Berlintendenzen

This is the kind of site that drives me freaking crazy. Beat the people at Biografica.org and ElUltimoCafe.com with iron rods, deinstall Flash from their machines, and sentence them to 10 years hard labour doing stuff like, er, saying where and when the exhibition is. Jesus wept.

Postage stamp scam

Bitter tears from the greedy idiots who bought–or thought they’d bought–unregulated investments–stamps–in the expectation of becoming fabulously rich instantly. And a big hand for the media who, with unaccustomed taste and tact, are seeking to profit from any distress by setting up email, as opposed to stamp-on-envelope, help facilities.

Mock Welsh

Benjamin Zimmer links to a paper by Jane H Hill on Mock Spanish (with references to Jocular Yiddish, and others). I wonder how much of this is applicable to the experience of Welsh immigrants to Renaissance London, with a context that included repressive cultural legislation and the use of caricatural Welsh English (eg devoiced initial…

Signor No

I suspect Ian Fleming knew (Noel Coward, allegedly: “Dear Ian, the answer to Dr No is no, no, no, no!”) the stereotypical Signor No in Thomas Dekker’s The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622-ish):

Who’s plagiarising whom?

There are remarkable similarities between the styleguides of the Guardian and of the University of Kent. Check eg “a or an before h?”, “abbreviations”, “accents”.

Forward to the past

One does like the direction taken by the gaze being used to flag the referendum on whether individual rights were really such a good idea after all.

Really dumb French email tax proposal

French conservative MEP Alain Lamassoure wants the budget-strapped EU to tax sms and email: For email, the rate could be as little as €0.00001. “This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income.” Ironport’s data suggests that global email volume for 2006 will be in excess…

Another bandolero ballad

Two Latino kids in the train singing while a third filmed: aunque digan que soy un bandolero donde voy le doy gracias a dios por hoy estar donde estoy y voy a seguir con mi tumbao y con mi ojos colorao con mis gatos activao ustedes to me lo han dao Google a line to…

Cup of light and gall

Here’s an unchecked and unpolished translation of something from 1955 by Manuel Altolaguirre: