Nudity and the Catalan autonomous millennium

I and the cat are in no doubt that all this public nakedness is linked to the campaign for a new statute of autonomy, and that Clos or Carod or Maragall or someone is going to emerge as a contemporary Jantje van Leyden. “Who?” rises the cry from the Catalan street. Jantje van Leyden–Jan Bockelson,…

Street nudism fine, says Barcelona council

That’s what this morning’s El Periódico says. The council is promoting it along with two naturist bodies, ADDAN and ALETEIA, and there’s a pamphlet featuring a naked woman up on Montjuïc. Unfortunately for local coppers there’s not likely to be much need for them to defend the civil rights of naked girlies (not even the…

Minister Monsignor

Most of you will only have heard of Spanish socialist defence minister, José Bono, for his having called Tony Blair “a dickhead” and for his having awarded himself a gong for flying the small Spanish contingent out of Iraq and back to barracks. It would be unfair of this blog to focus on Catalan ethnofascists…

Hump

A glittering prize for the person who, on being asked to select his channel’s best 10 programmes for veteran news broadcaster John Humphrys, “sent him tapes of programmes such as Banzai, Breasts Uncupped and Nip/Tuck.” There is, however, a glaring inconsistency in his criticism of reality telly and defence of news journalism: on the one…

Hmm…

There is no sound quite as revolting as an ex-street cat on heat and with ferocious nasal congestion licking its posterior end, and the smell is not exactly Scandinavian pine either. Jimmy Rushing on his 1944 recording of Harvard blues sings I don’t keep dogs or women in my room but omits mention of pussy,…

The fire and the precipice

The following curious passage brought back memories of a quiet Tuesday several years ago: The sixty Catalans imprisoned in Adrianople, after the murder of Caesar [German adventurer, Roger de Flor, leader of the Pyrenean mercenaries known as the Almogávares], on hearing the rumour of the defeat of the young emperor [Michael Palaeologos, who had Roger…

Just chicken

Bit old-fashioned, probably still works, though the pollo doesn’t look too happy about being faxed to hungry consumers: Still on chickens, Satan’s Laundromat, an excellent phlog, notes Kennedy Fried Chicken and Kantacky Fried Chicken in Brooklyn, KyFC in the Bronx, JFK Fried Chicken in various places, and J.F. Kennedy Fried Chicken in Orange, NJ. We…

Iran’s Night of the Zionist cows

The news (via Normblog) that the Iranian justice system has strung up a mentally incapable and unrepresented 16-year old girl for getting to know a boy shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to anyone who has heard the stories of those who escaped the revolution or the various officially sanctioned torture and murder…

Pujol and the future of the race

I just don’t get why Jordi Pujol, the big man of Catalan nationalism over the past 40 years, said that “crossbreeding” (mestissatge) with immigrants would mean the end of Catalonia. My dad’s been shagging Mrs P for years, and the kids are doing fine.