I do hate to be beside the seaside, unless it’s raining.

At Giseno, Lago di Como.

Birdies that ain’t.

But will an ecclesiastical trawler turn it into cat food first?

The pros of walking to Barcelona Airport.

The cottaging zone is getting so popular they’re having to pipe the stuff in.

It’s no longer a swinging safari now the nature-lovers have got guns too.

But here are a couple of photos from the day after the great storm

Kalebeul’s investigation into Vosk and the Na’kuhl temporal conduit yields some surprising results.

Cruise companies don’t appear to regard original copy as an important differentiating factor.

Molly Greene describes the complex anarchy that existed between the collapse of the Mediterranean powers and the entry of northern fleets.

The Auken report to the European Parliament may be above to be scuppered by a conspiracy between Spain’s two principal mafias.

Depending on how the bathymetric data is rendered. Over at Ogle Earth.

Lunch topics:

Marianism and genital iconography, as in The Virgin Mary is a hairy vagina. Conclusion: this one smells of red herring–she actually belongs to the sun.
The inability of “artists” to fit a proper fanny and a proper face into the same screen. The three best known forerunners of Bob Guccione-style gynaecology, Courbet’s stilled life Origin [...]

So they’ve posted a report alleging Sir John Moore’s defeat by the weather, 200 years ago. It’s snowing a bit in Spain at the moment, but no signs of it turning into a repeat of 1829-30, when the Ebro froze, 1835-6, when eggs froze in their shells in Palencia, 1836-7, when it snowed on the [...]

I thought ETA’s man on the run had lost it when he went AWOL from a Subject Nation of an Evil Empire with generally excellent weather to a Subject Nation of an Evil Empire where it never bloody stops raining, just in time for winter. But then it started snowing across northern Spain, and even [...]

PATIO ANDALUZ, conde del asalto 120, PRESENTS SPANISH FOLKLORE if you want to see the come along BEAUTIFUL GIRL’S will sing an dance for you… slow prices. A human adboard, but no pictures of US sailors sloping off into alleys with Spanish prostitutes on the 6th Fleet’s historic visit in 1952, although Bagdad was the [...]

Ah, he was a party man! David says that Africa stops in Murcia. It’s all relative, I guess.

Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918:
Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the discovery [...]

César-Javier Palacios reports on the cyclist, shot dead by a hunter who mistook him for a boar.
When in death’s dark vale loud singing usually suffices to drive off hell’s hunters. Hunters know this too. In his romance, Count Arnaldos, hungry hawk in hand, falls prey to a sailor (love, glory or death, true or trickster? [...]