Ah, but how long before it is rebuilt as a theme park? Plaza de San Felipe Neri is one of the most interesting examples of the latter in Barcelona, but only in the demolition of marginal and shanty towns have Spanish planners approached the rigour of the Chinese authorities. Half of the valley of Torre [...]

This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:

People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family [...]

A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:

At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:

More educational train journeys here.

The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:
In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge [...]

Huge numbers yesterday on this walk, on some very quiet meadows at between 400 and 600m. First Gonepteryx rhamni, our Brimstone:

Next is I think a Clouded Yellow, Colias croceus:

Then Papilio machaon, macaón in Spanish, Common swallowtail and a host of other names in English. We saw a couple of dozen:

A swallowtail story from The child’s [...]

This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, [...]

Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (”It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948″). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he [...]

Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.

Best writing there for ages, too:
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John Chappell must have stayed up in conservative, nationalist Gracia if he had a quiet night. We were with friends on Carretera de Sans, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many Spanish flags. Delicious detail: two young ladies, their prodigious assets barely concealed, beating up a violent pimp-ish type and immediately seducing some [...]

San Juan de Plan, Huesca, Spanish Pyrenees. You’ll have to twirl your machine 90º until Google Video start doing online rotation:
Tiny Tim started out as the Human Canary and died in the arms of Miss Sue after playing his appalling hit, Tip-toe thru the tulips, at the Women’s Club Of Minneapolis on November 30 1996. [...]

Photo 7 on this page shows a lamb being carried by refugees from villages on the Spanish side of the central Pyrenees as the Stalinist-led 43rd Division prepared its famous last stand–the Bielsa Pocket/la Bolsa de Bielsa–against Franco’s advancing Navarrans in spring 1938. Bielsa was completely shattered by the latter’s artillery, but the scorched earth [...]

The Spanish DVD is poorly produced but this error was probably planned:

George finds sanity through lunacy, monarchy through dethronement. The film is as fine in its own way as the original play was, and Nigel Hawthorne is divine. Handel was George I and II, not III, but period films normally inflict far greater musical torments.

Over at Carles Miró’s place. There’s a bit of it around in Anglocabronia, and machine-generated fakevertising sites (insert James Joyce joke here) are getting into pubic light, as in “Two inches, three, four, five and just the twirled pubic lamp shades teen of jake tickled his bulky route pocketing.” Good porn lighting must be worth [...]

The usuals are flooding us with mail calling on us to halt work in Spain next month in order to remind politicians that it is their solemn duty to provide each and every one of us with a mansion, a fast car, and a ready-rolled joint. Bet that strikes terror into the Chinese.

Over at Amigos del Circo.

The taz has been obligatory reading for the thoughtful German green-left for the last 30 years. It has no particular sympathy for airline companies or Joachim Hunold. Highlights from a piece published June 14 (via MM):
It is true [actually it isn't--but Tobias Büscher isn't the only one to make this error]: Franco prohibited regional [...]

I tend to concentrate on the Catalanist language nuts because they’re closer to hand, but Madrid has its own share of nationalist loons. For example, Amando de Miguel over at Libertad Digital is given to making unfounded claims about the dangers of English. I showed a while back that there’s no statistical basis for his [...]

Dolce vita pin-ups and spaghetti circus over at Raffaele De Ritis’ Novelties and Wonders.

Se trata de un primer intento de hacer un transformador fonético español-andaluz con el propósito de facilitar la producción de textos en diversos dialectos andaluces. Utiliza un algoritmo casero basado en las normas especificadas en el artículo sobre el andaluz en Wikipedia, me parece en gran parte el trabajo de Antonio M Romero Dorado, y [...]

People tell me that emission reporting is routinely fiddled in Barcelona, as is monitoring by local authorities, and the true location of Spanish polluters–crucial for studying health effects–seems to be vague at best, but this (quite old) collection for GE gives us a handy way of discovering interesting stuff like, oh, the Gonvarri metal treatment [...]

Our entrance is barred by a little man with a beret and a moustache:
–You know this isn’t a bar?
–Of course!
–No problem then, I’ll get the landlady.
Later, in conversation with the landlady:
–Aren’t you worried by the EU ban on making your own vermouth?
–If this isn’t a bar then why the fuck would we be making our [...]

Over at WFMU, probably the best music station in the world. Not much from this neck of the bosque, although they’ve got Los desechables, who I didn’t know, and the vile Eléctrica Dharma, who I do know and whose only merit is in having given rise to our freestyle pakrock outfit, Eléctrica Shoarma.

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.

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. [...]

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 [...]

Spanish insurers Fiatc have a fairly grisly reputation for health provision care in general. Here’s how they deal with you once you’re dead: “When we arrived at the crematorium we were taken in through the rear entrance, down a long corridor, where we passed someone else laying in a coffin, a woman walking down the [...]

Is not a gay bar but a lingerie-and-that-kind-of-stuff shop on the street in Barcelona named after Pi i Margall, Mr Pine and Wall barley:

Villa in c/ de l’Hortal, Carmelo, Barcelona apparently dedicated to books. The garden looks good. (Miquel Hortal i Arisó is probably the richest piano tuner in the history of Barcelona, inheriting from his father the estate on which a substantial part of the Carmelo was constructed.)

The mayor of Agón, Aragón, “sick of extreme nationalism”, on the transfer of water from the Ebro to Barcelona. The underlying point being made by him and others in this, the latest episode in the Iberian Water Wars, is actually fair enough: aware of declining water resources, Barcelona’s “eco-warrior” council planned for unsustainable growth in [...]

More from Eazy. CC

Wood ants descending rapidly en masse from a Quercus ilex on Montseny at the onset of a sharp shower:

Having spent several decades standing under trees waiting for the rain to stop, it is my firm belief that small ants do not flee from the rain as do big ones, although their level of activity [...]

Shite so cheesy it’s amazing the BBC didn’t beat PBS to it:

(Yes, head cheese, but shite cheese or cheese shite, probably not.)