Ravalejar

Someone a while back invented a verb that they thought would guerrilla-brand Barcelona’s Raval district and managed to have a fake letter of protest published in La Retaguardia, Barcelona’s favourite sucker rag. Here it is in Googlish:

Inexorable force

If al-Zarqawi has been wounded “in the path of God”, then authorship presumably lies with the Hindu deity Juggernaut rather than US forces.

Institutionalisation of blogging in Catalan

There’s a do in a couple of weeks featuring some Catalan-language bloggers. Strangely, the list of participants doesn’t include links to their blogs, and, stranger still, one of the speakers is journalist Màrius Serra, who didn’t show any interest when bloggers caught him a-plagiarising. The local state here finances civil society to ensure that its…

Barçablaster

Unfortunately I can’t see Barcelona’s notoriously tubby and boozed-up municipal police following Rio’s lead and pouring themselves into swimming trunks in order to combat the Maghrebis who stalk and rob tourists on the beaches here, so I’m afraid we’re going to have to think of something else. It might be interesting to issue all new…

Bike paths in Barcelona

More bike news in this morning’s Periódico, which reports that council propaganda overstates the actual bike path network by 50%, and that only 14% of it is adequate, a figure which sounds plausible to me. And, as Ecologistes en Acció point out, even when a path is OK, it’s likely to be rendered unusable by…