Barclays blaze

Why is written music featured on birthday cards and in ads always gibberish? Don’t Barclays International care that the musically literate think them a bunch of peasants?

New Orleans drumming

It doesn’t seem to show on Amazon, and it has little to do with Spain, but I’d like briefly to recommend most highly Antoon Aukes’ Second Line. 100 Years of New Orleans Drumming (the website is also his). Antoon is amongst other things a tapdancer, but don’t let that put you off.

Spanish Galway

Someone has been trying recently & kindly to hammer into my thick skull the nature and depth of early Irish ties with Iberia. Here’s a bleeding chunk from a piece called The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port in a recently cited James Joyce anthology (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings): The…

Trouble on the Trans-Saharan line

Were Zapatero to read the Bible as thoroughly as we Carpathian Independents, he’d be in a better position to understand the significance of the first photo-album of his glorious Alliance of Civilisations: the crowds sent to die in a desert in connivance with Morocco, the stigmata on the hands of those who make it over…

UN-net

So if Libya gets to chair the human rights commission, will China call the shots on the internet?

Lawyers and birds

I know we’re not meant to read books using CORDE, but we do, and we enjoy it muchly, so we do. Here’s a bit from Diálogo argentino de la lengua by Avelino Herrero Mayor, published first in 1954 with 50 gorgeously anachronistic dialogues teaching the art of talking and writing propane, and then again in…

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…