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

At Giseno, Lago di Como.

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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? [...]

It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of [...]

Some old photos over at the NOAA library, some new ones here. Not much of that any more. Farmed tuna doesn’t sound particularly attractive. I suppose we could always keep one in the bath.

A popular photography course, copied from a neighbourhood magazine produced by Alejandro Pérez, an enterprising Nou Barris estate agent, encountered on this walk:

I imagine the Bayeux Tapestry was planned in similar fashion.

Code-swapping, rather than Gibraltar-Andalusian. This week’s instalment comments on the stateless national soap opera, maritime conflicts and confusions with Spain.

“The price for getting to Spain on a canoe has gone down. It used to cost almost £1000, but in 2006 went down to £450. Now it is possible to buy a passage for £350. It must be the only thing in Senegal which has gone down in price. A loaf of bread has gone [...]