This is cool: BebaManno reads the Guardian, which means I don’t have to, and I get to learn Italian at the same time. (I see Italian as a kind of easy back door into Provençal.) BM’s previous post links to the Mandarin section of Corriere della Sera. I am not sure whether this is aimed…
And no one took a blind bit of notice. Check Sandmonkey. Takes a while to crank up a mob… (Meanwhile, the Romans are reported to be about to invade again unless we ban this. The druids are unhappy, too, and they know where my house lives.)
I fear commissar Franco Frattini is not thinking of protecting radical anythingarianism when he proposes introducing self-censorship in Europe. Franco (that man gets everywhere!) has taken this new-old approach to quite an extraordinary degree on his personal site. Dear Boris, Mr Frattini is from the Italian right, friends of freedom indeed…
In Amsterdam Dutch the term boterbrief, “butter-letter”, is used for a marriage licence. In English a bread-and-butter letter is written to thank one’s ex-host (or -spouse, presumably) for that which one has consumed. The former has its origins in the Latin literae butyricae, a permit issued by the church enabling consumption of meat and dairy…
I was cycling to a barrel organ meeting last night when I passed a group of Moroccans, one of whom threw something at me while another shouted “Nigger!” If I’d been slightly more awake, I’d have done a bit of ironic chromatic inversion on Blake.
Here’s a Sefardic tale, originally from Meam Loez, and included in Pascual Pascual Recuero’s Antología de cuentos sefardíes: A holy man and his scholars are out walking when they pass a dead dog that smells terrible. His scholars say to him: –Man, get a whiff of that! He replies: –Ah, but look how white its…
It has been suggested that I post a Danish flag on this page. Unfortunately I don’t do flags, but this page is already pretty red-and-white and there’s a decapitated me floating top-right to demonstrate my sympathies. Some have succumbed, however.