Since my reader in the northern hemisphere is spending all his time hanging around in a beach bar, hoping someone will talk to him, I’m going to post the occasional bit of new-to-me nonsense from down south until things cool down again in September. I think there’s no question that we’re all going to end…
[link] and no one can remember who stuffed her in there in the first place. That’s a different girl from Spike Jones’ Brownie with the light blue jeans, who was as sweet as liquorice beans, in case you’d forgotten. Nor did the Spice Girls sing, “The race is on to get out on the bottle,”…
Turks care about 5 times more about the living conditions of their fellow Europeans than the Spanish, says this chart, more freebies here. Someone who takes this stuff at face value has got to be pretty damn stupid. (The survey sponsor is the University of Tilburg (UvT), which used to be called the Catholic University…
Zapatero is biding his time, is the premonitory drift of Quarrell betweene the Dutch & English by Anon (via Polly Curtis@Guardian): The Belgick Frogge, out of the bogge, with Brittish mouse doth strive: The Iberian Kite meane while by slight, surprizeth both alive. While for their shares, of Indian wares, English & Dutch doe brawle;…
The Guardian: I never said we should end the CAP now or renegotiate it overnight. Le Monde: Je n’ai jamais dit que je voulais changer la PAC maintenant ou la renégocier en une nuit
I suspect Amando de Miguel’s “se deliveran groserías” comes from Alfredo Ochoa’s “se deliveran grocerías” and that it’s an invention designed to discredit the EU’s future sole official language, Spanglish. I’m not going to believe that a Dominican corner store in NYC would offer to deliver insults until someone shows me a storefront or flyer…
This and the huge and prosperous French population in SE England just go to confirm the notion that Britain is where the French go to work, while France decays gradually into a gigantic agricultural theme park dotted with wildlife reserves dedicated to obscurantist and ageing political dogmatists. Spain, on the other hand…
I’ve been on planet Mars, writing some arrangements and checking out the deeper side of big band theory, so I’ve only just discovered that the head of the conservative Partido Popular in Orense, Galicia, is a keen trombonist. Xosé Luis Baltar recently suggested to voters that Zapatero’s lot might try to steal the Galician elections…
Dr Weevil has noticed that Espasa-Calpe has published a collection of shorts by William Sidney Porter, misspelling his pen name. I thought at first that they’d Oirish-ised it for marketing reasons which I cannot conceive, but they’re just plain stupid. (Do writers whose first name begins with “o” avoid initialising it to prevent this kind…