“Nazi-onanism” for “nationalism,” in a good piece by Vicente Álvarez (via Libro de Notas) on the growing intolerance and aggression of regional movements in Spain.
Last night we were singing at a function and I started needling the French alto about Trafalgar, so she hit me hard with the new “Brits only care about drinking, fucking and fighting” survey, and then we moved on to the “hey, well at least we don’t beat our wives” refrain. A few days back…
Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re…
Enjoy El Periódico’s deputy director José Sorolla getting his intellectual knickers in a twist trying to figure out how Ahmadinejad can be an ultracon and Rafsanjani a leftie when Rafsanjani is a fan of the Ultracon States of America. Someone explain multi-axis analysis to him. (Jean Véronis@Technologies du Langage notes droitisation and droitiser. Spanish goes…
The temperature is up in the 30s, so Miguel Guash via Amando de Miguel wonders why words for “night” and “eight” are similar in some Indo-European languages. Since even the derangedest of astrologers acknowledge that the notion of there being eight moon phases is culturally relative (damn, we can’t even agree on the Number of…
Here’s another daisy for my chain of Spain-goes-south posts, unlikely to be of interest to anyone at all, although the ads may amuse. Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria viewed China as an imperial basket case. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide in La geografía en 1898 (1899) explains why it was to remain so: The…
Here’s another nugget from that dark and dirty vein, Spain’s colonial adventures. It’s from Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria (The misfortunes of the motherland; 1899), in which he reflects on national destiny following the disastrous loss to the US of Cuba and the Philippines: If others’ troubles could console us, a brief examination…
Akiane’s poem no 1 (via Stefan@MemeFirst), with a couple of small changes, brings to mind a story someone else tells about when the municipal cops rushed into a building, truncheons at the ready, to arrest a notorious heroin junk, only to discover, slipping and sliding, that he’d had a little accident: I slipped on the…
Comment spam has dried up over the last couple of months (along with comments), but I do get the occasional strange message from nutters who want to correspond with me or mow my lawn or whatever. One such writes every now and again in Spanish to suggest meeting up so that she (lots of allegedlies…