Hooded seal born on Asturian beach

Some lovely pictures here of the baby Cystophora cristata, the first ever to be born in the wild in these parts, say the experts. <ritualmoan>Most of the Spanish press get the beast’s Spanish name wrong, and none of them include the Latin. This latter failing is customary and is a real bummer when you start…

Marsh-drowned treasures

Nick Lloyd writes that The legend of “El bruel“, which refers to a strange mournful bellow that echoed over the lakes, is another reminder of the once vast marshes. The story goes that a wicked merchant, instead of using his wealth to help the people of Castelló during a winter of great hardship and hunger,…

Liberty and freedom: US cultural imports

Philip Resnik is not convinced that there was any “tradition of valuing other cultures as successive waves of immigrants settled in the United States”: Yup, a great tradition, exemplified so nicely by our nation’s coining the term “liberty sandwich” to replace “hamburger” during World War I … and exemplified more recently by all those good…

Hell and The Guardian

With a high proportion of Guardianistas seemingly convinced by the thesis of that notorious pre-Ockhamite, Mr Moore, that things are better seen “as if in the continuous story of a divinity who spent his time reading and devising the Weekly Puzzle Magazine” (Eco, Travels), it is interesting to note that The Guardian might (almost, kind…