Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian:
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the […]

Provided by the Junta de Andalucía in collaboration with Vodafone. Don’t forget your glasses, and enjoy the raffle, presumably to be held in the rest break between the Introduction and the Practice sections:

The English Wikipedia says that the history of Andalusia ended with the Muslims, which seems like fair comment. The Spanish version says that […]

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei.
What was news to […]

From the baldie:

Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain to […]

The Mother of God of Montserrat can come to Barcelona’s Hogar Extremeño on Wednesdays to watch the footie but she can’t bring Anubis. Whatsisname’s young Dominican is still banned.

You could try Clínica Cyclops in Barcelona:

They also have a tree surgery unit:

Update from Dave: a Scottish tree without eyes or mouth that nevertheless eats bicycles.

Would those who say that we should hang on to a few Francos because it was how things were, weren’t it, say the same of images of Marx? I’m something a fan of the Roman custom of leaving statue torsos intact and swapping heads as each dictator came and went.

Did the serpent deflower Eve or merely provide professional consulting services, thus relegating humans to a subsidiary role in creation?

Alphabetical list (via GBS unless otherwise indicated), and with no particular attention paid to the Greek vs Lybian business, to the Roman/West Mediterranean cult, or to anything else for that matter:

“ABDERA, ab-dé’-ra, a maritime city in Thrace” (Beeton’s Classical Dictionary)
Alesia, an ancient town of the Man« dubii in Gallia Lugdunensis, said to have been founded […]

If the ruling Galician national socialists want to redefine the region in their statute of autonomy as the “nation of Breogan” (their leader says their identity is in their genes), does that mean that, like their mythical hero, they’re going to spend all their money building a great big tower and then take the whole […]

Following Mad Mas’ exposition, at the invented tomb of invented Wilf the Hairy, of Catalanista scientific doctrine–Article 1: Just because something is false doesn’t mean it ain’t true–, Luis Alfonso Gámez picks up on an important story which the nutters have somehow missed. (Thanks to Carlos Ferrero)

Tunisia’s first private TV company doesn’t seem to have any elephants. (Via Karim)

Given the interesting record of Basque philology, I wouldn’t be surprised if the early Basque fragments found at Iruña-Veleia (near Vitoria-Gasteiz) turned out to be fakes. The inscription urdin isar, blue/greyish star, certainly leaves me curious. Off-hand I can think of no pre-C18th texts in any Western European language that refer to stars by their […]

Alastair Blanshard of Sydney Uni says the myth was invented by Christians and encouraged modern pervs like Oscar Wilde seeking to justify their behaviour. How sad.

Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian:
A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for Aetna, […]

Emboldened by comments from John of CityHighlights, who was out on an in-town walk yesterday, I’m going to start offering Barcelona city walking tours via the website.
(John pointed out that Roman London also took shape on a modest hill between two streams–in Barcelona’s case, we’re talking the Rambla and the old Riera de Sant Joan, […]

Lisa Spangenberg posted a while back on the recently publicised find of two 2,300-year-old bog bodies at Clonycavan and Croghan near Dublin. The BBC says of Clonycavan man that
he had been using a type of Iron Age hair gel; a vegetable plant oil mixed with a resin that had probably come from south-western France […]

The eighteenth century would have sounded rather different if composers had employed Persian instead of Turkish music:
Xenophon and others report: “In battles, Iranians played certain sounds that made the enemy fearful and escape, such as the sound of stones falling from the mountain or the sound of a waterfall or the horrible sound of the […]

‘“Bush is worse than Stalin” -Hitler’ gets 30 ghits while ‘“Bush is worse than Hitler” -Stalin’ gets 822. Is this because the people who make this kind of comparison (a) haven’t heard of Stalin; (b) think Stalin was uniquely awful, an ÜberBusch; or (c) think Stalin was actually a nice guy with some bad press? […]

Last night I had the privilege of singing at Ferrari driver Marc Gené’s wedding reception, held in a neo-Renaissance palace (built 1940-50) called Bell Recó (something like “Beautiful spot”–it’s tucked away behind some absolutely splendid trees on a hillside up near Argentona).
Apart from the kitchen, I found the building of interest principally because of […]

Wondering on a London bus this morning about suicide bombers (why don’t we just get rid of shoelaces–damn fiddly, prone to blow up in one’s face–and acquire slip-ons?), I chanced on the following passage in Menéndez Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos/History of the heterodox (1880; previous post):
During the tyranny of the Spanish king in Barcelona, […]

Re Mark Liberman’s post, I don’t know of any prior examples–the nearest I can think of are C16th Dutch usages like Poortegaal for the smallest room (but speaking Portuguese isn’t, unfortunately, mean speaking crap) and Scythen/Schijten = Scythians/shitting–and Thomas Watson’s “A perjured person is the devil’s excrement” is attractive but too late.
Saint Augustine doesn’t […]

Eulàlia has discovered a Gallo-Roman memorial in Lyon to a woman murdered by her husband. I like blogs with photos, but her drawings are wonderful.

The novel is progressing. I’ve hit the 50K mark and plot and characters are showing signs of improvement, partly because I’m putting a bit more time into research and a bit less into peripatetic weird shit collection. One of the puzzles I’m working through at the moment is the lack of a sub-Saharan chiliastic movement […]

“And as we find in a book of laws called Digesto that city used to be called Guiris because it was created by Garfeus, son of Canaan and grandson of Noah.”

Emphatically not a rodent; possibly Herb Alpert’s true muse.

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 tells me visitors to Der Standard are already speculating (now I scroll down, I can […]

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 he has balanced on top, The Fidenae Stadium Collapse Building.

From The Guardian, including handy stuff like “Which ones are the Orcs?” and “This film is terrible. I want my blood-money back.”