An anti-intellectual French horticultural fable.

With an excerpt from a plea for more state funding by the Bostonian Western Rail-road, in which we are given to understand that snow is not necessarily a bad thing.

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.

Desultory bar philosophising on the socio-economic function of Secret Santa.

Launch of Arcadi Espada news-site.

Is Mr Barbecue Bunny’s sardonic grin pre- or post-mortem?

Its teachers are raging butterflies, says a 16th century music publishing entrepreneur.

Proud English cock, limp Latin hen: the binary opposition of English and Spanish fowls as a metaphor for the contrast between growing British military might and declining Spanish power.

Excerpts from Juan Goytisolo and Ramón Fernández Palmeral, with an epitaph from George Orwell.

Joan Txàpal strikes at the heart of dorkness.

From an off-the-record report of a departmental seminar somewhere in the UK.

Artful Mr Kokon notes that the number of items in Goya’s Black Paintings is the same as the number of one of the buses used in the campaign–14–, that the number of items in a series of morbid wood engravings by Hans Holbein the Younger is the same as the number of the other–41–, and [...]

More traditional building for Colin Davies:
Real stone is expensive and makes it hard to plug holes and to plaster, so in Spain@Disney you stick (pre)machined chunks or carpet tile-type stuff onto the concrete prefab with glue.
Chorus: Cladding imitates but also improves on reality.

As the evenings draw in, the Arenys de Mar sensimilla syndicate has taken time off from the plantation to post another shambling Gran Armada-wreck of nationalist historical revisionism. (It’s dated 2006, but this is the first time it’s turned up in my reader, so…) As is customary, our scenario is back-to-the-future: a massive 15th century [...]

Barcelona students are occupying universities and fighting with police in a titanic life and death struggle against the prostitution of universities to Capital. Meanwhile Google UK news produces only five ghits for “Bologna Declaration“, three of which are in English, one of which concerns the accord signed in 1999 and designed to make it easier [...]

As we go into recession the governments of two mini-“nations”, one with a state, the other with considerable autonomy, both worse afflicted by the downturn than might reasonably have been expected 20 years ago, have, within days of one another, rediscovered vaguely Biblical and distinctly 1930s strategies to disguise their failures of economic management: blame [...]

People in Barcelona have started relating the apparently low mortality rate among Chinese residents to identity theft in the way they did in London a few years back, but we’re never going to get back to the good old days before forensic tools like DNA testing, finger printing and ubiquitous photography.
There’s an entertaining story [...]

In my mail this morning: someone calling himself Miguel Yasuki Hirota is giving a talk on complementary currencies for sustainable development at 19:30 on the 15th at Argentona 11. Gugel reveals that “Miguel” is a fan of the author of The natural economic order, of whom almost everyone’s favourite (since last month, anyway) liberal fascist [...]

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 [...]

So printed off a couple of this silhouette. Isaac Meyer Marks, Fears, phobias, and rituals: “Wild turkeys of any age try to escape from anything appearing above them in dark silhouette against a lighter background and moving with a certain angular speed relative to the size of the object. Similar escape reactions occur from a [...]