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.

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.

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.

Scratch a libertarian and you’ll discover a totalitarian, so keep scratching.

Influence of fat content on palatability of roast beef.

Nearsightedness is increasing, and there aren’t many other reasonable explanations.

Every 9th Canarian nationalist councillor has a problem, and the left looks to be in worse trouble than the right nationally.

If you believe crap like the stat in this post we’ll have you certified.

How to break Ponzi schemes in the form of moronic blog prizes while still having a bit of fun.

Figures from the International Sleep Products Association show the economy is hitting the mattress industry pretty hard, so where are smart people keeping their money now that deaky little hiding place in the hedge is gone?

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 [...]

Check out the excellent Mr Butler on how our “socialist” government is handing over, more or less for free, a substantial stake in a nominally Spanish energy business to a Russian oil business with allegedly major mafia participation in order to save a big construction company and hence rescue the domestic financial sector from overt [...]

Seven years on and Spanish barmen still haven’t learned to love those damn eros ueros:

Perhaps the shame this induces will send Trichet cap in hand to Threadneedle Street to apply to the Old Lady for admission. Perhaps not.
(Thanks to El Ciruco, who is holding out for more than a share in Google Ads)

Ah, he was a party man! David says that Africa stops in Murcia. It’s all relative, I guess.

In my mail this morning: someone calling himself Miguel Yasuki Hirota is giving a talk on complementary currencies for sustainable development at 19:30 on the 15th at Argentona 11. Gugel reveals that “Miguel” is a fan of the author of The natural economic order, of whom almost everyone’s favourite (since last month, anyway) liberal fascist [...]

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 [...]

He claimed to be travelling around Britain and submitted his travel expenses based on fares listed in a British railway guide. A slight difficulty was that he did not understand the pre-decimal system of currency used in Britain, expressed in pounds, shillings and pence. He was unable to make sense of the British monetary system, [...]

The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20 [...]

Mr. T. was struck with the number of lunaticks confined in the several provinces of Spain:

Response from Sales to one Peter Harvey re the new release: “We at google use our own tools and have been using this new interface for a while now and I have not experienced any dire loss of functionality with it. However, we do have requests for more sorting functionalities – by name, by file [...]