Month: June 2005

Is Michael Moore a resurrected Saracen monster?

European acceptance of Michael Moore’s new anti-Americanism has been greatly assisted by the loving detail with which he depicts the country he has invented, bursting with gun- and God-happy fatties and ruled over by a Semitic mafia. Here, from El Semanario Curioso, Histórico, Erudito, Comercial, Público y Económico, El Blasón de Cataluña (1842; cited in…

Anti-Catalanism

Antoni’s going to look at anti-Catalanism, which should be worth a read. The Wikipedia anti-Americanism entry is good, with quotes from Frederick II’s court philosopher, Cornelius de Pauw (“degenerate or monstrous … the weakest European could crush them with ease”), Kant (a “half-degenerated sub-race”) and Samuel Johnson (“I am willing to love all mankind, except…

Standard Dutch

Via Onze Taal: “For years Martin van Acht (39) from Eindhoven thought that the only Dutch in existence was Brabant dialect. What a surprise he got when at secondary school he suddenly had to learn how to talk General Civilised Dutch.” I once joined a local band to learn Dutch and it was only when…

Irak/Irac/Iraq

There’s an interesting comment by Antoni to a piece in which he mysteriously comes to the conclusion that an article dealing with an eventual British withdrawal from Iraq is somehow good news for the anti-war mob. In his comment he says that the non-standard Catalan spelling “Irac” (“Irak” is what you’ll normally see) is taken…

Dead lawn cures (commercial break)

Catalonia is following Huesca and heading towards imposing hosepipe bans, and rising consumer water consumption means there’s a lot more of this on the way. However if you’re smart your garden won’t end up looking like a Saudi golf course when the council turns off the tap. A sustainable planting strategy–there are good ground-cover alternatives…

Singing tonight

We are on at el Mercat de les Flors at around 1am, so do come along and make some noise. Over the past couple of years we’ve grown from a fairly messy group with a highly conventional repertoire into a bunch of iconoclasts singing weird shit. True to this new egalibertarian spirit, the workers have…

100 days

Many Americans think that the 100 days business began with FDR, while the French think that Villepin stole it off Napoleon (and many wish him a similar fate). I don’t know who was first, but (useless information starts here): A certain cardinal Miçer Napoleón was granted 100 days (and one year: damn) partial indulgence in…

The Hitchens roadshow

It is rumoured that, following this shindig, a small British border town is about to change its name to Hey!-on-Why?

More Brussels

Here‘s another random example of why Europe doesn’t work: ICT policy consisting of a chunk of liberalisation initiatives (great, if it weren’t a sure bet that they’ll be stripped out or frustrated by the usual culprits) and large lumps of pork. (The documentation is, characteristically, available in two pain-in-the-posterior formats, .doc and .pdf, instead of…