Staggering up the hill at Parky Gay, as Park Güell is now called by some:

A Swedish girl once turned up for Night of the Tarantula in some fairly ambitious heels and not much else and was turned away. If things had gone wrong the headlines could have been quite lurid.

The Lenin-loving Joves Comunistes are the miniscule youth-wing of the increasingly insignificant alphabet soup of confused post-communists headed up by the bed-hopping Catalan regional interior councillor, Joan Saura, whose police force shot and almost killed the Barcelona municipal police chief last week. (”Youth” in Spanish leftist politics means anyone who wears jeans; most of them [...]

Barcelona still gets a substantial volume of stag and hen traffic. This party consisted of a dozen supermen and a dozen ladies done out in Southend style. Note to tourists: Catalonia is not Krypton.

This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools, [...]

Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (”It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948″). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he [...]

John Chappell must have stayed up in conservative, nationalist Gracia if he had a quiet night. We were with friends on Carretera de Sans, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many Spanish flags. Delicious detail: two young ladies, their prodigious assets barely concealed, beating up a violent pimp-ish type and immediately seducing some [...]

Over at Amigos del Circo.

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

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 [...]

Here’s most of the second half of an article dealing with the Air Berlin affair in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a MOR German daily:
Hunold said … that he was proud that on internal Spanish flights they managed to have at least one Spanish-speaking stewardess on board. Introducing another language would be impossible. “Am I meant to [...]

The mayor of Agón, Aragón, “sick of extreme nationalism”, on the transfer of water from the Ebro to Barcelona. The underlying point being made by him and others in this, the latest episode in the Iberian Water Wars, is actually fair enough: aware of declining water resources, Barcelona’s “eco-warrior” council planned for unsustainable growth in [...]

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 [...]

Vicente Carballido has Ctrl-C/V-ed a piece by Anna Rosa Cisquella, exec producer at theatre company Dagoll Dagom. Cisquella is frustrated by the relative lack of success of their excellent production of Boscos endins, the translation into Catalan of Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the woods. A birdie unassociated with the production tells me that the show [...]

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 [...]

Mr Clarke blogging at It’s Probably The Pox, My Son links to a typical bit of mendacity, or gross ignorance if you are feeling charitable, from John Hooper at the Guardian:
Silvio Berlusconi, who won a general election earlier this month, welcomed the latest evidence of Italy’s leap to the right by declaring: “We are the [...]

Peret’s (Catalan-language) recording of El mig amic is from Spanish telly in 1969, when, as Wikipedia continues to remind us, the “use of Catalan in the mass media was forbidden.” Such claims have decreased considerably over the last five years due solely to kalebeul’s relentless and fearless campaigning. One important defeat for the inventors of [...]

“I have in my mind the most masterly farts which, however, would be impossible to reproduce.” The farting policeman explains nevertheless how to perform the “Imperial”, the “Terminator” and the “Saturday Night”, which may or may not refer to the comparable artistic frustrations no doubt suffered by the admirable Mr Travolta.

Eurotopia–a Europe consisting of a host of regional statelets–is actually 15 years old, and was produced by historian Henk Wesseling on request of beer magnate Freddy Heineken as a systematic response to the gradual decline in the efficacy of large (multi-)nation-states. He’s not proposing new, mini-nation states as desired by the less crazy Cataloonies, and [...]

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 think that’s the subtext to the announcement of a “Reunió de l’Àrea de gais, lesbianes, bisexuals i transsexuals d’EUiA“. Other news just in: EUiA is holding a referendum on whether to introduce a republic; I and the barmaid at Bodega M have declared war on Scunthorpe. We are also addicted to Volare by Super [...]

Some were convinced by an entertaining account of early fantastic porn flicks in Barcelona.

Latin American, actually, but you could have fooled me. Apparently (via), according to Mendoza/Montaner/Llosa:
The perfect idiot’s political tutelage included, in addition to connivings and resentments, a mixture of the most varied and confusing ingredients. First, of course, there is a lot of the Marxist vulgate from his university years. In those years, various introductory-level Marxist [...]

