english

2004/11/24 - welcome to new, pronounceable k’alebøl!
The continuation of this blog is over here. I'll put in server redirects here at some stage so no one gets too confused....
(Catala, English, Nederlands, language)

2004/11/18 - spainmedia.com dead
As noted on the site, I and John have been unable to reach agreement on how to take SpainMedia.com forward, so it is dead. I'll be continuing with what I've been doing here and various other things and I expect...
(English)

2004/11/17 - blogmove
I'm shortly going to be moving this blog onto WordPress in order to provide more features that will support more varied content. Comments still work here (with authentication: massive DoS attack last night), but any new ones won't get transferred....
(Catala, English, Nederlands, language)

2004/11/15 - pirates and kleinecke's etymology of pidgin
In which I suggest that an old Spanish slang word has nothing at all to do with Dutch pirates but instead adds weight to David Kleinecke's generally discarded South American etymology of the word "pidgin"....
(English, language)

2004/11/13 - conspiracy, conspiracy
Enschede aan Zee -> French developer's Flash CV in English and French. Why, tho, does his blog say "Copyright 2004 Microsoft Corporation"?...
(English, music)

2004/11/11 - we've been wikipediad!
OK, it's not the same as being instapunditted or slashdotted, but the link from here to here is still good for a few hits....
(English)

2004/11/09 - sermon on the nount
I am but a lowly goat-wrestler, a smuggler of unlabelled bottles, a ragged-trousered anythingarianist. But within me burns a flame of hope that one day I will achieve great things that, inter alia, will reduce the rate of subterranean rotation...
(English, language, religion)

2004/11/09 - witch doctor impersonator implicated in money laundering
A client of a friend once fell for the Nigerian 419 scam, flew all the way there and was chauffeured to a government office, where he was robbed of $50K. However, this kind of stuff doesn't just happen to East...
(English)

2004/11/08 - niceties
From the Washington Post: "Asked to respond to reports that Arafat is brain-dead, [French foreign minister Michel] Barnier replied, 'I wouldn't say that.'"...
(English, language, politics)

2004/11/07 - boston tea leaves
The 10 least frequent phrases that have led to this site so far this month are (highest-ranked link selected):...
(English)

2004/11/06 - blood and fire
The rhetoric of Islamic terror is based on old, shared beliefs in a millennium which is imminent and which will be reached through conflagration and slaughter. Here, for example, is a translation of the farewell poem recovered from Amsterdam Moroccan...
(English, language, poetry, politics, religion)

2004/11/06 - it's those bl00dy anglophones again!
For all its multilingualness (a bruxellisme?), Switzerland has always been remarkably paranoid about the introduction of other languages and cultures. Now...
(English, language, politics)

2004/11/05 - when is a telemarketer a stalker?
Just received six calls from Gas Natural's telemarketing department, the first cold and the rest increasingly warm. Basically, the woman refused to accept that I was not interested in the Christmas special offer and kept calling back. If there's no...
(English)

2004/11/05 - schrödinger's arafat
This seemed to me an interesting view of the media-meets-multiple-state-man scenario we're now in:...
(English, politics)

2004/11/04 - flash mobbing
The public left-wing aggression, organised via mobiles, that I think most people accept was crucial in the Spanish elections this year is often taken as having been the first successful application of flash mobbing to politics. Dheera Sujan, in Gods...
(English, politics, religion)

2004/11/03 - he nemde symon petrum
The 4th International's Peter Symon cloning conspiracy, exposed:...
(English, politics, religion)

2004/11/02 - murder of theo van gogh by muslim extremist
De Telegraaf draws a link between the murders of Pim Fortuyn and, this morning in Amsterdam, of Dutch polemicist and director, Theo van Gogh: their deaths are separated by 911 days, as were New York and Madrid. He was shot...
(English, politics, religion)

2004/11/02 - i think you know what this is about
John Chappell of Iberian Notes is on TV3 from 11:30 this morning, chewing up liberals, Europeans and all manner of junk (but no real meat, please). Wotchit....
(English, politics)

2004/10/31 - this scissors
What is acceptable in boxers and (Don) kings is not necessarily so in lesser mortals. Here's some English-German translator explaining for the umpteenth time on his blog why he is the best:...
(English, language)

2004/10/30 - paying the pipers
Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson (Enowning > a Slashdot interview):...
(English)

