Catalan lit at Frankfurt

I thought Stephen Burgen had taken the Catalan nationalist shilling, but John Pawlenko links to a sensible piece by him in the Times.

“Spanish better-written in US than in Spain”

So says Alberto Gómez, Fundación del Español Urgente person. He puts it down to better quality control, while the Spanish right–of course–think it’s the result of a loss of identification with the language. (Gómez’ preachy foundation is an EFE-bot. The EFE release contains errors of orthography (“National Association of Hispanic Journalist”) and fact (the US…

Deabstracted

Euskerichia navarrophaga in an invertebrate splatter.

Roman scales

I’m really fond of Eulàlia Petit’s Barcelonetes because, unlike the overwhelming majority of distinctly underwhelming blogs here, it provides useful stuff and not house, garden and kitchen chitchat. Take, for example, this drawing of a vendor using simple Roman scales (una romana) in a Montpellier market. Close-ups of others here and here, and here‘s a…

Arachnophile shag-fest

Thanks to Margaret Marks for pointing out Mrs Tilton’s post on Jordi Moya-Laraño’s upcoming spider sex symposium. Widows, and, particularly, black widows, are, of course, the ones to watch, not the harmless tarantulas I take people to see. There’s a spider Kama Sutra over at Pharyngula for those of you with enough legs to make…

Algerian war on French

Catalan nationalism is not, of course, unique in the region in its attempts to eradicate a language that straddles borders and unites people: Première femme de lettre maghrébine élue à la prestigieuse [sic] Académie française, [Assia Djebbar] n’a eu droit, dans son pays, qu’à un bref communiqué lu à la télévision algérienne. Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, l’académicienne…

Cannibals?

On what grounds does Spanish or Catalan law forbid one to make soup out of bones in a (Peralada) cemetery, bad taste aside?