If phone companies don’t provide window stickers, Pakistani shopkeepers may have a go themselves.

OCB’s Black Thinking brand launches a startling new ambient campaign.

Where are the heaving (crowds of) drunks of yesteryear?

Stallholders in Vilafranca del Penedès are slashing prices, but don’t let greed get the better of you.

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

Figures from the International Sleep Products Association show the economy is hitting the mattress industry pretty hard, so where are smart people keeping their money now that deaky little hiding place in the hedge is gone?

I looked a while back at allegations of a Spanish media obsession with Israel and concluded that they were without basis in fact. Someone of similar political views to the reactionary squatter hooligan leader, Joan Txàpal, said to me last night that the Spanish press would be all over Bernie Madoff’s Jewishness. The numbers at [...]

Check out this good short piece by Pedro Soria-Rodriguez on how for party political ends Spanish national and regional government have ensured that DVB-T/TDT will not increase choice for consumers. This is not a direct issue for me–I only see the telly in Spain in bars (the same applies in France and the UK)–but it’s [...]

The following description of birdsong contests is taken from Josep Pla’s brilliant anecdotography of Rafael Puget, Un señor de Barcelona, and is mid- to late-19th century ():
Singing competitions
A fondness for birdsong has existed in Manlleu, Barcelona province for as far back as my memory reaches. The “Societat d’aucellistes”, the Society of Bird-Fanciers, is very old [...]

Crouched on the street with the usual placard. A granny passes:
–5 cents, for the love of God!
–Sorry, no.
–Well then let me give you a lucky gypsy kiss! (Leaps up and embraces the granny, despite her protests.)
–Oh all right then. Wait, I want to give you 20 cents.
–Thanks, I’ve already got it.
Tribes continue to be rounded [...]

Francesc Peirón and his Vanguardia editors don’t know the name of the world’s most famous stock market index. “Down Jones” is used jokingly for “Dow Jones” when the market is falling (it’s up this morning) and in suppressing the Legitimate National Aspirations of the Welsh Race (we have none).

Carlos Muñoz of the Institut Libre Marie Haps in Brussels laments (a) the decline in prestige and airtime within Spain suffered by the standard, educated, Madrilenian accent of Spanish, and (b) the lack of phonetic consistency exhibited by model speakers of the more specifically regional accents which have to a certain extent replaced it. He [...]

español
Vilafranca is a quiet country town, but the weekly market attracts an interesting range of pickpockets. Hopefully numbers will increase as the works in the main square are completed and the recession begins to bite. This lady put her hand into S’s pocket at a vegetable stall:

She works with another Latin American women with magnificent [...]

Barcelona. Shop no 1 is closed at 11:30, well within its normal opening hours. The iron street blinds are down and there’s no message posted, so I walk across town to shop no 2. Yes, no problem, pay now and we’ll confirm the delivery date in a moment. The call comes a couple of hours [...]

Man: What’s that?
Woman: A bank deposit guarantee?
Man: No, a saver?

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 [...]

Elderly client: So what’s that in pesetas then?
Barman struggles for a moment with a calculator: 601.01.
Client: Not bad.

Spelled-out evidence suggesting that Expansión, La Vanguardia and various other established Spanish newspapers’ international financial experts may actually know uck all about their subject.

Via EFDL, El Plagio Literario. Quim Monzó, Luis Racionero and Lucía Etxebarría apparently see themselves as practicians of intertextuality rather than plagiarists, but that’s surely from their perspective.
Surely virtually no Spanish readers will have read or even heard of their sources, Courrier International, Gilbert Murray and Antonio Colinas. And so, surely, virtually all Spanish [...]

Siegfried Anton den Boer/Siegfried Andre Den Boer Kramer/Anthony van den Boer/Tony Ronald/Tonny Ronald etc, born Arnhem 1941/1943/1944, permanently resident in Barcelona from 1959/1960, recording nevertheless in Holland in Dutch and German until 1963, either has the best or the worst memory in the world. Here’s his 1971 summer hit, Help!, in Spanish:

… and in English [...]