More stags soon

I’ll publish some photos soon of a virtually unknown mediaeval mural of an infernal animal pageant, during which I’ll be sticking my head again into après moi, le déluge. These guys seem to waste even more time on the net than I do. I hope they’re getting paid for it.

Consonant migration

In connection with the La horda business, I’m just reading around a bit. One think I’m interested in is the migration of /r/ in some Spanish speech, so that for example pobre > probe. I’d like to know why it happens (is it along the lines of the al-oud > lute shift, or is it…

Improved language toolkit

Now here. It’s a grouped search interface to some of the collections I often use, done by transferring the value in the visible search box to the correct, invisible parameter using Javascript. Hitting return doesn’t work at the moment for some reason, and since those damn French bureaucrats string queries together with semi-colons instead of…

What Theo van Gogh really said

There’s a deserved attack here by Franco Alemán on a lousy article by Carmen Montón in La Vanguardia, the paper for people who like to think they know about Foreignistan. She says that “[Theo]Van Gogh had exceeded the most extreme limits of provocation known in civilised countries.” This is not the view of the man…

Magic fire

Strange historical trivia: the codename for Hitler’s programme to help Franco in the war on Spanish Bolshevism (or whatever), Feuerzauber, was used again for the Mogadishu hijack rescue which formed part of the Federal Republic’s war on the Red Army Fraction‘s leftist terror.