A tress stress law would have finished off ETA ages back.

Apparently it might incite violence. Particularly, one suspects, if the directors of the taxpayer-funded Permanent Seminar on International Migration and Foreigners (“an open space for Interculturality and Human Rights“) in Aragon attend home matches of SD Huesca, whose major achievement to date was fifth place in the Second Division in the 1950-1 season. Via Miguel [...]

It’s not exactly a secret that Catalonia is currently run by spiteful, greedy, semi-literate buffoons, but our leaders’ protest re the Economist’s description of ex-regional president Jordi Pujol as a cacique should help to convince anyone still in doubt. The Oxford English Dictionary defines cacique thus:
2. In Spain or Latin America, a man who owes [...]

“Kraus was perfectly capable of using ‘feuilletonism’ without anti-Semitic undertones.”

I know a quite considerable number of clever, balanced Italians, and I also believe that there are millions more out there. Tragically none of them seem to show the slightest inclination to get involved in their country’s political process, which is left to people like Berlusconi, who, while not a new class of José Antonios [...]

And I didn’t blink. Actually in this context it means something like “No one gives a toss about the Statute” and refers to the complete absence of the Catalan government during ongoing debates, about which indeed no one gives a toss, but which are still apparently broadcast live on two out of the four screens [...]

El blog Ausente links to a piece by Rinzewind (which links etc etc) about Valdeluz. This is the settlement built in the desert outside Guadalajara and equipped with a high-speed train station in what appeared to be a corrupt development deal engineered by PP bigwigs Esperanza Aguirre and Álvarez Cascos with the blessing of PSOE [...]

The old ones are always the best ones. In the Dresden Files the Old Ones are demons, or dark gods who ruled the world before mankind. They were apparently banished from our reality. The Fifth Law of Magic prohibits the summoning of both the Old Ones, and their foot soldiers the Walkers, or Outsiders.
In old [...]

Ah, he was a party man! David says that Africa stops in Murcia. It’s all relative, I guess.

More modern standard Andalusian from El Ciruco:

You may fantasize about him blogging here, but someone would have to pay the shelf space for his photo collection.

In my mail this morning: someone calling himself Miguel Yasuki Hirota is giving a talk on complementary currencies for sustainable development at 19:30 on the 15th at Argentona 11. Gugel reveals that “Miguel” is a fan of the author of The natural economic order, of whom almost everyone’s favourite (since last month, anyway) liberal fascist [...]

Baltasar Porcel is a Mallorcan writer who is said to believe that his Nobel is grossly overdue. I find his columns and novels unbearably egoistic and confused, and the excellent Carles Miró in a brief review of Porcel’s career and latest novel suggests that I am not alone.

Le blog du Chì, one year ago, on TF1’s enthusiasm for the apoplectic dwarf who substituted him as opium of the peephole. Another favourite mystification, from El Ciruco:

Patricia Metola is a fine illustrator who’s had enough of people ripping off her work for profit or not. This contempt for intellectual property is an overwhelming concern for designers unable to afford lawyers, and is a major factor in limiting the availability of products online, where ripping is easy as plum pie.
I’m particularly [...]

As well as dancing the old fandango, being a brigand on the mountains, etc. His father was a something from Barcelonia. Here. Can anyone make out the entire text? (This isn’t Funiculì funiculà.)

Foreigners used to have to wheel a barrow of photocopies around half a dozen offices to be rewarded with a small laminated residency card. Then residency cards were declared obsolete, the only catch being that for most kinds of transactions they were not, Spanish practice not quite keeping up with Ayooropean theory. So foreigners had [...]

Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918:
Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the discovery [...]

So printed off a couple of this silhouette. Isaac Meyer Marks, Fears, phobias, and rituals: “Wild turkeys of any age try to escape from anything appearing above them in dark silhouette against a lighter background and moving with a certain angular speed relative to the size of the object. Similar escape reactions occur from a [...]

“What is really worrying for contemporary Spain is not that it is a country of waiters. What is worrying are the habits and manners of its waiters, their training and their crossed nobility, that thick-set-blue-beard-festooned grin.” Arcadi is certainly your man if you enjoy the extremes of 100% pseudo-intellectual introverted wank or simple, straight-forward abuse.

Xavier Caballé quotes a bit where the notoriously unreliable Catalan historian Josep Benet overstates post-war executions in what he calls “the Valencian Country” by factor 10. (I could have sworn that my comment appeared before footnote 2 did, but it’s been a confusing day.) The actual figure, taken over the period in question (1939-1953), is, [...]