Re the War of Jackson’s Sneer, Colin Davies notes the presence of trolls in Spain but suggests they have still not discovered the woods and grottoes of the Royal Academy. Not so: it’s just that the RAE, for reasons that are logical but probably doomed, calls them trol.
If their behaviour is anything like that [...]

Apparently immigrants are being denied access to virtually all night bars in Barcelona’s popular Raval district. I’m an immigrant, and I’ve never had any problems getting in (getting out is a different story), so I guess El Periódico is using the same definition as one of my ex mother-in-laws: “You’re not an immigrant, you’re white!” [...]

Code-swapping, rather than Gibraltar-Andalusian. This week’s instalment comments on the stateless national soap opera, maritime conflicts and confusions with Spain.

Amando de Miguel’s blog contains myriad hoards of fascinating localisms, but, as has been observed in the past, as soon as thought of the English language enters through one ear, reason appears to exit via the other.
Re criticisms of the poor Catalan spoken by José Montilla, the Catalan president, de Miguel writes that “ethnic [...]

Yesterday the state-approved and -subsidised competition to Baldie Galactic was observed claiming that trencadís was yet more proof of the quite extraordinary originality of the Catalan mind, etc etc. Not so: it has been around for centuries, and any connoisseur of English cathedral windows will be familiar with my favourite application of break-it-and-mend-it–the new/non-sense created [...]

Here.
The film is by the Barcelona film-maker, Ricardo de Baños, whose oeuvre, produced for an audience including Alfonso XIII, combined Barcelona storm scenes with early flamenco, as well as porn flicks like Consultorio de señoras and anti-Protestant erotica like El confesor. (BTW I wonder whether the otherwise excellent Ferdinand von Galitzien is not mistaken [...]

“Nosferatu in Bremen is essentially a flitting liminality … the German soul instinctively prefers twilight to daylight.” Way too many bloody Teutonic incorporeal materialist graffiteros lurking around on c/ Molist, Barcelona.

MM posts re the alleged use by German lawyers of American law. I think it might actually make sense to adopt US law in other jurisdictions (including Louisiana, ho ho): Hollywood achieves far greater public scrutiny of controversial legislation than, for example, Spanish democracy. (But is Hollywood law the same as US law?) National pride [...]

foucault, n. A howler, an insane mistake. “I’m afraid I’ve committed an egregious foucault.” (via Norm). Still all a bit of a fuss about Sweet Foucault.

Why else would the tender to manage the municipal pools of Cuéllar, Middle of Nowhere (pop 9,500) be published in English?

Opposite, another: Valle-Inclán’s neighbour lived here.

The marvellous world of almost, or what a difference a letter makes:

(Click thru to post page to see text)

The Emperor Wu is very pleased with his new toy. Now all that needs to happen is for someone else to enter all the walks we actually do and correct the details of the ones already in there.
The purpose of this kind of stuff is to enable inclusion of walks and similar activities run [...]

B forgot one in the freezer. I quite like the redesign. Opening it was mildly implosive, nothing like as interesting as a butane canister explosion.

Over at Manuel Trallero.

“The price for getting to Spain on a canoe has gone down. It used to cost almost £1000, but in 2006 went down to £450. Now it is possible to buy a passage for £350. It must be the only thing in Senegal which has gone down in price. A loaf of bread has gone [...]

Taking the centre line is the modern, motoring equivalent of taking the wall:
Archie’s driving habit was unique, He drove 35 mph an hour, whether on a gravel road, or the highway, keeping the left tire on the center line. Your brother John was riding with him, and said, “Grandpa Archie, what if you meet a [...]

Some Andalusians overheard this afternoon seemed to believe that Casa Milà was built as the municipal dogs’ home. Other famous landmarks–Parky Gay, Sangria Familia, Sangrada Familia, Passage Gracias–here.

Yesterday in town it was remarked on the benefits to allkind that would accrue from exchanging our customary diet of Big Macs for one of roadkill and Fucking pigeon (what’s the Latin?). Celtiberians consulted state that their race does not partake of the pigeon, and Juan Bautista Carrasco’s Mitología universal (1864) suggests that this may [...]

Recalling this, oranges weighing a kilo in Salamanca and 4-metre sunflowers in the mutant garden of Riba-Roja.

Solución aquí. Son las propias actualizaciones de Windows Vista que te joden.

Re John Chappell’s smack toddler, here’s Thomas COW from Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland singing “Bottle take effect” by Jim Reeves:

There’s a photo out there somewhere of my father helping me drink Guinness out of a bottle, aged 3. I think we’ll be able to pull statute of limitations on that one.
(Via Clinton McClung [...]

Staggering up the hill at Parky Gay, as Park Güell is now called by some:

A Swedish girl once turned up for Night of the Tarantula in some fairly ambitious heels and not much else and was turned away. If things had gone wrong the headlines could have been quite lurid.

The Lenin-loving Joves Comunistes are the miniscule youth-wing of the increasingly insignificant alphabet soup of confused post-communists headed up by the bed-hopping Catalan regional interior councillor, Joan Saura, whose police force shot and almost killed the Barcelona municipal police chief last week. (”Youth” in Spanish leftist politics means anyone who wears jeans; most of them [...]

Mr Hammond is looking for sponsors for his 24-hour (church) organ marathon (with webcam) next Tuesday at St Edmund’s (that’s the king), Northwood, Middlesex. Lohengrin is somewhere after three in the morning, Italy at five, and fortunately there’s no Spanish repertoire. A month ago he was having the odd problem with Widor.

Xavi Caballé mentions an oft-cited Catalan etymology of paper:
1249; del ll. papyrus, i aquest, del gr. pápyros ‘papir’, adaptat per via semiculta a una terminació catalana, d’on passà a les altres llengües europees
AFAIK the Enciclopèdia Catalana has never substantiated this. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise says:
PAPIER n. m. XIIIe siècle. Issu, par l’intermédiaire du latin [...]

Barcelona still gets a substantial volume of stag and hen traffic. This party consisted of a dozen supermen and a dozen ladies done out in Southend style. Note to tourists: Catalonia is not Krypton.

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. 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 del [...]

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.