2004/10/29 - wild thing
Picked up the two-month-old Beast of Bages this afternoon from a farm where she was in imminent danger of being eaten by hunting dogs. She's still too shy for photos, but has already assaulted one of the neighbours and climbed...
(English, cats, music)

2004/10/26 - peel
So it's just going to be the once on Peel. That was a strange summer, when the customary laziness was suddenly interrupted by unfamiliar terms like "airplay" and "contract". Then the singer got eight years for stammering during an armed...
(English, music)

2004/10/26 - importance of language (potty?) training
A fascist left site stole an excerpt from a translation of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and posted it approvingly next to what they think is the authentic cover. Check it out. (Tim Blair > Barcepundit, neither of whom seems...
(English, politics)

2004/10/24 - raven blast
The raven didn't hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it...
(English, poetry)

2004/10/23 - rank, drunken ballboys
Now we've established that you don't necessarily need to be 14 and follied to pick up a tennis ball and lob it to a drug-crazed millionaire slogger, let's follow in the footsteps of reality telly and diversify: vapid clones mean...
(English, football)

2004/10/22 - deep-fried chocolate sparrow
At bar Miramelindo in Barcelona...
(English, foods, language)

2004/10/22 - "welsh language threatened by harbour development"
Better no jobs than a few English-speaking seagulls. Ah, my people....
(English, language)

2004/10/19 - richard and the lion's heart: the truth
So Richard Cœur-de-Lion owed his name to bravery in battle? Hmmm, because Robert Chambers' 1869 Book of Days, pillaging a medieval romance, tells a different tale. As we join proceedings, Richard is languishing in the nick (again! but it's German...
(English)

2004/10/19 - eunuch-love. quiet please, ladies and gentlemen
Two points re Eunuch umpires needed (for the Madrid Masters):...
(English)

2004/10/18 - faultless translations for free
Also via Margaret Marks, a machine that does perfect translations in a number of European languages....
(English, IT, language)

2004/10/18 - curse of the glacier mummy
Sad and strange: Helmut Simon, the guy who, with his wife, found Ötzi, the prehistoric iceman, has disappeared while walking at somewhere in the region of 2,400m. Rescue teams have given up hope of finding him alive, and Margaret Marks...
(English)

2004/10/18 - what mad dictators do for a living
Forget the Murdoch-Blair story and compare this man with this man. Oh dear....
(English)

2004/10/17 - join the chupa chups boycott!
This is a new channel in the continuing story of a Dane's struggle to get money owed to his son - that's what they say, and I believe them - by big evil Catalan multinational, Chupa Chups, without relying on...
(English)

2004/10/17 - sweet sue
In a riposte to a piece by Ron Gompertz about Spanish plans to sue Italy over the Roman occupation, Al Pernales suggests that a win might encourage Madrid to sue the US for collaborating with continental drift during the Triassic...
(English)

2004/10/17 - "where's the baldie?"
Apparently a bunch of American academics came to Barcelona recently on their annual beano and, rumours about Baldie Tours having spread, recoiled in horror when they got into their coach on Monday morning and found a delightful young Spanish woman...
(English)

2004/10/17 - nothing new in politics
Two brothers [illegible] one kingdom. One dreamed of peace for his country, the other fought valiantly for his ideals:...
(English, film, politics)

2004/10/17 - heidegger and beckenbauer
I'll be visiting Jan van Bakel's site again shortly to quote from his extraordinary collection of letters written by Flemish soldiers in Napoleon's armies, but here's another strange thing I found, which he quotes from Rüdiger Safranski's Martin Heidegger -...
(English, football)

2004/10/16 - fertility, creativity, and the rising spirit of hip
It is held in some ovoids that the only way to understand what you wrote when drunk is to repeat the experience. Although fixed habits ill become a man without a fixed income, I have knocked back the odd glass...
(English, language)

2004/10/16 - cameroon pidgin version of google on the way
The Goracle just got normative on me again, suggesting I try "cow way yo no get tail, na goddi dream fly" instead of "cow way yi no get tail, na god di drivam fly". Who do these people think they...
(English, language)

2004/10/15 - osama for pres!
... is what the Guardian seems to be saying this morning, noting that in Pakistan only 7% support Bush while 65% think Osama is ... well ... groovy. Americans should, it is suggested, listen to the citizens of states traditionally...
(English, politics)

