Bilingual blogs

Sheesh! Someone called Luistxo has invented a complicated spec–read and shiver!–with which you have to comply in order to have a proper bilingual blog. Kaleboel has dropped its forked-tongue strategy, having discovered that people get much more excited when you are rude about them in English rather than their own obscure dialect. But that, of…

People stopping bombs

Maybe the British have had more practice than the Spanish, but while the Metropolitan Police and MI5 (“keep garden areas free from dense shrubbery“) public information campaigns are very professional, here I haven’t seen anything. Does the Spanish state really have such a low opinion of its citizens’ abilities?

Half eel, half snake, all mad

Just about the only politicians who fear for the nation and for the national religion/myth and language as much as the French are the Malaysians. A couple of days back, Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Rais Yatim said that Malaysians were destroying Bahasa Melayu by using it in a rojak manner, mixing it up with…

Cocaine: long sentence coming up

This excerpt from a court statement made on 1928/1/11 is taken from Paco Villar’s Historia y Leyenda del Barrio Chino (1997): On the night of the 13th to the 14th of April, 1927, by virtue of information held by the police implicating the individuals Rafael “Little Madrid” García Serra and Mario “Dove” Guallart García in…