Edward Fennell writes: “Looking ahead to the height of summer, I must commend to sunseekers a place at the specialist course that the City Law School is to run in Barcelona… Those who successfully complete the programme will be awarded a certificate of achievement. Those who fail to complete will earn a suntan (cum laude) […]

When I’m in Barcelona we often go and have a Sunday lunchtime beer on a bar terrace near Park Güell, ethnic Andalusian with scatterings of La Mancha and the Maghreb. The other day there was a new guy, well-dressed, which is uncommon here, and reading El país, which is even less usual. I’ve never heard […]

And here’s a fine slash-and-burn assault on the show trial in a Barcelona court of some dirty bloody foreigners. Perhaps the most extraordinary wrongdoing in the whole affair is that over a number of years the police, which is to say the mayor, tolerated a squat run by a psychotic whose raves kept a densely […]

This is the anarchist serial killer who, according to a good series of articles by Josep Maria Sòria in La Vanguardia in 2003,

in April 1936 shot dead Miquel Badia. (To be fair, Badia had it coming, as he himself acknowledged: failed regicide, fascist bootboy and strikebreaker for “our caudillo” Francesc Macià, head of security under […]

The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now searchable to 1913. Apart from anything else they are an interesting source of information re the misfortunes of London’s Spanish population, from the refugees from Fernando VII to the anarchist trials in the 1890s. The following testimony to the traditional linguistic handicap of the Iberian tribes was […]

Brief for Barcelona council
Eduardo Chillida sold us a “sculpture” called In praise of water/Elogi de l’aigua/Elogio del agua. In fact it is clearly nothing of the kind. It is a poorly-built orange-peel hydraulic grab, of the type used in quarrying. That explains why he had it put in the old quarry at Creueta del Coll. […]

Antonio Gascón Ricao:
Es de sobras conocido que una de las habilidades más comunes de las brujas consiste en clavar agujas o cortar con unas tijeras un corazón, el hígado o los riñones de un animal, y así, el daño causado en dichos órganos animales se puede reproducir de igual forma en la persona a la […]

Or, the advantages of belonging to a tribe under Spain’s current electoral system:

Nice photo all the same:

[
Source.
Absurd quote last night: “I’m happy Zapatero’s won, he’s good looking, isn’t he! Now let’s see if he can get rid of all these homosexuals this time round.” There’s one vote the PP missed.
Favourite campaign poster: eco-commie Joan “I […]

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 […]

We may take people to drink rum and smoke cigars and weep softly to sentimental tropical music, but we don’t actually go to Cuba. Honest. Not yet. (Thanks, RF)

Ferran Mascarell said a couple of months back that
Frankfurt perseguia tres objectius: millorar la presència de la literatura catalana en el món, entendre el paper fonamental de l’edició catalana amb els seus cinc segles d’història al darrere i ensenyar al món l’existència d’una cultura forta, plena i integral. El primer objectiu suposo que ha funcionat, […]

Does anyone happen to know where murderers were done away with at that stage? Some kind of reference would be most helpful.

A short story “El lobo de las sierras” published in The new monthly magazine in 1851 evokes a typical day in the life of a British railway engineer on the Catalan coast (the Mataro-Barcelona line opened in 1848):
It was enough to have disquieted a man of stouter nerves than Tom, who, torn, stupid and intoxicated […]

The Catalan government continues to claim that public use of Catalan was prohibited during the dictatorship, but everyone sensible now agrees that this was not so, and that publishing in Catalan–which is what we are interested in today–was never banned.
Xavi Caballé today posted several lists estimating numbers of publications in Catalan (where?) for some […]

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.

From David Miliband’s speech in Oxford yesterday: “Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s former prime minister, once characterised ‘Asian values’ as ‘a certain attitude towards life which raises the interest of the community above that of the individual.’” Welcome to Catalonia, mate.

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 […]

A revealing note from Fran Harper’s Spanish phrasebook (1963, “text by Joan I de Corvera”):
If you stay in a hotel or private boarding house which has no all-night porter, and return after 10.30 p.m. in winter, or 11 p.m. in summer, the outer door will be opened by the “Sereno,” who is a kind of […]

“Neighbours and neighbouresses, this man injured a woman at knifepoint with the intention of raping her. We don’t want rapists in this neighbourhood [Gracia, Barcelona] or anywhere.” What am I meant to do if I meet him? Kneecap him?

