Lisa Spangenberg posted a while back on the recently publicised find of two 2,300-year-old bog bodies at Clonycavan and Croghan near Dublin. The BBC says of Clonycavan man that he had been using a type of Iron Age hair gel; a vegetable plant oil mixed with a resin that had probably come from south-western France…
Michael Quinion says it’s a weird word, so I guess I read weird books. Some early models had the benches raked so that everyone could see forward without standing up; accidents must have been spectacular. Spaniards travelled in char-á-bancs, as well as char-á-banes and charabáns (see porlan), and Cuba may have had the odd chalabán.…
Maxime calls it an anaphoneme. Pig Latin is more complex, but voice confidentiality tool Babble appears to be anaphonemic: Babble is a desktop device that connects to the telephone and sends the user’s voice out in multiplied and “babbled” form through proprietary speakers arranged in the work area. It achieves confidentiality without distracting the user…
I’m not sure if presidentmaragall.cat was such a smart choice of domain, with voters apparently keen to kick out the idiots and reelect the thieves. (The blog link seems to have stopped working. This can’t be because the system doesn’t let him post when he’s drunk, because, as we know, he doesn’t have a problem.)
El santuario no se rinde, on at 10 at the Filmoteca. Released in 1949, apparently it has the besieged Guardia Civils sing fandangos while they wait for the red notary to desert the French International Brigades and die honourably. The big question: will it be worse than Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, seen the other week?
Just in case you thought Sephardic morality tales were all doom and gloom and putrid canines, here’s one in which true love triumphs over promiscuity, dodgy geology and a thoroughly nasty little weasel: A girl fell into a pit while on the way to her father’s house. A young man appeared in the mouth of…