Day: October 3, 2005

Dutch solution to gay marriage

This (via this) is a good story for those of you who, like me, can’t understand why marriage should be in the Spanish constitution anyway.

Language teaching strategy

This is all very well, but the only realistic strategy would involve paying immigrants for progress made rather than increasing subsidies to publishers, most of whom already seem to have quite big lunches. With the amount Maragall spends on entertainment you could bribe the whole population of Bangladesh to pass level C and still have…

Formica in Spain

… seems to have come in at the end of the 40s: Arturo heredó la taberna en 1939 y la transformó en bar dos años más tarde. En 1949 hizo una nueva reforma: puso un letrero luminoso, un armario frigorífico y seis mesas de formica: “La Montaña-Cafetería Bar”. Poco después la transformaba en banco. Es…

Sodom and Granada

Vaguely re this post, there’s a strong current of belief here that sees the Civil War as a rerun of the Reconquista, with (here we head into caricature mode) the left viewing both as the destruction of a new age of peace and love (the latter in all its many varieties) by intolerant savages, while…

Jumping immigrants

Every night Africans try to climb over the razor-wire fences into Spain’s North African colonies; some don’t make it, and are robbed, raped, murdered by Moroccan “security” forces. Real Madrid employs some phenomenally well-paid Brazilians. El País’ homepage this afternoon.

Face-fart fines

Mediaeval local legal codes, fueros, all contain passages like the following, taken from the Fuero de Bejár (1290s):

Catalan woman wins €500K on German quiz

But doesn’t dare answer the €1M all-or-nothing question (Which Nobel prize winner–Schweitzer, Röntgen, Koch or Planck–didn’t do his school-leaving exam?). I’m not much of an expert on these things, but Elisa looks completely German to me–hit the Zurück links for more views. (Via Margaret Marks, who I always imagine as being impeccably British in appearance,…