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 […]

Mal aparcado posts photos of absurd and illegal parking. There are often so many cars and scooters parked on the pavements in Barcelona that the only place left to walk is the road. Barcelona shots include a nice one of three Mosso-mobiles illegally parked nose-to-tail to go snacking in a bar. Anecdote: The other day […]

From George Ticknor’s superb History of Spanish literature
… a Gothic remnant fled from the Moors into the Alpine Asturias, carrying with them race, name, creed, language, and country—scotched but not killed. In that rocky school, and amid storms and war, the infant Spanish language—eldest child and heir to the Latin—was slowly brought up; seven […]

Most southern European theorising re that poorly defined construct, Anglosaxonia, is corny racism dressed up as sociology or socialism or whatever. This, however, from one of my favourite reads, is amusing, if somewhat flawed:
Lampedusa aroused in me the suspicion that the only country in which law and order are, pregonament, synonymous with civilisation and democracy […]

Walking down the escalator at Fontana metro, I pass a undistinguished-looking middle-aged woman just as she skilfully inserts her hand into the bag of the girl standing, unaware, on the step below her. I grip her arm and say, Gotcha. Oh no, she says, it’s my daughter, but you’re right to do it: there are […]

Sin mirarlo de cerca compro un candado de combinación @ 9,65€ en Ferretería Pablos (dueño Domingo Pablos), Provença 504, 08025 Barcelona, NIF 07734406N. Al salir de la tienda veo que el paquete está cerrado con celo, y al sacar el candado descubro que ya ha sido utilizado sin notar la nueva combinación. Vuelvo inmediatamente a […]

Just out of interest, I emailed an advertiser on Loquo.com similar to this one. He has replied:
Thanks for your email and it is my gladness to hearing from you.I am Gandy […],the owner of the house you are making enquiry of.Actually I resided in the house with my family,such as my wife and my only […]

SQ is onto the mysterious case of RalphAnderson1987@yahoo.com, who is landlord of absolutely identical “funished” flats situated in Athens, Barcelona, Brussels, London, Paris, and Mexico City. I wonder from the style whether this particular conman is not Nigerian.

P tells of an interesting upcoming case in N in southern Albacete. The Forestry Commission planted trees on substantial areas of private land in the vicinity without asking permission and now wants to sue landowners for the value of the lumber. The latter submit that in 12 years none of the trees has grown above […]

A young Latino with a moderately loud blaster gets on at Sant Andreu. I’m trying to talk to people, so I’m grateful when a Latino security guard comes through the carriage just after Torre de Baró. He walks over to the young guy, taps him on the shoulder, motions him to turn UP the sound, […]

I’ve always wondered where Spanish judges, particularly local ones, find justification for their habit of ignoring judicial precedent and ruling whatever the hell they feel like. Having read Azorín’s Los pueblos (1904) yesterday evening, I think I’m getting closer.
It contains the story of Don Alonso, a rural judge in Ciudad Real, who is presented […]

Back in September 2004 the Catalan regional police, keen to capture anti-terrorism responsibilities from their federal colleagues, carried out a spectacular raid in Barcelona in which a dozen Pakistanis were arrested and accused of planning al-Qaeda-type attacks on a couple of small towers and the municipal aquarium.
Evidence for this was provided by the suspects’ […]

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 […]

Guirilandia has translated one of the most inappropriate flyers ever.

Of no interest, except to Christian socialists, who may wonder if Mr Jesus was behind the distribution of supplies to strikers:
OROTAVA, September 17 1934. (By telegraph.)- The Orotava Valley agricultural organisation continues the general strike begun August 31 past without an accord having been feasible thus far. The civil governor has kept the organisation’s offices […]

If you believe that Brussels is more than happy to see powerful member states neutralised by internal division–as is increasingly Spain’s case–then it becomes easier to understand the promotion by official EU “news” agency Eurolang of a French electoral lobby devoted to obtaining official status for the country’s smaller languages. Like all European initiatives of […]

Sez Florica from Pitesti:
You cannot pretend you are a real witch if you cannot help a businessman get the European Union funds he wants. For example, only the other day I had a young businessman who came to me with his papers applying for European funds. I spread the cards on his documents, said my […]

Being a naive progressive, my opposition to the illegal policy of compulsory Catalan language immersion has always been based on appeals to the old liberal idea that we should be free to use whichever language we choose, with the odd reference to “rights” enshrined in international conventions and publicised via absurd junkets like UNESCO’s International […]

Re this post at Transblawg: nugatorio is most rare in Spanish, but here’s some Ramón López Velarde (via Corde; poetry and bio):
Se me destina, en la casona, la sala de la derecha. Fantasmas, fantasmas, fantasmas. A las diez de la noche, logro escaparme. En un cielo turquí, el relámpago flagela edredones de nube. La ciudad […]

Why the curious reluctance (n = 0 at post time) to give the pillagers of the Napoli their correct name? The Spanish word is raquero, which the DRAE says comes from raque, which it describes as the “act of gathering objects lost on the coasts through shipwreck or cargo spillage.” Etymology suggested is Gothic rakan, […]

Fernando Savater suggests that, since the Basque nationalists always say they want a peace process like the Northern Irish one, surely the Madrid truce bomb means it’s time to suspend autonomous government, which is what the Brits do every time the parties in Ulster relapse into “hey, but fratricide is just so much easier” mode.