A widely-ranging post by Iggy on Blogalization analyses the bizarre request by epinions to a hapless user to rewrite “unhelpful” Spanish-language posts in English. I hope that I will have moved on before someone tells me to redo all of this in Mandarin.
Although Spanish playing fields are not the 2m-deep clay solution of their English cousins, I’m still a bit surprised that Zapatero thinks he’s going to win votes with an education policy featuring less religion and more physical education. A reduction in religion has got to be welcome in a country in which religious education still…
Not only (as Margaret Marks notes) has the BBC started using trucker instead of lorry-driver or patient with chronic back pain and a dietary disorder: the Americanism has been the preferred usage in Holland for years. Henk Wijngaard’s 1978 hit, Met De Vlam In De Pijp, is probably the best-known Dutch truckliedje. Try singing this…
Looking for something else, I just found this grammar, lexicon and corpus of Syldavian, the invented language used in the Tintin adventures King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Destination Moon and The Calculus Affair. Since I read Hergé before I learnt Dutch, and since, while old Syldavian uses the Roman alphabet, the contemporary script is Cyrillic, I’d always…
Andrew Motion says that important manuscripts held in Britain shouldn’t be sold abroad. Since they’re currently only available to a very small group of people anyway, this seems pretty daft to me. I say digitalise them, publish them on the web, and use revenues from the sale of the originals to finance improvements in education,…
I just don’t get it. While one bunch of nutters has finally managed to destroy Catalunya’s last Osborne bull for being too Spanish, another bunch of crazies is going round putting up things that look pretty damn Gallic to me: OK, now here’s a challenge: discuss this solely with reference to the aesthetic merits of…
Orwell biographer DJ Taylor wants to dig up the common of Southwold, a quiet Suffolk seaside resort, in order to find a time capsule that Orwell allegedly buried there 70 years ago. If found, I suspect that it will not contain a bucket and spade.
While garden show presenters who can’t tell the difference between cannabis and cabbage would probably do better sticking to alcohol, I’m intrigued to note that healthcare scammers, All Nutritional Supplements, are advertising bags of Jamaican bat guano, apparently for human use. (Yes, it’ll also do wonders for your cabbages, although the Scots may want to…
NRC Handelsblad, Holland’s most respected rag, says that the French commission that advocated banning the headscarf was strongly influenced by what it was told during a fact-finding trip to Holland in November. The two out of three members of the delegation contacted by the paper said they were shocked by the situation and in particular…
… demands an additional credit to UK Criminal Justice Weblog for the previous post. One reaches a stage, however, when attributions begin to resemble those grim ap-ap-ap recitations of Welsh genealogy.