library books and cds: top 10 loans

These 3rd quarter 2003 charts are for municipal libraries in Barcelona province and are the result of running a reformatter on a page belonging to the library service. One of the interesting features is the suggestion that kids are reading Catalan while they go through the Catalan-language education system and that they shift into Castilian…

shaggy copper story

Mayank Jain, Madhya Pradesh state police superintendent, is apparently going round giving colleagues with a moustache 65c and telling everyone else that men with what look like two rats disappearing into their nasal cavity get taken more seriously (cf Gol Maal). What about the hypothesis that men with an exaggerated sense of self-importance tend to…

what planet's he on?

From a BBC article re Channel 4’s reality TV show, Shattered: [O]n leaving the show, contestant Craig North said: “It was like torture being deprived of sleep. It’s not every day you try to spend 180 hours without any sleep.” I hereby accuse Mr North of a being a little green man from Pluto, where…

site changes

Just a warning that the site may be even more chaotic over the next couple of days. This is because I’ve taken a deep breath and decided to do stuff like kick out virtually all non-data tables in favour of CSS2-based layouts (= quicker site + more display/media options) and switch to UTF-8 (= more…

Smoking

“A creamy dessert and espresso? Puff, puff.”

rae: internet here to stay

This is absolutely revolutionary: la Real Academia Española, the Spanish version of l’Académie Française, is going to include internet in its new dictionary. It was felt that such a move would have been premature when the previous revision was made in 2001.

Sugarcandy excluded from judicial combat

De batalla, a legal document published somewhere around here between 1251 and 1255, prescribes the conditions by which litigants must agree to abide before they start amputating: I, such-and-such, swear that that with which I have challenged so-and-so is true, and that I will defend it [?: menar], and on the field I will neither…

Strangest disclaimer ever

Here. However, even the Lord is not proof against turning off Javascript in your browser preferences.