2004/10/14 - horny, half-naked cameroonian teens and the un universal deceleration of human rights
There's an interesting piece by Kini Nsom at the excellent Post Online (Cameroon) on topless, drunken and otherwise disorderly women in that country. This compelling issue came up in parliament in the form of a complaint by the MP for...
(English)

2004/10/14 - clouseau to head up european justice system
This eez Chief Inspector Clouseau speaking on the phön. No, sorry, this is a malevolent interpretation of a notion dreamt up by Maurice Druon, distinguished member of l'Académie française, who claimed the other day that...
(English, language)

2004/10/13 - "the only constant throughout spain's storied history is failure"
... writes Paul Cannon over at Fox. Indeed, he says,...
(English, football)

2004/10/13 - more pussy pics
Despite the fact my language of choice is that of a far better empire, Kaleboel comes in at no 839 on the list of "more than 10,000" participants in la blogosfera hispana, as calculated by Bitacoras.com. The infinitely superior Puerta...
(English, cats)

2004/10/13 - plan crash
There's a good opinion piece by Rainer Soller over at Deutsche Welle on the extradition to Turkey of Muslim extremist Metin Kaplan on terrorism charges. This para in particular caught my eye:...
(English)

2004/10/13 - darfur ... what?
OK, The Onion is not always a killer, but this is not at all bad:...
(English)

2004/10/12 - retrench, lads
A South African friend told me the other day that she had been retrenched. This means that the buggers have made her redundant, binned her, killed her, arranged to see her down the pub in half an hour, matie. The...
(English)

2004/10/11 - "you have the right to remain silent"
... said the policeman to the would-be rapist whose tongue had been bitten off by his intended victim in Barcelona, South Africa....
(English)

2004/10/11 - more on "foetus butcher ramón tanda"
... over at SpainMedia.com. The story was broken yesterday by the Sunday Telegraph, but John Barrass has come up with more, lots more, on Ginemedex, the Barcelona clinic that boasts of performing 30-week abortions. ABC says that the price increases...
(English)

2004/10/10 - brass monkey
Nick Lloyd writes of a lingerie salesman student of his from Zaragoza:...
(English)

2004/10/10 - on this day
... Henry VIII was at something of a loose end, so he told a builder to put a bowling alley in Whitehall. No one asked him if he had planning permission....
(English)

2004/10/10 - undone
A friend in Nairobi tells me that Kenyan newspaper sales were up 10% yesterday on the news that the local champion of unpulped wood had got the Nobel....
(English)

2004/10/10 - national stereotypes
As a Brit, I wonder if there are also Americans who roll around laughing when they discover FranklinCovey's Mission Builder ("Use our Mission Builder exercise to add focus, direction, and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions"). I suspect...
(English, language)

2004/10/09 - who's afraid of the big bad wolof?
I once read some complete nonsense by UCD prof Clarence Major, so I do kind of wonder whether he's got any evidence for the claim (Prentiss Riddle → MSNBC) that relates hip "to the Wolof verb hepi ('to see') or...
(English, language, love)

2004/10/08 - introducing the aragonese albino dragon slug
Nick Lloyd notes that "The spread of mad cows disease into Spain means that, following EU rules, dead cows, sheep and goats can no longer be left in the countryside, and must be destroyed." Fortunately for Brussels this is not...
(English, photos, sheep)

2004/10/08 - the man who strato-pogoed to earth
Airborne sorties across ceilings were what led me into the pernicious habit of strato-pogoing around the globe, springing out of a sunrise in Sumatra to boing past Bangkok bu**ocks and take in most of Southeast Asia before my bacon and...
(English)

2004/10/08 - everyone loves magical trevor
I have been busy for a while, and this is what I have been doing....
(English, cows)

2004/10/06 - speaking of football...
However much you hate football, this is the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile. Ah, say people, Ronaldinho is able to do that kind of stuff because he is Brazilian. We liberals know better than to believe any...
(English)

2004/10/05 - spainmedia.com
Go and check out SpainMedia.com, a news & views site which I and John Barrass, ex-jefe of Barcelona Business, launched this afternoon. Our aim echoes to a degree Tom Lehrer's old dope peddler's gloss on Adam Smith: to do well...
(English)

2004/10/03 - enough lloretisation!
I keep seeing new words that describe the destruction of the Catalan countryside by corrupt Catalan constructors and politicians. There's a sheet hanging in the Plaça de la Vila de Madrid, plagued by drunks and junks since the council landscaped...
(English)

