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.)

Unnerved by the publicity this year for La Romería de la Primera Sueca/The Pilgrimage of the First Swedish Totty, the committee decided to undertake a dry run dress rehearsal the day before. During this expedition the focus shifted from quality to quantity, with the unfortunate result that the entire committee found itself incapable of performing […]

Carnival as personal hygiene challenge:

Whirling brooms sweep bits of newspaper into a vacuum zone under the truck, whence they are pumped to the bin:

Driving lesson:

All is well and good in the house of Huaira.net and other quackshops in Barcelona in general and Gracia in particular, where Latins have rhythm, Africans have tribes and, of course, Yankeelandia has racists. This Brit admits to a tweak of vergüenza ajena.

Pilates Reformer sounds interesting: an obscure religion in which the biblical figure […]

The Catalan government has announced that it is setting up special schools for immigrants and other nignogs in response to the concerns of Catalan-speaking parents, who can’t see the point of enforcing Catalan in schools since the policy (a) has little positive effect on those not inclined to use it, and (b) by including couldn’t-care-less […]

I love taking tourists to the massive Chinese distribution centres in towns around Barcelona (check ChinaCity.es if you need help understanding the future of Spanish manufacturing), which sell wholesale to all comers with roughly 50€ in their pocket and reasonably impressive tax documentation. Here are some mannequins from San Adrián, People’s Republic of China:

The assumption […]

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?

“Carry on my wayward son,” snapped on the beach in San Adrián del Besós. Check the club blog. I don’t know who authored the lyrics.

Two South Asian gents photographing each other on the shore just short of Badalona. The younger man wore “traditional” baggy trousers, the older even more traditional “Manchesters”.

The other day I did a libertarian Raval tour with a particularly dangerous Californian sociologist, and we got onto Orwell’s apparent incapacity to see the most recent civil war as anything but a class conflict betrayed. This despite ethnic-based stuff like the vicious mini-civil war between Catalan fascists associated with Estat Català and self-described communist […]

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 […]

It hasn’t rained very much in Barcelona for quite a long time. You can see the filth awaiting this Renfe train as it passes the Fecsa power station heading south over the Besós.

Found whilst burning a pile of flyers. Maybe Soulside will tell us if this was a conscious tribute to the rock-dotted “n” in “This is Spinal Tap”.

In a ruined house on one of the variants of this walk.