I think it’s actually a slow worm, but here’s Thomas Decker’s Honest whore anyway:
Lord Hippolito. Scarce can I read the stories on your brow,
Which age hath writ there: you look youthful still.
Orlando Friscobaldo. I eat snakes, my Lord, I eat snakes. My heart shall never have a wrinkle in it, so long as I can [...]

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 [...]

With the vaguest of references to i-shepan-im here’s Kirby’s wonderful and scientific museum in 1820:
The fecundity of the rabbit is truly astonishing ; it breeds seven times in the year, and generally produces eight young at a time ; from which it is calculated, that one pair may increase in the course of four years, [...]

“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.

Over at Manuel Trallero.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

The British Sardine Racing association (popups) is “dedicated to breeding a better Sardine, revolutionising training methods, and the breeding of both pedigree fish, and Hybrids, such as the Sardine/Shark crossbreed.”
The Living Age (1919): “… eagerly bending over a long, narrow tank on the floor. They were racing sardines, taking them out of a tin [...]

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 [...]

Is not a gay bar but a lingerie-and-that-kind-of-stuff shop on the street in Barcelona named after Pi i Margall, Mr Pine and Wall barley:

Wood ants descending rapidly en masse from a Quercus ilex on Montseny at the onset of a sharp shower:

Having spent several decades standing under trees waiting for the rain to stop, it is my firm belief that small ants do not flee from the rain as do big ones, although their level of activity [...]

George Sandford has left a fascinating comment on this post, which deals with an amusing 19th century literary-historical hoax–purported correspondence between Ferdinand the Catholic and an esoteric global selection of fellow-monarchs.
George is family of the alleged editor, Brother Antonio the Goth, and thus of the Christian clan kidnapped by the Moors when they invaded [...]

When I’m in Barcelona we often go and have a Sunday lunchtime beer on a bar terrace near Park Güell, ethnic Andalusian with scatterings of La Mancha and the Maghreb. The other day there was a new guy, well-dressed, which is uncommon here, and reading El país, which is even less usual. I’ve never heard [...]

Samir over at View from Fez says that around 100 kids die annually from scorpion bites in Morocco. They’re quite common in Spain too. Here’s one in the gardens of Can Ferrero in Barcelona’s Zona Franca district that scared the hell out of me:

This is the anarchist serial killer who, according to a good series of articles by Josep Maria Sòria in La Vanguardia in 2003,

in April 1936 shot dead Miquel Badia. (To be fair, Badia had it coming, as he himself acknowledged: failed regicide, fascist bootboy and strikebreaker for “our caudillo” Francesc Macià, head of security under [...]

Lucanus cervus (Ciervo volante) on the hills above San Juan de Plan in the Pyrenees of Huesca:

Proyecto Ciervo Volante writes:
Flight abilities seem, in principle, well developed. Fight speed reaches 6 km/h (D’Ami, 1981) but dispersal abilities are unknown. There are XIX century tales about mass movements (Darwin, 1871; Lacroix, 1968; Paulian & Baraud, 1982). [...]

San Jordi in Barcelona, and millions of females who would be perfectly happy eating hay are receiving roses from males who have problems reading a football shirt, never mind the book of 500 Catalan jokes they will get in return for their floral investment. We ecolefties disincline naturally from needlessy fucking up Lake Victoria and [...]

I didn’t know they served frankfurters in Bocatta. Someone says it’s in Galicia. I hope no Galician bloggers are involved.

Some walkers want to have a look round a ruined factory, so conversation must be made with the security guard. He is truncheoning around with a muscular, aggressive, sleek-haired pup and a peaceful older bitch–Heinz 57 varieties with some dominant sheepdog:
–Good morning, that’s a fine-looking pup you’ve got there. He’s going to be a monster [...]

When Europa played over at Sant Andreu in November, the local Four Bar Squad, which has record, unveiled a banner showing another local saint, St Martin, in wolf costume slaughtering a pig dressed as one of Europa’s following (they believe they’re tigers, not pigs, but whatever):

Sant Andreu duly murdered Europa 3-0. The return is this [...]

These bloody bears, they come over here and everything get’s changed just to suit them. Do bears shit in woods? Yes, and they’ve no right. They don’t belong here. Signed, A Dog.

(In Catalan gossos = dogs, while ossos = bears. There, that’s ruined it.)

History recalls Wolfie Smith as the British incarnation. March mare’s nest words for Jordi Buch Oliver: sciamachy, galimathias, amphigouri.
Mr Butler forwards some fine election propaganda. Just in case you wondered, sain is not homophonic with the English sane.
Another Spanish election contender has introduced the barbarisms brekindans, crusaito, maikelllason, robocoo in his campaign video:

Those in the [...]

All but one, now living in a back garden in c/ Sors, Barcelona.

Ángel Palomino, Carta abierta a una sueca (1974) lists various types of Swedish girls, whose presence on the Spanish costas in the 1960s was crucial in many Seat 600 purchase decisions: “suecas suecas, suecas inglesas, suecas francesas, suecas alemanas, incluso españolas. Que a su vez se subdividen en diversas clases: la sueca veinteañera y cimbreada, [...]

Just to the right of the dedication to Tony and Ingrid, dated 2006, are the faint remains of a similar one to Toni and Ana, dated 2004. What will 2008 bring?

Mona:

(I once met a Tangier man who claimed to own a Barbary ape called Lisa, but let’s not go there, or here either.)
Copywriters have moved on since Darwin was alleged to have said, “It’s the best, science says so and I’m not lying”:

I use the sweet version of Anis del Mono in pastry cooking. Drinking [...]

The famous “Kiss of death” memorial sculpture in Poble Nou cemetery, photo by the excellent izarbeltza, regularly visited on one of these Barcelona walks:

A more earthy interpretation, from a Chinese shop, also in Barcelona:

Two elderly ladies have just met for the first time and are sounding each other out:
A: My dog is so intelligent it stands by the door and woofs whenever it wants to go out and have a poo.
B: My cat is so intelligent it comes in at five o’clock in the morning and jumps on [...]

I suspect their algorithm is rather crude, and the seasons are rather vague along the Barcelona coast, but these are meant to emerge in spring (typically late January here), not late November. “The pine processionary caterpillar is a pest whose northward spread in France is being fostered by climate change. INRA researchers in Orleans are [...]

None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician:

Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark:

All on this walk.

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 [...]

Leoncio Urabayen (La tierra humanizada, 1949) says that the dung beetle (escarabajo pelotero) is to a hive of bees as the pyramids are to the Empire State. This is unfair:

“The American Institute of Biological Sciences reports that dung beetles save the United States cattle industry an estimated US$380 million annually through burying above-ground livestock [...]

I am building a bird table so I can catch tasty little birds with a net and fry them in bechamel for breakfast. Its leg consists sturdy spring, which will cause pigeons, goats and other creatures undesirable for this purpose to fall off before they get to the bait.

Walking down the escalator at Fontana metro, I pass a undistinguished-looking middle-aged woman just as she skilfully inserts her hand into the bag of the girl standing, unaware, on the step below her. I grip her arm and say, Gotcha. Oh no, she says, it’s my daughter, but you’re right to do it: there are [...]

On a farm wall near Olot:

I guess one of us should apologise to Maurice Sendak.

Village bullfighting is far more exciting and beautiful than the formalised crap on offer in big rings like Barcelona’s Monumental, but if the photo above gives some idea of the upside, the downside involves stuff like dwarf bullfighters cutting fillets off animals as they race past because they’re too short to plunge the sword in [...]