2004/10/01 - zapatero already more notorious than chamberlain--in the us
John Chappell suggests (scroll quickly past the bizarre homophobic rant) that "pull a Spain" ("hacer una españolada") is becoming the new "pull a Chamberlain", an expression for poorly reasoned cowardice. That's clearly true for Americans in pyjamas, but doesn't yet...
(English, language, politics)

2004/09/30 - melons and quinces
By Pete "The Feet" "Ooh Me Back!":...
(English, foods, photos)

2004/09/30 - medium/message
NYC is dispossessing newsstand owners in order to make the streets more monotone and generate ad revenues:...
(English)

2004/09/30 - how beijing financed the dutch secret police
According to a book by ex-spook F Hoekstra, the Dutch Secret Service (BVD) set up a Maoist party, the Marxist-Leninist Party Netherlands (MLPN), to figure out the extent and nature of Chinese influence among students and scientists in the 70s....
(English, politics)

2004/09/29 - drongos from mars
There's a good post over at Confrontación about the current Telefónica hard sell, which involves pestering hapless consumers with something worse than they've already got. Someone I know down south just had to wait four months for a line to...
(English)

2004/09/29 - chupa chups vs svend aage bek update
Check over at John Pawlenko's (scroll down) for photos of the goons trailing the elderly man who says--convincingly--that Chupa Chups owe him a couple of hundred grand and who Chupa Chups have managed--unconvincingly--to haul into court on charges related, it...
(English)

2004/09/29 - do not buy this book! a fiery diatribe
Apparently Baldie Enterprises (Europe) are too alternative to be included in a new guidebook to alternative Barcelona, so we suggest that you avoid this dreadful Flash site like Vietnamese parrot flu and under no circumstances purchase the damn thing (which...
(English)

2004/09/29 - money bunnies
One of the stupidest pieces of evidence cited in anonymous briefings by the regional police in their attempts--based as far as I am aware purely on inter-corps rivalries--to pin Islamic terrorism charges on the 10 Pakistanis detained here on the...
(English)

2004/09/27 - spanish justice
John Pawlenko's excellent Chupa Chups exposé is turning into the longest post in the world (scroll to 27th Sept), but you need to read it for one simple reason: Catalonia appears to share with Burma and parts of rural China...
(English)

2004/09/27 - horny goddess
MG Cole writes from a farmstead on Bala Lake: I am disappointed that you, a Welshman, don't publish more stories of interest to dope-crazed New Age pillocks and consumer goods purchasers like myself. Here then is an authentic photo of...
(English, photos)

2004/09/27 - the ulster branch of the trevors
Someone told me this morning that the Royal Ulster Constabulary used to be known as the Trevors. It's unclear to me whether this is a reference to the low incidence of the name in Catholic families, to Tacitus' pigheaded Treviri,...
(English, music, photos)

2004/09/27 - formal analysis
Reading (and trying to sing) bits of Jack Kerouac's Mexico City Blues over lunch, I came across the following in the 118th chorus:...
(English, music, poetry)

2004/09/26 - forum auction not to include mayor clos
Price estimates had dropped so rapidly following recent news that the accountants figured it would be cheaper just to keep him locked up in the town hall until the next elections. 11,000 lots are up for sale--mostly office attributes--but I'm...
(English, photos)

2004/09/25 - blogs broken down by age, sex and other useful variables
In tribute to this noble undertaking, I would like to present a select list of blogs written in English by would-be Spaniards currently resident in the Cambrillish Empire who were bitten this morning on the calf by a tiger mosquito...
(English)

2004/09/25 - svend aage bek and the catalan lollipop mafia
Go over to John Pawlenko's Barcablog and read this story of how, it seems, Chupa Chups think they can poo all over foreign entrepreneurs (like they attempted to poo all over the Spanish taxman) and get away with it. Why...
(English)

2004/09/25 - playing with fire
The Times of India writes of the late Raja Ramanna that...
(English, music)

2004/09/24 - chomsky, anyone?
I hope that Europeans realise that it really only is absence that makes their hearts grow so strangely fond of Noam Chomsky, and that they don't take up Eric Bakovic's suggestion and deprive the Empire of a major source of...
(English)

2004/09/24 - wrong schlong
Someone claiming to be in LeMeaux has mailed to refute M's suggestion that our mayor, Joan Clos, had made some kind of artificial addition to his beloved Hampton Wick. So what the hell's wrong with him then?...
(English)

