funiculà” some other day.)

Tim the Translator is not happy with a diktat on non-sexist language issued by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, which includes a recommendation to use passive reflexive (which may well be distinct from reflexive passive) constructs like “it will be ruled judicially…” in order to avoid discriminatory acts like “the judge [m] will rule…”. He [...]

Seven years on and Spanish barmen still haven’t learned to love those damn eros ueros:

Perhaps the shame this induces will send Trichet cap in hand to Threadneedle Street to apply to the Old Lady for admission. Perhaps not.
(Thanks to El Ciruco, who is holding out for more than a share in Google Ads)

People in Barcelona have started relating the apparently low mortality rate among Chinese residents to identity theft in the way they did in London a few years back, but we’re never going to get back to the good old days before forensic tools like DNA testing, finger printing and ubiquitous photography.
There’s an entertaining story [...]

BA’s Highlife mag goes lowlife: “After 40 years of mass tourism, Torremolinos continues to evolve and, away from the coast, it’s a bustling Andalucian town. The high-rise 1950s and 1960s hotels are now admired by fashionable architects. The campaign to make it a Unesco World Heritage site begins here.” I’ve been going to Benidorm for [...]