Xenophobic atavism in the 1640 Reapers Revolt.

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

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

Public morality on the train to Vilafranca.

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

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

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (excerpt) is his novelised idealisation of Napoleonic nationalist totalitarianism: if not exactly a New Jerusalem, then certainly a New Paris, built around a New Seine, designed by its dictator, the Icar. This book and its hype led hundreds of families, mainly French, principally artesans (sez James Chastain) to doom and [...]