The Guardian has tracked down the British Labour Party’s deputy leader and leading pugilist, John Prescott.

The phonetic rebranding of Kaleboel.

More uses for a scissors than distinguished Viennese-Albertan dialect experts think.

Translation of the farewell poem recovered from the murderer of Theo van Gogh.

The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting […]

Reading (and trying to sing) bits of Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues over lunch, I came across the following in the 118th chorus:

Here, from Emil Helfferich (1878-1974)’s Südostasiatische Geschichten (Jever/Oldenburg, 1966), is an account of what happened to another German-speaker who made light of girlie-men:

This morning in one of Barcelona’s beach-side districts, Barceloneta, l’Agrupació Coral Humorística “El Rossinyol”, founded 1925, was singing the following ditty, accompanied by a band that in Holland would be referred to as a boerenkapel:

Sa-le_el sol por la ma-ña-na,
por la ma-ña-na sa-le_el sol.
Los bor-rachos por la tar-de,
y por la no-che_el ros-sin-yol!
I don’t know who sang […]

When people emerge from feudalism only to find themselves imprisoned once more by pyschopaths dressed as plumbers, it’s difficult to take exception to any desire they may have to change their condition and to make that change permanent. However, there is always the odd Cassandra in trousers determined to find defeat in victory. “In China […]

Waszynski’s extraordinary 1937 Dibuk still drifts into the occasional dream. Der Volf was written by another Polish Jewish artist, H Leivick at around the same time as the play on which Waszynski’s film was based. Both introduce the supernatural in order to help us understand why it is wrong to do wrong, but where Der […]

With that grace alate/
which thy stool embalms/Shelter neath thy cloak/our humble homes and farms.

John at Barcablog claims to have a cunning plan. I do not, but here is a punning clan:

No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been […]

I have been up the coast a couple of times this week (off again tomorrow) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many spring flowers. Their profusion is partly a consequence of heavy rainfall, and partly of the fires last summer that burnt away heavy shrubbery and young pine woods, clearing the ground. However, […]

The kinky Murcian waiters clique is anxious to watch rude muscles bulge and divine blood flow in Mel’s Pash and will not be making an appearance today, which means that we need not fear interruption as, for a change, we get random with some really boring stuff.

JA Millán points out that Barcelona’s Herder Editorial has gone over to print-on-demand. Given the nature of their catalogue (lots of Catholic history and theology), that’s a decision that is unlikely to make the world’s forests tremble like a Melief drinker.

Taking the view that the plain folk of Catalonia were illiterate and uncouth to a degree that would lead to ridicule in more cultured lands, Catalan language evangelists at the turn of the nineteenth century launched a barrage of self-help books. These guides taught business and social forms that will be familiar to English-speaking readers, […]

Normally I’ll read any kind of rubbish, but this has got me defeated and puzzled. It’s a collection of instructions dating from 1484 to 1576 on how to run an inquisition (there’s some Torquemada in there) that belonged to one Doctor Martín Yánez de Padilla. However, not only are there no bloodstains on the pages […]

This stuff should be subsidised, not banned, although I can’t work out whether the machines used to produce it are translators or generators. Here’s something I received this morning (URL omitted):
Our soft pensil makes sound.
Our noisy round eraser is thinking and our children beautiful spoon arrives.
A golden glasses smells at the place that any round-shaped […]

Re the Dirty Kuffar video: although the transliteration changes, radical Islam has been predicting imminent victory over us for quite a long time:
And Halid returned to the west of Azahfi, and said to them:
- Know that these kafres are disheartened.
(Anonymous, Libro de las batallas (1600))
But we aren’t, are we, because we just like getting naked! […]

Andrew Motion says that important manuscripts held in Britain shouldn’t be sold abroad. Since they’re currently only available to a very small group of people anyway, this seems pretty daft to me. I say digitalise them, publish them on the web, and use revenues from the sale of the originals to finance improvements in education, […]

There they go again, blaming the courier (via Prandial). It would never have happened in Roxboro, where peaceful co-existence is the order of the day.
In one of those coincidences that herald intestinal difficulties and a tepid spring, it turns out this week was also the last at work for the man know for inventing […]

Like a tree quick, rooted in the wind…

It may seem childish, but it did please me to discover that Doris Moreno Martínez was supervised for her thesis on the Inquisition in C16th Catalunya by one Ricardo García Cárcel. Having survived his encarcelación in these parts, Abenatar Melo escaped to Amsterdam where he wrote a verse version (1626) of the Psalms of David, […]

Through the serpent have come all evils in the world.

These 3rd quarter 2003 charts are for municipal libraries in Barcelona province and are the result of running a reformatter on a page belonging to the library service. One of the interesting features is the suggestion that kids are reading Catalan while they go through the Catalan-language education system and that they shift into Castilian […]

Once upon a time Pere Quart (Joan Oliver to his friends) composed some often wickedly funny verses that were published with drawings by Xavier Nogués under the title Bestiari in Barcelona in 1937. His treatise on the camel and the dromedary is reminiscient of one by Ogden Nash that I blogged into melodious Catalan a couple of months back and I prefer his zebra:

un problema
Del MediaDailyNews:
[Un] estudi … [ha revelat] que els espectadors [americans] han d’aguantar un increïble 52 minuts de basura promocional durant un bloc típic de tres hores de prime time en les quatre cadenes principals. Aquesta xifra és 8% més que en 2000 i 36% més que en 1991… La durada mitja dels blocs […]

Transblawg posts re the adaptation of the language used in British novels for the American market and vice versa. This subject also occasionally exercises John of Iberian Notes (2003/10/17, for example), who thinks that it’s time we Brits started caring again about the eccentric pastimes of folk who were so very rude to us only […]

The joy of the poor is brief,
My friends, how soon it’s past!
Just when everything’s going so well,
The donkey breathes its last.

These two energetic logos are on one of my favourite day-off wanders: from the Plaça d’Espanya through the old backstreets of working class Sants up to Collblanc, then a slalom down through the drab poverty of l’Hospitalet, finishing up with wander down the ceramic-ridden old road back to the Plaça d’Espanya.
The first logo adorns […]

Some of the recent obituaries of super-poet Willem Wilmink (1936-2003) managed to avoid mentioning his writings in Twents, despite the fact that this part of his work - he also translated, wrote and rewrote extensively in Dutch - enjoyed a large following in Twente.
Let’s start by locating the two languages. Linguists classify Dutch and Twents […]

Duitse ondernemers in Barcelona in de vijftiende eeuw.

Jaume wordt me even te veel vandaag. Waarom? Stress, omdat ik geen drukker weet te vinden hier die (a) een computer bezit, en (b) tijd heeft om visitekaartjes te leveren dit millenium. Een authentieke drukkerij in mijn buurt is eigenlijk of een volkse sigarenrookclub of een industrieel archeologische wunderkammer, maar de meeste weten een aardige […]