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:

Quite a lot of the Barcelona mapping at OpenStreetMap.org is already more detailed and reliable than some commercial products I’ve seen, although I briefly thought Plaça dels Angels had been mapped by skaters. Whatever happened to the UPC Barcelona mapping party?

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

We say we’re anti-nuclear and then buy electricity from the French; we say we care about water conservation while doing everything possible to make Barcelona unsustainable; but if we’re going to keep on moaning about the fuel consumption of the unspeakable Yankees, at least we could end eco-Barcelona’s facking absurd ban on hanging washing to […]

Nice story here about underpaid author Thomas Kohnstamm, who wrote his Lonely planet guide without going to Columbia. (Or did he go there and have to deal coke to survive? LD is characteristically confused.)
Guidebooks are so superficial, and information online so plentiful, that there’s actually no reason now why they shouldn’t be written from […]

Some walkers want to have a look round a ruined factory, so conversation must be made with the security guard. He is truncheoning around with a muscular, aggressive, sleek-haired pup and a peaceful older bitch–Heinz 57 varieties with some dominant sheepdog:
–Good morning, that’s a fine-looking pup you’ve got there. He’s going to be a monster […]

German sausages commonly arouse Spanish bar owners to orthographical orgasm, but this is perhaps the most beautiful, and at first sight most puzzling spelling of Frankfurt in the peninsula:

No time to inquire her ancestry of the lady at this magnificent tapas bar in the Creueta del Coll park, Barcelona, but one suspects the Dread Hand […]

They don’t screw around with it like the brand marketeers do. Fact #6 from a good post by Ryan Opaz helps us understand why a sizeable proportion of new Spanish wine is toxic piss: “Oak aged wines that come in under 10euros/dollars/pounds are 9.9 times out of ten flavored with chips/oak slats/oak tea bags. ‘Aged […]

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 […]

For rural tourism + magical & mysterious garden project in the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve of Babia, summer home of the kings of León. Brief brainstorm: The León King, Clanging gardens of Babia (garden features mobiles with bottles/bits of metal), The banging gardens of Babia (but erotic gardens are so C20th), Flower of Babel, er… Spanish […]

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.)

I don’t normally do births, marriages and such, but Iñaki was rather special. I knew him from Saravillo, and a nicer person you could not meet. (Update)

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)

This example of hostelries unable to spell their own name is rather interesting because of the two signs Bar Morrisson is clearly older than Bar Morryssom. Does this mark a decline in Spanish literacy–they used to be able to spell it–or are they merely trying to please various orthographical markets? (Background: Spanish speakers find it […]

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.

The long, narrow bar connects the folksy-chaotic gypsy street on one side of the block with the folksy-chaotic payo shopping street on the other. People walk through it from one side to the other without greeting the hick Pakistani tenant or any of his clients. Not that he cares in the least: he is off […]

We’ve been outed by a couple of publications, so here’s the why/where/when for any readers of this blog who want to come along:
La Hermandad “Pippi Kortkjol” invita a amigos, compañeros, y luchadores de anteriores y actuales jornadas a participar en la Romería Tradicional de La Primera Sueca, que este año se realizará el día sábado […]

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

Driving lesson:

Tom has been having the standard problems you get when you photograph the police in a country suffering from separatist and religious terrorism. My maddest such encounter recently: I took a family group into the (public) ground floor of the Barcelona council offices on Pl Bonsuccés to look at the gegants. No problem, but when […]

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?

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 […]

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

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:

Apparently there is a multi-ethnic casa de barrets (hat-house, from the number hanging there) at the top of the John Lennon Musical Garden–there hasn’t been any music there since people used to pop outside the city walls to have a crap:

Here’s the pricelist:

Argentines: 80€
Blacks: 30/60€
Catalans: 50€
Romanians: 30€
Columbians: ?
Ecuadorians: 25€
Pigs, bitches, cocksuckers, whores in general, etc: […]

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 […]

This falls into the same category as the revelation by Arenys de Mar’s thriving community of dope-fiends historians that the three kings were all black. Dunno where that leaves trite lyrics like Siempre que pintas iglesias/pintas angelitos bellos/pero nunca te acordaste/de pintar un ángel negro. (On this walk. Critical discussion of inocentadas here.)

Graffiti art outside the nursery of the Coves d’en Cimany (Cimany’s Caves) primary school on one of the variants of this walk. Sendys, who I take to be the author, says that his friend Zoen said, “Man, it’s like a meringue smeared with sugar.” I seem to have lost the accompanying photo of the work […]

TRANQIL·LITAT → TRANQUIL·LITAT, actually TRANQUILITAT. I suspect the Italians. “What’s this, then? ‘Romanes Eunt Domus’? ‘People called Romanes they go the house’?“

I suspect their algorithm is rather crude, and the seasons are rather vague along the Barcelona coast, but these are meant to emerge in spring (typically late January here), not late November. “The pine processionary caterpillar is a pest whose northward spread in France is being fostered by climate change. INRA researchers in Orleans are […]

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.

None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician:

Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark:

All on this walk.

The other day, on this walk, an elderly Englishman from G. Speaking with an Andalusian accent, he claimed to be one of a group of Brits who, following the abortive Algiers putsch (aka putsch des généraux) against De Gaulle in 1961, fled the Marseilles barracks of the French Légion étrangère and crossed the Pyrenees to […]

This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just […]