2004/09/24 - boarhunting on the quiet
Quake and quiver, countryfolk, for Sicilian gentlemen will shortly be beating Berkshire's bushy byways for the Great British Truffle Harvest of 2004; the principal threats to Catalonia's black diamonds, on the other hand, are Alzheimer's--forests seem very big when you're...
(English, foods, pigs)

2004/09/24 - efficient use of pr budget
André Hazes, the notable (but not notably abstemious--he famously lit up in the no-smoking cinema in which his life-film was being premiered) Dutch singer, died yesterday morning. RIP, one would think, but the Dutch music industry is smart--and tacky--enough not...
(English, music)

2004/09/23 - al-qaeda's debt to the american music industry
From Popbitch:...
(English, music)

2004/09/23 - "breaks slammed on railway privatization"
Right headline, wrong story from Deutsche Welle: what the DB Vorstand really wanted to communicate is that German rail privatisation will proceed according to plan, and that under a new CEO, one Kurtis Blow, trains will be marketed to a...
(English, music, politics, trains)

2004/09/23 - fair's fair
Catalonia Today is deservedly taking a beating, but it is worth recalling that for really bad English you should try "quality" paper La Vanguardia's plagiarist nitwit in London, Rafael Ramos. Just thought I'd mention that....
(English)

2004/09/23 - commenter approval
I've turned on the blog feature that requires me to OK commenters first time round. This is to stop a gentleman not a million miles from here who has been spamming the comment sections. It provides me with no more...
(English)

2004/09/22 - wells fargo
It may come as something of a surprise to Europeans that Geoff Pullum and Prentiss Riddle expect a bus company to provide clearly articulated, comprehensive information....
(English, buses, financial)

2004/09/22 - "filthiest book in the aussie language"
If the items here from The Bugle's Dicktionary are the best Andrew Pegler can come up with, then either we're being conned and there are lots of dirtier books out there or the Australian language (why's it not in Strine?)...
(English)

2004/09/22 - hurray for the times of india
... which provides no less than six RSS cricket feeds. The Times this morning even manages to nudge news of cricketer Parthiv Patel's fake Gujarat marriage above the story of how Mahatma Gandhi enslaved his son....
(English, cricket)

2004/09/22 - the fox and the cat, mallorcan style
Belated congratulations to blogger/journalist Pere Marí, now being sociocultural for El Diario de Mallorca. He had an interesting piece last month on the 70th anniversary of Balearic publishing dynasty, Editorial Moll, which I can't link to because of DdeM's moronic...
(English, cats, dogs, language)

2004/09/16 - good word
Fascist China still unable to cope with survival of splittist....
(English, language)

2004/09/16 - cats vs porcupines: gramsci's view
Mistress Puss has departed for the hill, so it's time for another beast to abuse, kill and eat the 5-6cm American (they're actually African) cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) which are displacing their smaller German cousins here and which crawl upstairs every...
(English, cats)

2004/09/16 - danse macabre
These three dancing Spidermen (Scripting News > Xavi Caballé)...
(English, dance, film, religion)

2004/09/16 - linguistic evidence that american fusion chefs are disorientated morons
From the Baltimore Business Journal (Trevor's strong):...
(English, foods, language)

2004/09/15 - spanish socialist celebrations of 9-11
Everyone's getting excited about the following advert for El País, Spain's principal socialist-atavist newspaper, sourced here, which says something along the lines of "A day is enough for a lot. Imagine what can happen in three months":...
(English)

2004/09/14 - real, existing travel hell
Taken from the back cover of Donald K Burleson's new Oracle9i UNIX Administration Handbook, this has to be the worst ever, worse than the lounge at Luton, worse even than divorcee cruises out of Miami, although possibly not as hard...
(English)

2004/09/14 - plus ça change...
I don't normally read David de Ugarte, but this is strange:...
(English, media)

2004/09/14 - flawed plan
If the gentleman opposite were to imitate Stefan@MemeFirst's excellent unlicensed extension of the 1776ft Freedom Tower scheme, he'd be able to give his building two names: for official purposes, The Tiberias Building Building, and in recognition of the illegal storey...
(English)

2004/09/14 - hank williams and sustainable misery
This morning's revelations of a depression Prozac symbiosis are nothing more than a variation on the old Guinness-is-good-for-you pub therapy industry. The trick is to recognise it as such and manage it effectively. While it is evident that Hank Williams...
(English, beverages, music)</