Mr Hammond is looking for sponsors for his 24-hour (church) organ marathon (with webcam) next Tuesday at St Edmund’s (that’s the king), Northwood, Middlesex. Lohengrin is somewhere after three in the morning, Italy at five, and fortunately there’s no Spanish repertoire. A month ago he was having the odd problem with Widor.

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 seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate:

People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of the family [...]

A malfunction of the public address system produces a rather pleasing strobe:

At the end of this clip, a crude example of the wagon wheel effect, caused by what the brain, fooled by the camera, takes to be a succession of evenly spaced, identical Quercus ilex:

More educational train journeys here.

The May monsoon endowed plants with a Made-In-China verisimilitude:

Knee-scratching thistles are now several metres high, and Karik and Valya could have told you all about the monstrous dragonflies:
In the spot where just a moment or two ago there had lain a tiny dragonfly, there now moved a thick, long, log-like, jointed body with a huge [...]

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, [...]

Homosexuallord Fields votes for Los Shakers from Montevideo. Scroll down the post for MP3s.

Best writing there for ages, too:
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Mr Wu has added our Weird Shit Guarantee™ to the Baldie Tours FAQs in response to a suggestion from some New Jersey clients following a conversation with a rather unusual street-organ performer. It may deter as many as it attracts, but what the hell.

The Spanish DVD is poorly produced but this error was probably planned:

George finds sanity through lunacy, monarchy through dethronement. The film is as fine in its own way as the original play was, and Nigel Hawthorne is divine. Handel was George I and II, not III, but period films normally inflict far greater musical torments.

Over at Carles Miró’s place. There’s a bit of it around in Anglocabronia, and machine-generated fakevertising sites (insert James Joyce joke here) are getting into pubic light, as in “Two inches, three, four, five and just the twirled pubic lamp shades teen of jake tickled his bulky route pocketing.” Good porn lighting must be worth [...]

The usuals are flooding us with mail calling on us to halt work in Spain next month in order to remind politicians that it is their solemn duty to provide each and every one of us with a mansion, a fast car, and a ready-rolled joint. Bet that strikes terror into the Chinese.

Over at Amigos del Circo.

The taz has been obligatory reading for the thoughtful German green-left for the last 30 years. It has no particular sympathy for airline companies or Joachim Hunold. Highlights from a piece published June 14 (via MM):
It is true [actually it isn't--but Tobias Büscher isn't the only one to make this error]: Franco prohibited regional [...]

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

Check out some local talent (@Museu d’Història de la Medicina de Catalunya) over at Morbid Anatomy. (Via Tecnología Obsoleta)

People tell me that emission reporting is routinely fiddled in Barcelona, as is monitoring by local authorities, and the true location of Spanish polluters–crucial for studying health effects–seems to be vague at best, but this (quite old) collection for GE gives us a handy way of discovering interesting stuff like, oh, the Gonvarri metal treatment [...]

Our entrance is barred by a little man with a beret and a moustache:
–You know this isn’t a bar?
–Of course!
–No problem then, I’ll get the landlady.
Later, in conversation with the landlady:
–Aren’t you worried by the EU ban on making your own vermouth?
–If this isn’t a bar then why the fuck would we be making our [...]

Over at WFMU, probably the best music station in the world. Not much from this neck of the bosque, although they’ve got Los desechables, who I didn’t know, and the vile Eléctrica Dharma, who I do know and whose only merit is in having given rise to our freestyle pakrock outfit, Eléctrica Shoarma.

Someone just sent me this job ad to illustrate the kind of shite people suffer in Barcelona. It’s a six month contract in a city centre branch of a chain of cafés. The morning shift is Mon-Sun 06:00-15:00 with alternating Sat and Sunday free, which adds up to 54 antisocial hours a week (the EU [...]

The British Sardine Racing association (popups) is “dedicated to breeding a better Sardine, revolutionising training methods, and the breeding of both pedigree fish, and Hybrids, such as the Sardine/Shark crossbreed.”
The Living Age (1919): “… eagerly bending over a long, narrow tank on the floor. They were racing sardines, taking them out of a tin [...]

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 [...]

Being Barcelona Council’s corporativist scheme to marginalise private bike ownership and bike shops:

59euros is going round chaining random stuff to lampposts in protest at the council’s policy minimising facilities for non-council bikes and then removing perfectly roadworthy examples from the streets to make way for yet more council bikes and illegally parked motorbikes. Saltada Popular [...]

Here (thanks MM). So are you with Joe or against him? Does the Guernica page header mean the author identifies Air Berlin with the Luftwaffe? I thought only racists indulged in that kind of generalisation.

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?

Some Civil War street plaques sound a dissonant note with respect to the official Popular Front “historical memory” dogma. St James’ chapel dates from the 17th century and, we are told by Sant Martí de Centelles council, “like the majority of churches in the Congost valley, was sacked and burned in 1936. Subsequently the chapel [...]

Apologies for any (continuing) inconvenience and thanks for warnings. The degree of technological sophistication involved suggests John Chappell

Spanish insurers Fiatc have a fairly grisly reputation for health provision care in general. Here’s how they deal with you once you’re dead: “When we arrived at the crematorium we were taken in through the rear entrance, down a long corridor, where we passed someone else laying in a coffin, a woman walking down the [...]

Is not a gay bar but a lingerie-and-that-kind-of-stuff shop on the street in Barcelona named after Pi i Margall, Mr Pine and Wall barley:

Villa in c/ de l’Hortal, Carmelo, Barcelona apparently dedicated to books. The garden looks good. (Miquel Hortal i Arisó is probably the richest piano tuner in the history of Barcelona, inheriting from his father the estate on which a substantial part of the Carmelo was constructed.)

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 [...]

More from Eazy. CC

Shite so cheesy it’s amazing the BBC didn’t beat PBS to it:

(Yes, head cheese, but shite cheese or cheese shite, probably not.)

No mention of heroin, but presumably it is only a matter of time before inspectors start banning players for risky rasgueado and closing all those nasty cellars lacking in natural light. Camarón might still be alive if he had been given a cubicle and regular coffee breaks.

Señor Coconut was a timely reminder to those who needed one that the best performers of Latin American music have always been Central Europeans. Here’s der Onkel Bumba as immortalised by the Comedian Harmonists:

Their life made impossible by Mr Goebbels, half the Comedians ended up in the States, but an even stranger fate awaited Dajos [...]

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 [...]

This excellent piece by Mr Butler provides background to Deutsche’s warning on Spanish mid-table banks and illustrates the eternal perils of investing in real estate in Andalusia–unless you happen to have Manuel Chaves’ mobile number. It will be ghoulishly interesting to observe whether interventionist regions fcuk up better or worse than the ones that still [...]

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) [...]

Didn’t expect this one: “Not inviting Catalan authors writing in Spanish was, in my opinion, a big error. They should have positioned the Catalan culture as an open culture with excellent contributions in our mother tongue and also in other languages like Spanish. They could have even tried to find Catalans who write in other [...]

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 [...]