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 [...]

Sez our foreign correspondent of Bar Agujas d’Ouro in Estremoz, Portugal. Its radical eclecticism picknmixery suggests the architect may have mistakenly interpreted the lack of aesthetic coordination in many cathedrals and other large, old, respectable buildings as the result of a synchronic design choice rather than the typical diachronic process in which committees regret [...]

The Spanish DVD is poorly produced but this error was probably planned:

George finds sanity through lunacy, monarchy through dethronement. The film is as fine in its own way as the original play was, and Nigel Hawthorne is divine. Handel was George I and II, not III, but period films normally inflict far greater musical torments.

Over at Amigos del Circo.

Dolce vita pin-ups and spaghetti circus over at Raffaele De Ritis’ Novelties and Wonders.

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

In English:

Dubbed into Spanish:

If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has ended up [...]

Some Civil War street plaques sound a dissonant note with respect to the official Popular Front “historical memory” dogma. St James’ chapel dates from the 17th century and, we are told by Sant Martí de Centelles council, “like the majority of churches in the Congost valley, was sacked and burned in 1936. Subsequently the chapel [...]

Three South Asian-British professionals (down from four last time, one having fallen to feminine wiles in the intervening biennium) emerge blinking from the forest at the end of this walk. My God, says one looking down, is that a mosque? And then remembers seeing a photo of it during his physics degree:

The idea seems perfectly [...]

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:

Villa in c/ de l’Hortal, Carmelo, Barcelona apparently dedicated to books. The garden looks good. (Miquel Hortal i Arisó is probably the richest piano tuner in the history of Barcelona, inheriting from his father the estate on which a substantial part of the Carmelo was constructed.)

More from Eazy. CC

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 [...]

Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn’s Liberation is a French maypole scene. Here it is:

I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but I can’t remember whether this was intended to represent the liberation of France [...]

All praise to Lenox over at Spanish Shilling, who got the shot without getting his head punched. “During the second half, perhaps inspired by a herd of goats being led past by a dusty looking old shepherd and a couple of dogs, the Cabras rose to even greater efforts and by the final whistle (and [...]

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:

Montjuïc cemetery publishes a little map which, interested in historical renown, guides you past the generally terribly tedious tombs of well-known Barcelona citizens (good, bad, ugly) and thus omits the quite extraordinary artistic achievements of some of its less well-documented residents. Here is one of the finest funeral monuments, built by people who have clearly [...]

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). [...]

“Originally built in 1901, this walkway now serves as an aproach to makinodromo, the famous climbing sector of El Chorro.” (H/t to the DG)

This delectable flor del mal from Barcelona’s Poble Sec district is a daisychain from A Nun’s link to a review of a book dealing with degradation and deviancy in the same neighbourhood. New York, April 26 1926:
Ushers with tall combs and white mantillas stole back up the aisles as the house lights faded out. The [...]

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

Tom’s being more naive than necessary re the latest Woody Allen crap being in Catalan and English only. Mediapro was a creature of the Generalitat in terms of finance and the Generalitat’s TV3 in terms of personnel. It also continues to count on the formidable assistance of Generalitat’s ICF, eg in the €125M required to [...]

Still showing along the Sequia Comtal in Clot, by then incorporated into Barcelona. The date is 1914, which is to say 20 years later, and just as Dreyfus was limbering up to go to war once more. I suppose the flick must have been French translated into Spanish. Incidentally, goats make excellent cinema audiences and [...]

Meet El Novio de la Muerte/Death’s Groom, back from the tomb (he wasn’t human anyway), and his angel-wolf Canute:

Hear him sing “Agua de los ríos”:

More here, including ¡how Canuto saved Death’s Groom from serpents! ¡the treasure and the skeleton’s ring! and ¡El Novio’s unfortunate relationship with the head of the bað̞a’xoθ paddleboat fleet! Extremadura has [...]

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 [...]

I was having a chat about stuff with Pete Doherty this morning, and he tells me that because of the common genetic ancestry of most of the races of the Milky Way galaxy, many species are able to interbreed with or without the help of genetic technology. In fact dogs and doves are quite similar, [...]

I ask because the chattels of the gentlemen right fore in this early nineteenth century image of the Palace of Barcelona clearly include a front-loading automatic:

(Full image on single-post page.)
Blasco de Garay, eat your heart out.

Man trapped inside elevator at Fontana metro:

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.)

The manager of this distinctly non-Bond den of one-armed banditry in c/ Hospital, Barcelona subscribes to the commonly-held opinion that illegal Spanish signs can be turned into legal Catalan ones simply by removing the last letter of each word. In his case, SALON RECREATIVO -> SALO RECREATIV:

One hopes the spelling police will take a relaxed [...]

But not in Pedralbes:

If only shots were that cheap at my local.

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

Thanks all for kind wishes. Cake under attack from fish:

Afterwards I got to go walkies, and chose one of the old junkie trails to Can Tunis, made vaguely notorious in rather different form (before they built the freaking motorway and destroyed the old port and beaches) in Juli Vallmitjana’s interesting (he helped Picasso get dirty) [...]

The window display is so abundant that it’s difficult to see inside, so it might have been the butcher himself singing this morning in the shop at Asturias 47, Gracia, Barcelona.

I imagine this bears the same relation in terms of intellectual property to Barcelona’s famous Bar Kentucky as Women’Secret does to Victoria’s Secret, but I’m not a twisted knickers expert, in public at least.

Some British pubs take their French rather literally:

Fellow hippies will know that if you stack your chips right on the day of the winter solstice and then chant a magic spell, the sun’s rays will fall in such a way as to create a shadow image of pretty much whichever megalithic construction you fancy.

(In Barcelona, just in case you wondered.)

Dead playing pheasant (gamekeeper’s grave on the N estate in what used to be called Central Southern England before Labour, inspired by Norman Tebbit’s dad’s bicycle, decided to demolish the entire north and rebuild it in Southeast England, which unfortunately turned out to be a tad small for the exercise):

Keepers’ memorials like the above are [...]

France’s finest trip over their own testicles once again, here alienating the trombone vote. Possibly.

(Mercy buckets, Dr Pete.) (Normal service to be resumed soon, so watch yer dirty mouth Manuel. Yes, you. They don’t call me Purple Boner for nothing.)