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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Follow a donkey and you will find your village. Follow a goat and you will fall off a cliff.

Spot is a dog. (Dear agent, I also do other barnyard animals, as well as goldfinches, linnets and horny pussycats.)

The crazy European regulation making it illegal to leave carcasses in the high mountains has led to reports of starving vultures attacking and killing large live stock in several parts of Spain. Now one of Nick’s wolfmen has sent news of several hundred griffon vultures from the Pyrenees having sought alimentary asylum in Holland, in […]

This video shows her when she knows she’s being watched:

Move your monitor back and lie on your desk with your face touching the screen and your feet left to view the next fragment. It shows her still getting used to the Bulgarian military hip camera used in its capture:

Nothing much there, but check this:

“Ah! behaviourism!” […]

I’m different, says the former:

The death of the latter:
How camp! Did I mention that lunch in Bar Manolete in Mogón is excellent?

The sheep and goats above have just arrived back in Plan from low pastures to spend the summer in the mountains, rather like schoolchildren coming back from a language exchange. Joaquín Costa’s Colectivismo agrario en España (1898), available in full on Corde, contains a number of accounts of communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees:
The town […]

I recently had lunch with a Huescan entrepreneur who sold his dad’s cows in the 50s to buy a car, but this is ridiculous.
[
Update: D confirms that Srecko Djordjevic is not an anagram of for example “jive jerks cod cord” and points out that he has form:

A man chopped his own penis off with a […]

Bit of fratricidal jollity from Ángel Ganivet, Idearium español (1897): “Confronted with the spiritual ruin of Spain we must put a stone where our heart is and throw a million Spaniards to the wolves if we all do not wish to be thrown to the swine.” No national stereotypes, please. Just trying to think of […]

In another bar in the village-over-the-hill aforementioned:
Lettuce in fearsome red wine vinegar
Little bony bits of baby goat wrapped in stomach in a mushroom sauce
Intestines of baby goat stuffed with rice and lungs, kidneys, liver etc
Roasted baby goat head
Pudding made of milk from the mothers of new-born calves
Red wine, coffee, tea and whisky
I think 15 goats […]

Those tree-hung disks aren’t really for scaring off the deer, silly. Take one home with you and, when you’ve had all you can bear of Hits of Hits or Dirty Dancing II, or when you figure that installing BitWare for Windows wasn’t that smart anyway, take it back and hang it on the correct tree.

I rather like the idea of going up the M6 one day and finding an elephant where Manchester used to be.

Zazie thinks it’s OK to waste food. I’m still figuring how to cook this:

My head might have videoed it but my stomach definitely would not. Enjoy your lunch!

Off the other evening to see Chelsea-Liverpool on a big screen in a village bar in another valley. Coming down from the pass on an old walled stone track, I turn a corner and there’s a flock of goats nibbling the hedges. In the middle of the path, the cloth-capped ruddy-faced goatherd in classic caganero […]

The EU says that you have to take animal carcasses found in the high mountains down to the bottom, truck them half-way across Spain to an abattoir to make sure they’re really dead, and then, to stop the vultures starving to death, you are allowed to bring them all the way back and leave them […]

Apparently the four corners of a square reel used in this Huesca village in hemp yarn production represent four horses bound for France. I wonder which horses these were: those that awaited the Duke of Calabria, when he sought with three others to flee the court of King Ferdinand of Aragon, or others? (If folksy […]

Check out the extraordinary selection of animal-love videos on sale at Guirilandia’s local Chinese supermarket in Barcelona.

Transhumance is in the air, so here’s a smutty song from a commie from Zaragoza:
Los pastores se van, se van,
Los pastores lloran, lloran:
¡ay de mí, pobre pastora!
¿con quién follarás tú ahora?
Rejigged:
The shepherds are going, they’re going again,
The shepherds are weeping, they’re wailing this strain:
“Alas, alack, oh Phyllis my dear,
Who will you fuck now you’re in […]

Sorry, but this is not big news where I am this week, and the upstairs/downstairs arrangement is normal too. I used to play in a band with someone who lived with his elderly parents and a dozen pigs and cows in a one-storey Saxon loshoes in a German border swamp. From the rich sounds that […]

… where the little boys are playing Monster Truck Trials and searching for “pictures of sheep farms” and “sheep in abundance” and such. Tralala!

Some people think that Marc’s headgear is sheepish, others that it is Phrygian. One significant advantage is that, upside-down, it makes an excellent beard. Elsewhere, Jill Bollman writes:
To make my son’s sheep costume, I used a pair of cream-colored long underwear and glued bunched pillow batting all over it. Next, I bought a cream-colored hat […]

I think I can show that the term guiri is traceable to Semitic roots, and I will do at some stage, but I’d just like to add a little bit of very vaguely circumstantial evidence to an alternative hypothesis discussed here. At the time I turned over in bed and muttered:
So was the term guiri […]

Nick Lloyd notes that “The spread of mad cows disease into Spain means that, following EU rules, dead cows, sheep and goats can no longer be left in the countryside, and must be destroyed.” Fortunately for Brussels this is not all that remains of a sheep but one of Spain’s rarest creatures, the Aragonese albino […]

I have been busy for a while, and this is what I have been doing.

The news (via Normblog) that the Iranian justice system has strung up a mentally incapable and unrepresented 16-year old girl for getting to know a boy shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has heard the stories of those who escaped the revolution or the various officially sanctioned torture and murder […]

Here’s a photo of Gypsy Eric in his first proper job after attempting to cycle to the Ends of the Earth with two pigs, Space and Time, in his panniers. He was quite frequently stoned during the trip, and children also threw rocks at him, partly on account of his clothing but principally because of […]

I’m pretty sure this picture is of the boar-pig hybrids mentioned the other day:

GhanaWeb, one of the world’s leading portals, reports that

Says the FT:

How fine is the sound of the military mock-Arabic word for a pregnant camel!

Not a single person wanted to come on the Republican Picnic today, so I went a-wandering in a very quiet valley in the pre-littoral range. There I met a 75-year old shepherd, out for the day with a couple of dozen young ewes and goats, who explained to me a number of very interesting things, […]

Czech this surreal photo from Basra of a Celtic fan from East Kilbride. More Iraq moblogs here (via Kottke).

If you want to save a beefmobile from a horrible death, the best way is to keep bullrings open. These are the numbers:

Localisation - like most developments in publishing - has benefited greatly from the needs of the porn industry. “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse,” said Charles V of Spain, without, alas, going into detail. I assume, however, that his Italian will not have been the […]

In the Middle Ages anyone of any commercial talent (and his/her mum) had visions and stored some human bones in the new toilet chapel extension of the pig shed nave of the temple next to that handy spring holy source on the hillside. Here, extracted by moderately cunning device from Amazon, is the relevant part of the ToC of Eileen Gardiner’s (not completely exhaustive) Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook: