I was sitting peacefully on a bench yesterday when an Italian architect came and sat beside me. (I knew he was a architect, because all the Italians here are architects. I don’t know why.) He asked me where the nearest supermarket was, but I knew this was just what chessplayers refer to as the Berlin…
“Saleh al-Hami – who, like many former guerrillas who fought in Afghanistan, has a long black beard and a plastic leg – married Mr. Zarqawi’s younger sister.”
I obviously don’t subscribe to this kind of over-familiar nonsense, but here anyway is Dickens in Household words (via Google Print) in 1856: There have not been wanting theorists who have recognised in the apparently constant opposition of the north and south a kind of natural law, by which both are destined to be regulated,…
There’s a terrible piece by James Sturcke in the Guardian today on the statute of autonomy. It repeats various stale myths about Barça having been a focus of anti-Francoism (links: debunking of football results, piece on recently demonstrated connections between the Barça board and the Spanish ultra-right) and gets its statute facts badly wrong. Some…
This is an absolutely phenomenal bike photo, and I haven’t got the faintest who it’s by. (My front page displays photos from a Flickr feed using a WP plugin. Until now I thought I preferred the sheep.)
Amando de Miguel and others who spend days on end with the flag wrapped round their heads are convinced it is Spain. English books in Google paint a different picture, however. Here are some very rough results based on various strings, which take no account of the not hugely different meanings attributed to “nation” &…
If you make a mistake in Spanish, you just say: Hey, dude, don’t oppress me and my national-historic surreality, that’s a Catalanism / Asturianism / Malagueñism / whatever. If you make a mistake in Catalan, however, they cut your balls off.
Apparently this is the dictator doing a Kurt Schwitters parody: Unfortunately there’s no sound on this machine – Pyrenean Telecentro. (Thankyou Shanghai L)
OK, it was a mixture of bismuth powder with small quantities of vaseline, but what was it meant to do (late C19th) and what was its English name? (Lots of products at the end of the C19th were made by mixing powders with petroleum jelly (eg coal dust to make mascara). It might be unsafe…
Moving house, so orders may take longer until mid-February - mail me first if in doubt. Shop deliveries free on foot in Leeds LS1-8 & LS13. Dismiss