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 […]

Today in 1565 the True Cross was taken and dipped in the sea in order to assuage the great drought. Doesn’t look like that’s going to be needed this year after all. (Kalebeul’s History of Barcelona now does moveable feasts, although not quite in the way it would like. It is also unsure to do […]

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:

I don’t have time to read this story right now, but that’s what people tell me’s going on.

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?

L helped a cause.
L joined FACEBOOK EN CATALÀ!
6,121 members - $0 raised
People, get your wallets out.

Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.

Stricken by Barcelona belly, I’ve been trying out this 19th century cholera cure. It’s better with rice, but I’m still surprised more people didn’t die. (Sublimated sulphur is used by modern-day lepers, says the chemist, so that wasn’t a problem.)

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 […]

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 […]

Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania, […]

“José Lone, natural de Madrid, casado con Francisca de San Pedro, de la que tenía un niño de 7 meses, de oficio tendero en la plazuela de Santo Domingo, núm.6, faltó de su casa desde el dia 2 de Mayo á las cinco de la tarde: su madre María Riscos dijo que tenía la […]

This non-authentic version of Paquito chocolatero is by King Africa, who is, according to Wikipedia, actually kind of American, and John Major’s favourite artist to boot:

Now an authentic version from Mike Oldfield, which doesn’t involve the mass simulation of anal sex popular down south:
The next three most favourite tunes are also pasodobles, namely Viva el […]

One of the first times I played in public as a kid was at the local Polish club, and I remember trying to figure out what all these old folks were doing in this neighbourhood, amid numerous refugees from newer tyrannies in Asia and Africa and Latin America. After that it was a short conceptual […]

–Hola, buenos días, ¿tienes ex-votos?
–Yo nada de botos señor, pero la suegra se ha dejado hacer las domingas y están bastante bien.
//
Later, someone is getting on the bus driver’s nerves. So:
–¡No me toques los botones!

Não é desgraça ser pobre, there ain’t no shame in being poor, and sometimes it’s better only being able to afford one tranny hooker.

By Amália Rodrigues, who I only discovered the other day.

“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)

When I saw this first I briefly thought it was Montjuïc viewed from Maians Island, where Quixote first saw the sea. But the sun sets west, not south, and those are mountains in the background, not clouds. So it must be Italy, somewhere. Here’s the text.

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 […]

–¡Alfonso primero!
–¡Alfonso XIII!
Probably one of those time-space-specific things. Alfonso XIII strikes me as an infinitely superior as far as witless losers go, but I wasn’t there at the time.

“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.

Ta meao, pissed on, one rendering of the Generalitat’s €400,000 exercise in vanity publishing.

La Vanguardia, 2008/4/21: “Piratas somalíes secuestran un atunero vasco. El ‘Playa de Bakio’ lleva 26 tripulantes, trece africanos, ocho gallegos y cinco vascos. Anoche, una fragata española acudía desde el mar Rojo a auxiliar al barco.” Victims from north of the Mediterranean are dissimilated on the basis of their autonomous community, while victims from the […]

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 […]

I didn’t know they served frankfurters in Bocatta. Someone says it’s in Galicia. I hope no Galician bloggers are involved.

Or, as La Vanguardia has it, “El presunto parricida de su madre…“. I thought Eve had left the Garden of patriarchal vocabulary, or maybe this is just what happens when you’re paid by the word.

I humbly draw your attention to a new minisite–fear of public shame may help me get round to doing it. Meanwhile the Barcelona historical almanac continues to progress, although the timeline and feed and various other stuff need fixing.

Surreal quote in this doc on personal adoptive languages, a typically absurd Belgian scheme to avoid civil war, appropriate EU funds, and inflict a tactical defeat on the Anglo-Saxons by having the Flemish learn French and the Walloons learn Dutch, instead of just letting everyone get on with their English classes: “An Le Nouail Marlière […]

Is one of the all-time greats of popular Spanglish linguistics, so it is very much to be hoped that the NYT will again use the former after the next pirate raid off Barbary or in the Caribbean. There’s probably similar wordfun to be had in the South China Sea, but we don’t go there.

A flamencocrat says goodbye. I thought nation branding was the kind of thing undertaken only by scoundrels like Tony Blair and Andrei Zhdanov, both of whom were capable of presenting their villainy with slightly more tact.

Celestino Corbacho, our new minister of Honest Endeavour, is also rebranding himself from faceless Volkssozialist of the periphery as a new metropolitan Che Guevara. Apart from the charming blurred little tourist booklets produced by the regional Delegation in order to give him name recognition, it now turns out that he, too, fought the fascists, tooth […]

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 […]

Uliczkę znam w Barcelonie, by the great Sława Przybylska, who has no English-language Wikipedia entry, and who I first got to know during a dissolute spell in a village near Breslau, or whatever it’s called these days. I have no idea who sang the original or who wrote it–I’m guessing it wasn’t a Pole, since […]

Or something along those lines. Jerry R Craddock clears up this and a number of other confusions in his excellent inaugural Disparatorio del suroeste. (Via Jesús Rodríguez Velasco). Galdós was politer in Trafalgar, but we all know what he meant. This one will run and run.

Tom’s being more naive than necessary re the latest Woody Allen crap being in Catalan and English only. Mediapro was a creature of the Generalitat in terms of finance and the Generalitat’s TV3 in terms of personnel. It also continues to count on the formidable assistance of Generalitat’s ICF, eg in the €125M required to […]

Still showing along the Sequia Comtal in Clot, by then incorporated into Barcelona. The date is 1914, which is to say 20 years later, and just as Dreyfus was limbering up to go to war once more. I suppose the flick must have been French translated into Spanish. Incidentally, goats make excellent cinema audiences and […]

Colin Davies refers to progress in his neck of the desert. I am told that staff at a distinguished Barcelona institute of higher education, none of whom speak English, have petitioned to have Basque rather than English as the third language on their website “because we can speak Spanish to them, and what are we […]

Olympic torches on a Parisian bus reminded me of Josep Pla, smoking merrily away on oil tankers in the famous 1976 A fondo interview with Joaquín Soler Serrano:

Not having heard other recordings, I continue to wonder whether don José wasn’t playing up the accent for the occasion.