Category archive for Man and monsters (RSS)

The coming and going of the gypsies

Posted: June 12th 2009 23:27. Last modified: June 13th 2009 11:37

Yo, el vaquilla, quinqui cinema, and the usual political whining.

Monkey hangers in 17th century Barcelona

Posted: June 7th 2009 20:45. Last modified: June 8th 2009 11:40

Xenophobic atavism in the 1640 Reapers Revolt.

How many spokes should the gypsy chakra have?

Posted: May 21st 2009 23:08.

A Barcelona scrap-metal dealer only has 12 on the favicon on his website.

Bleeding-heart hippy

Posted: March 27th 2009 12:18. Last modified: March 27th 2009 12:34

Iglesia Parroquial de Santa Teresa de Jesús, Carmelo, Barcelona.

Scum

Posted: February 25th 2009 22:35. Last modified: February 26th 2009 09:59

Public morality on the train to Vilafranca.

Guantánamo

Posted: February 25th 2009 09:58. Last modified: February 25th 2009 10:05

Why does the Spanish government want inmates, and where is it going to put them?

Testing redesign

Posted: January 28th 2009 16:38. Last modified: January 28th 2009 16:59

Visit the site with caution for the next few days until I get round to sorting out all the crap.

Calling all Barcelona-based Ukrainian anarcho-communists

Posted: January 20th 2009 08:16. Last modified: April 21st 2009 13:01

Local “anarchists” showing Nestor Makhno, paysan d’Ukraine this Friday.

On preparing an anthology of English-language nursery rhymes for a Pyrenean baby

Posted: January 13th 2009 11:32. Last modified: January 19th 2009 11:06

Dead space is newish horror survival game set on board a stricken interstellar mining ship. You play an engineer fighting a polymorphic, viral infestation which turns humans into grotesque alien monsters. Reviewing it Seth Schiesel asks:
When did fear become fun?
I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I’ve played Dead Space, the new, delectably [...]

The Spanish media and Madoff’s Jewishness

Posted: December 14th 2008 14:33.

I looked a while back at allegations of a Spanish media obsession with Israel and concluded that they were without basis in fact. Someone of similar political views to the reactionary squatter hooligan leader, Joan Txàpal, said to me last night that the Spanish press would be all over Bernie Madoff’s Jewishness. The numbers at [...]

De Juana Chaos gets something right

Posted: November 25th 2008 21:21.

I thought ETA’s man on the run had lost it when he went AWOL from a Subject Nation of an Evil Empire with generally excellent weather to a Subject Nation of an Evil Empire where it never bloody stops raining, just in time for winter. But then it started snowing across northern Spain, and even [...]

“What is art in Latin countries is obscenity in the Nordic north”

Posted: November 23rd 2008 20:02. Last modified: November 23rd 2008 20:27

JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes:
The stamps (29,800) [...]

The legal practicality of resurrection in Spain

Posted: November 17th 2008 12:38. Last modified: November 17th 2008 12:43

People in Barcelona have started relating the apparently low mortality rate among Chinese residents to identity theft in the way they did in London a few years back, but we’re never going to get back to the good old days before forensic tools like DNA testing, finger printing and ubiquitous photography.
There’s an entertaining story [...]

Sarkotraficante

Posted: November 11th 2008 18:00. Last modified: November 11th 2008 21:43

Le blog du Chì, one year ago, on TF1’s enthusiasm for the apoplectic dwarf who substituted him as opium of the peephole. Another favourite mystification, from El Ciruco:

Two dwarves

Posted: October 17th 2008 11:09. Last modified: October 17th 2008 11:11

I’d write about tiny stockbrokers, Liliputian interior designers and pygmy chestnut vendors, but I’ve never met any. The only dwarf I’ve ever known (slightly) atoned for his main job in the midget porn industry with cameos in Disneyoid kiddies’ films. I would have liked to have been acquainted with A Rapetto, frustrated tenor soloist of [...]

Bear delivery

Posted: September 22nd 2008 12:55. Last modified: September 22nd 2008 12:57

A friend looking for a childbirth course in one of Spain’s lonelier regions said that ghitting parto and the name of the county capital only ghot veterinary sites. I tried to replicate, and discovered that the municipal authorities can’t spell the name of their principal natural attraction, the Cantabrian brown bear, or oso parto [...]

Gimnasio full-contact

Posted: September 17th 2008 11:47. Last modified: September 17th 2008 12:07

Beware: a full-contact gym is not quite the same thing as a full-contact sauna. Stroking a karate expert and kicking a massage parlour worker may, nevertheless, have similar long-term consequences in terms of your dentistry needs and general sense of well-being.

Of prostitution in Spain

Posted: August 26th 2008 14:10. Last modified: August 26th 2008 14:03

Since both Spanish prostitution and Henry Mayhew came up yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to combine them and copy-paste from the excellent (though slow) Perseus database at Tufts the latter’s view of the former. I assume his street prostitutes who “traffic for the bare means of subsistence and submit to any and every [...]

Pajillera/tosser

Posted: August 25th 2008 16:53. Last modified: January 13th 2009 21:56

At the beginning of the last century one Professor Max-Bembo published La mala vida en Barcelona: anormalidad, miseria y vicio, which in authentic Daily Mail style vaguely enjoined the government to do something about the social and sexual degradation he profited from in such loving and lascivious detail. Here’s the section on wankworkers, copy-pasted from [...]

Catalan Venus skinned

Posted: June 16th 2008 08:06. Last modified: June 16th 2008 08:07

Check out some local talent (@Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya) over at Morbid Anatomy. (Via Tecnología Obsoleta)

On this day

Barcelona

  • July 5 1522 Solemnes rogativas para el feliz viage del rey D. Cárlos I que venia de Alemania, á donde fue para tomar posesion del imperio.
  • July 5 1844 

    I am delighted with Barcelona. It is a beautiful city, especially the new part, with a mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian character. The climate is soft and voluptuous, the heats being tempered by the sea breezes. Instead of the naked desert which surrounds Madrid, we have here, between the ...

  • July 5 1848 

    En la iglesia de la Trinidad, hoy parroquia de San Jaime, se celebra una solemne funcion en honor del
    beato Miguel de los Santos que habia pertenecido á la órden trinitaria, y cuya imágen se venera en un altar de dicha iglesia. La concurrencia no es reducida, y de las tres partes las dos...

  • July 5 1899 

    SPANISH MOBS STILL ACTIVE.; Further Disturbances at Alicante, Valencia, and Barcelona.

  • July 5 1909 

    MORE BOMBS IN BARCELONA.; One Explodes in Cafe, Another Found at Circus Wrecks a Van.

Palafrugell and thereabouts

  • Sorry, nothing doing today.

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