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,…
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.)
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…
I’m looking at setting up a pornohop group and found http://www.milkandcookies.com while looking for an MP3 of that classic, I wanna fuck you in the ass. Unfortunately the link doesn’t work. I originally had the song on a compilation of filthy hiphop given to me by some grubby French person, which may have been purged…
Not that surprising to see a banner for the “moderate” Basque nationalists (“non-nationalists forfeit the right to live”) on the homepage of the American Nazi party (http://nazi.org/). (Via Órdago @ Criterio)
From Ibn ‘AbdÅ«n’s rulebook for Seville market, translated by Bernard Lewis: “Truffles should not be sold around the mosque, for this is a delicacy of the dissolute.” (Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources, ed Olivia R Constable) There’s no reason to believe this ties in with the prohibition on the use of…