Here are the maps created by French surveyors in the face of extreme weather, demolished triangulation points (church spires had a bad time) and bloodthirsty mobs in order to calculate, with what we now know was an extraordinary degree of accuracy, the physical length of the 1791 commission’s definition of the metre as one ten…
Here. This is a variant of the famous review2 attributed to Reger, Brahms and others: “Sir, I am seated in the smallest room of my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.”
Check the absolutely gorgeous photo by Santi Cogolludo of Albert Rivera in La Paloma, The Dove, on today’s El Mundo front page. The hall opened in the 1890s as a vice den called The White Camellia but changed its name and image in 1903, taking its interior design from Paris and its new name from…
Most sad that Barcelona’s Hogar Extremeño (Extremaduran Centre) was unable to host “Yo soy aquel negrito” last Friday. The show’s title comes from a popular 1956 advertising song for the chocolate drink Cola Cao (check the 1962 cinema ad here), which has “a little negro” from “tropical Africa” singing the song as he works: Yo…
The story of the Moroccans with keys to houses in Granada is well known. La Cruz, The Cross, a Catholic periodical carried what sounds like a variant of this in 1854, claiming that Prussian Jews were about to petition the Spanish court to abolish the 1492 expulsion decree. Léon Carbonero y Sol wrote: In truth…
Pleasingly, Bable is used as a synonym for Astur-Leonese, aka Leonese etc. The name was apparently popularised by someone called Xovellanos in the C18th and taken from someone else I’ve never heard of called González Posada. Its origin is (still apparently) unknown but its use is widespread and it appears in the inevitable references to…