In which I proffer my experience in the service of the East European mafia as a model for helping us help the Aricept generation.

This is surely where this took place, and this must have been one of the last guests pre-mortem. I liked the unconsciously gruesome comments on TripAdvisor about the chilly welcome and subsidence on the tennis court, and a couple of the photos are thoroughly spooky.

An Iberian proposal would slash wage costs, free up time and talent for cashflow-friendly shagshow opportunities, and assimilate football to mainstream Peninsular cultural practice.

Includes video of snow felling a pine tree and a photo of a municipal bus which almost skated its way down-town.

Restores the power of speech to stricken Andalusians.

I’m going to shift all the crap on this server to a new host tomorrow evening–cheaper, I believe more reliable, and it’s in the States so I can say whatever I want. One query: I have vague memories from when I left the disastrous WebFusion/Host Europe setup a couple of years ago that WordPress times-out [...]

Some historical advice from an Irish perspective for Esperanza Aguirre on the pitfalls of attempting to demonstrate by symbolic means the virile and libertarian spirit of Madrid in the invented and regrettable conflict between it and doldrummed Barcelona.

Here’s a cheeky hybrid of actual and virtual tourism: the guide hasn’t been to all of the places advertised here at 100€ per person per day, and he hasn’t visited some for a decade, so instead of conducting costly research he learns them from Google Streetview. Which, for all I know, may work perfectly well [...]

Peter Mandelson on how fortunate we are that the European Commission is unelected, remote, unaccountable, and a major bureaucracy.

Yet another scheme to get poor slowly.

But what was Rosa Díez actually trying to say before she so expertly inserted foot into mouth?

In response to confusion in the markets re Spain’s constitutional arrangements and the size and distribution of its public debt, kaleBirthday has, remarkably, gained the consent of the Catalan, Spanish and EU administrations to conduct a binding poll on the future of the troubled region. Vote now or forever hold your peace.

Public auctions of wrecks in Barcelona, Pontevedra and Algeciras, with thoughts on how to reduce blogging competition.

With the Anglo-Saxon plot in tatters and Jewish machinations a non-starter, some strategic paranoia for Mr Zapatero. (Like: Is Mendelssohn’s Elijah a secret weapon of German subversion?)

Hasta luego Edgar León, but what’s the real solution?

With an excerpt from a plea for more state funding by the Bostonian Western Rail-road, in which we are given to understand that snow is not necessarily a bad thing.

From this month’s Barcelona Connect:
Win a 13 Litre Jug of Margarita Cocktail at Pippermint Bar!
Probably the biggest jug of cocktail in the city, and certainly not one to be tackled without a good group of friends! Pippermint offers a delicious variety of cocktails, plus student night on Thursdays, and you can catch the big sports [...]

It’s Pig’d over at Calculated Risk has a toothy smirk for the bailout which, for the usual reasons, we are not to call a bailout.
Mr Artificial Turf confirms our opinion that Bordeaux is astonishingly good value compared to Barcelona. And it has real waves.

TravelShop Turkey’s bus doesn’t actually take you to Istanbul or Tunis, but love those krazy keywords (and of course even Trabzon isn’t that Turkish any more anyway).

A Google Maps/Le Figaro mashup.