Public auctions of wrecks in Barcelona, Pontevedra and Algeciras, with thoughts on how to reduce blogging competition.

A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.

“Discontented devil of a blackamoor, why canst thou not be satisfied to live here?” “Avast there; all our gold and diamonds can’t procure us here the bright sunshine and joyous people, nor the rich fruits and wine, of my native clime.”

Or rather, how my grandfather seems to have been named after a minor railway station.

Half roasted Frenchmen, some o’er Gratings Broil’d/Do mix with Spaniards in the Sea parboil’d;

Blasco Ibáñez says that actually we have always thought “at all hours of the Mediterranean rim.”

A Catalan children’s song remembered by Francesc Candel; early rave culture on Central America’s eastern seaboard.

Our itinerary, and that of Polo Polo on his Viaje a España.

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 [...]