I’m curious as to the relationship–if any–between Manuel Girona i Agrafel, who has a street on one side of Avinguda de Pedralbes, and “Jordi Girona”, whose street on the other side of Av de P takes up more or less where Manuel Girona leaves off. Also as to how Jorge Girona Salgado managed to keep [...]

Provided by the Junta de Andalucía in collaboration with Vodafone. Don’t forget your glasses, and enjoy the raffle, presumably to be held in the rest break between the Introduction and the Practice sections:

The English Wikipedia says that the history of Andalusia ended with the Muslims, which seems like fair comment. The Spanish version says that [...]

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 [...]

History recalls Wolfie Smith as the British incarnation. March mare’s nest words for Jordi Buch Oliver: sciamachy, galimathias, amphigouri.
Mr Butler forwards some fine election propaganda. Just in case you wondered, sain is not homophonic with the English sane.
Another Spanish election contender has introduced the barbarisms brekindans, crusaito, maikelllason, robocoo in his campaign video:

Those in the [...]

Here.

Blurb for show we went to by mistake yesterday at L’Antic Teatre:
The creation of the spectacle “Madamas Butterflys” takes as a point of item the Puccini’s opera, but not to recreate it but to penetrate into the behaviors that they lead to a spiritual death and its posterior renaissance. ” Madamas Butterflys ” it wants [...]

So does this mean they’ve ruled out coalitions with the “moderate” nationalists after the elections? Or are they convinced they’re going to lose/get an absolute majority, so it doesn’t matter anyway? Or is it just Sirera farting around?

This of course is to be taken in jest. As is this.

The famous “Kiss of death” memorial sculpture in Poble Nou cemetery, photo by the excellent izarbeltza, regularly visited on one of these Barcelona walks:

A more earthy interpretation, from a Chinese shop, also in Barcelona:

14/12, Octavi Martí 1950s gossipwank in El País: “Pero hay quienes aseguran, sin embargo, que [Rachida Dati] es una de las ministras más cercanas [a Sarkozy] y a ninguno de los dos les importa que se note.”
18/12, more gossipwank in El País, this time from one JM Martí Font: “El presidente francés Nicolas Sarkozy, de [...]

Wikipedia suggests that H’Angus the Monkey (cartoon) may have been voted mayor first time by local gamblers attracted by the high odds against him. Stuart Drummond failed to honour his “free bananas” pledge, but was re-elected.
On this walk.

What Catalan imperialists forget: all their dialects are simply dodgy Limousin, and all the territories they claim (Valencia, the Blearies, the gypsy quarter of Perpignan, several hamlets in Albania) are actually part of Greater Occitania. Quite what this adds to GNP is unclear, but ain’t it fun!

Sergi Belbel’s A la Toscana, last night, first night at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, of which Mr Belbel is the boss. It was well staged, the music was well done, and the actors are the ones who get all the work on the nacional circuit, and none the worse for that. But, like the [...]

Village bullfighting is far more exciting and beautiful than the formalised crap on offer in big rings like Barcelona’s Monumental, but if the photo above gives some idea of the upside, the downside involves stuff like dwarf bullfighters cutting fillets off animals as they race past because they’re too short to plunge the sword in [...]

It turns out that an occasional commenter here has a blog of his own, From Catalonia to Caledonia, in which, from a Catalan nationalist perspective, he whinges about the Spanish, the English, ungrateful immigrants and stuff. However, his family turns out to contain the odd cockatoo cuckoo too:
My parents are just another example of this. [...]

It’s been done before, but here’s soundman, producer, director Luis Jimenez (if he really was any of these, and not a mere video-ripper) in footage of Maria La Sabina:

At stake in this terrible new conflict is nothing less than the question of whether the name of the place where the oranges come from is to be spelt Valéncia or València in standard Valencian, the former being the variant proposed by Àngel (that accent worries me) Calpe and other speakers of standard Valencian, while [...]

Solbes is going to fund his promised tax cuts (keeps the centre happy) by whacking up duties on alcohol and tobacco (fodder for the bulgy-eyed health fundamentalists), so what better way to stop him than by supporting a liberal constitutionalist called Bouza, and the hell with pronunciation and coherence.