Catalan colonialism

At a recent match Barça unveiled a map of what the local ethnic supremacists call “The Catalan Countries”. The president of the Valencian region is not happy at Catalan nationalists’ desire to colonise other allegedly Catalan-speaking zones, compares his situation with Czechoslovakia before the Anschluss, and says that “Catalan fascists” have less following down his…

Stuttering Spaniards

The Spanish parliament recently decided that stutterers could no longer be turned away by public employers. Dutch commenters at FOK! think that thousands will now die as stutterers take over air traffic control and the police, while Blonchi hopes that the Spanish lisp will finally be abolished.

The Queen of Iznatoraf

A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive…