Surely the first two stories are in reverse chronological order. More news from beyond the grave: Frank Drake plans to talk to alien civilisations in 100 years; is El Draque still after Nova Albion?

James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters Domestic and Foreign (1754):
I am now in Barcelona; but the next Week I intend to go on through your Town of Valencia to Alicant, and thence you shall be sure to hear from me farther, for I make account to winter there. The Duke of Ossuna passed by here [...]

I’ve always kind of wondered whether this is kind of tribute to blue jeans/bleu de Gênes, but I’ve never had the courage to ask, mainly because if I’m wrong they’re going to think I’m fucking crazy.

What is the connection (if any) between the symbol on this house in Sin, Huesca, and that of the Día supermarket chain?
(
Sin really does exist. Here’s the sign:

One would obviously like to live in it, at least for a while, but owners are reluctant to sell.
)

Check out these wonderful cylinder recordings at the Donald C Davidson Library at UCSB.

There’s some excellent decorative stonework in the posher parts of Barcelona’s Eixample, but the Italians are in a different league.

Re a reference@Amando de Miguel: that the expressions are interchangeable (“Capulino frotó suavemente el respaldo de una silla; acarició después el metal de un llavero, por expresa recomendación de Juana. Y sonrió.”, or here for the English) suggests that Frazer was wrong to point to iron’s novelty as the source of its taboo status. Intriguingly, [...]

Check out the excellent Guirilandia. I recently commented on the mob of thieves that awaits you at the ferry port and was accused, seriously, of racism. Tangier is just horrible, and I suspect that Mr Bowles wasn’t much nicer than his fellow residents.

Paco “El pocero”–in Wales he’d be called Jones the Drains–is Francisco Hernando, the 57-year-old illiterate building a €6B, 13,500-house development, Spain’s largest ever, in a village near Madrid, whether the mayor likes it or not, and he doesn’t. The mayor, Manuel Fuentes, is receiving police protection, and Alfredo Urdaci wants to know what happened to [...]

Also via Margaret Marks, a machine that does perfect translations in a number of European languages.

For a client I need a shared hosting solution with storable.pm installed. WebFusion/HostEurope/Pipex won’t do it. Any ideas?
(Update: thanks for a couple of suggestions, but I’ve decided to dive into PHP.)

From Kitten. There’s lots of good stuff coming out of the WordPress community, but not what quite a lot of people seem to have been requesting for a while: a functional multi-author system. At the moment WP trumpets its various user levels but no mention is made of the fact that same-level users can all [...]

Toast oven => PC. There’s loads more good stuff on GeekDIY.com.

Seriously, if I write this blog in Portuguese, will someone invite me onto Orkut? Or am I better off just heading down the Brazilian bar down the street? All these do-good schemes always end up in trouble - just check the story of rioting at the Forum over in Lorna’s Shorts.

This is interesting. Unipeak reproduces my site (your site) dynamically on theirs, as it were, turns off my ads, and turns on theirs. The site is presented as a tool to help among others the poor old Chinese, but the fact that my material ends up being cached by Google as if it were theirs [...]

For reasons that are unclear to me, the burlesque leader who ruled Dublin during carnival used to be known as Mayor of the Bull Ring. Barcelona’s Mayor Clos is so damn serious that he wants to close our bull-ring, but the chances that he’ll stop making a fool of himself the rest of the time [...]

Sez Rob (via Memepool). There’s a generation-by-generation analysis of the techniques buried somewhere around here, but it has got slightly less amusing recently: early last month I was getting up to 200/hr - not good, even if they do go straight to trash - and, though that problem has been killed, new contact emails receive [...]

Recognising an urgent need, Barcelona’s excellent Institut Français has undertaken to explain love to the Catalans (translation Googlebotted for style, steam, and speed):

John Chappell writes that “Only [Rafael Ramos] could somehow establish a comparison between a 1930s realist painter and the Iraq war.” What, Barcelona’s leading illiterate plagiarist with an original idea? John might change his mind if he checked Jonathan Jones’ Guardian article, published last week. In fact, all that Ramos (search) adds to the sum [...]

I reckon that most of the money invested by local and regional government in providing e-services, ranging from bog-standard pages for rural councils to the more ambitious attempts seen here in Barcelona, was wasted. This is because most projects served either as a means to funnel money to new media businesses set up by the [...]

There’s a guide here. Looks pretty clunky to me and dynamic generation of pages just shunts the MT rebuild issue down the row. Textpattern looks interesting in a hippy kind of way, but I may have to start sending postcards again…

Dinner’s taking a shower, so here’s a very interesting notion from Brice Dunwoodie re the next galaxy in the Googliverse:

Kaleboel figures for insignificant reasons in an academic paper by Fernando Tricas-García and Juan Julián Merelo-Guervós. The Spanish-speaking Blogosphere: Towards the Powerlaw? (PDF) introduces a spider-based tool developed by the authors, the Blogómetro, and includes the following interesting comment:

Yet another triumph for capitalism: try out show me your ass and spit at me on Burger King’s Subservient Chicken.
Via Language Log.

WiFi-SM (via wondering) sounds good:
I’ve been using WiFi-SM for one month and it’s amazing ! When somebody suffers on earth, not only I know it, but I can also feel a little bit of his/her pain. I don’t feel guilty anymore and I can enjoy life without limitation. I love WiFi-SM
Here’s the blurb:

Den mailed to point out a site run by a Barcelona taxi driver, Francisco Dugo aka Taxi Tupi, with a webcam and lots of lovely photos. How public-spirited!

Apparently the fine children’s illustrator Honor Appleton (1879-1951) was not such a good girl after all:

Here. Now all I need to do is stop the cat vomiting on the kitchen table.

This is the kind of news that must break the hearts of the beards who want to establish little, backward Islamic fiefdoms:

This is what I call a good post:

The headline figure this morning is 20%, but the survey (.doc) asks the question twice and the other answer is different. First there’s question 3:

I’m going to read you a list of apparatus and new technologies that are being used more and more frequently in Spain. Tell me, please, of each one whether you have [...]

The scan below (100K) is of the front cover of Gil de Rusena’s El Memorialista Català, cited in the previous post. All I know of the artist, “Robert”, is that he worked for Salvador Bonavia and other publishers on a number of other books, including folklore collections. Bonavia’s old shop is just down the road [...]

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 [...]

As a second-class Anglo-Saxon, I would have immediately and incorrectly assumed that the use of the word shatnes in connection with wool and linen referred to the increase in hygiene and decrease in mortality that resulted from making undergarments from the latter rather than the former (PDF).
Via LanguageHat.

I just don’t get it. While one bunch of nutters has finally managed to destroy Catalunya’s last Osborne bull for being too Spanish, another bunch of crazies is going round putting up things that look pretty damn Gallic to me:

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 [...]

Says Jon Cusack of his new child, Jon Cusack v2.0:
I wrote in the birth announcement e-mail stuff, like there’s a lot of features from version 1.0 with additional features from Jamie [his wife].
Fine, but someone explain to me how you put the release date back three months to enable glitch fixes.
Via Boing Boing.

Featuring Josep-Lluís Carod-Rovira, Uncle Joe Stalin and the Singh brothers from Mohali.

If CNET are so bloody clever, how come I receive their Morning Dispatch at five in the afternoon? Three concepts for further study: IP mapping, time zones, personalisation.

Tom Coates has ’shopped that top-10 spam meme, Unrelenting C*cks Destroy Innocent Pussies.