Here’s the real-life flipside to Valley of the wolves, Iraq: a Turkish military court has released the phenomenally brave gay consciencious objector Mehmet Tarhan. An excellent piece by Bernard Bouwman in Dutch in the NRC describes how our man decided after 9/11 that this fight was not his in any sense and–traitor!–refused to serve when…
Life is skittles, life is beer, and, where possible, life is adultery. There’s a lovely bit in Enrique Jardiel Poncela’s But … were there ever eleven thousand virgins? where he says that amor is Spanish for two people eating stew together. Resistance is futile, my dear, particularly with the roses up in the Cervantes gardens…
A semi-literate, a verbose nitwit, from Writer’s Block. Romance language speakers are nothing like as innovative or as welcoming of innovation as the Dutch.
The hash-crazed killer etymology we all know and love is, according to Nouvelle Langue Française (via Langue sauce piquante), a nonsense, invented in 1809 by a dilettante orientalist, Silvestre de Sacy. We should, instead, be looking to the Arabic, assas, guard.
I don’t know whether they’ll be good for anything else, but I do hope there’s a piano lying around somewhere in the Veena Vadini School at Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh.
Apart from reliving medieval massacres, there are various perfectly sensible reasons why one might want to thwack the ground in the spring. Mark Liberman has found a worm grunting festival which makes me wonder whether the underlying purpose might not be to wake up the worms, without whom stuff wouldn’t grow. (Worms are like eyeballs:…
Having a gunwoman riding pillion on the scooter seems a good idea, rather like female coxes in boat racing. One can imagine few worse distractions from one’s enduring preoccupation with road safety than having some big sweaty guy fiddling with his gun behind one’s back.
One would almost suppose from nationalist eulogies that Aragón came from paragon. In fact it is a corruption of paraguas, umbrella, which, placed upside-down, clearly resembles the hydroelectric dams which the region so cherishes. There is a river Paragua in Venezuela, and in the City pressure is growing to rename that stately stream that with…