Nicked

Barcepundit has caught Julio Valdeón Blanco in El Mundo plagiarising Julie Bosman in the NY Times. Julio’s narrative style is characterised by his brilliant use of language, unless it was he who wrote his Wikipedia profile. (PS Whatever happened to Rafael Ramos? Nothing, of course!)

Walking Kennedy to Manhattan

I’m not a big fan of his writing, but this is cool. Once somewhere similar I used to walk to work to burn off beer and pizza reserves and ended up going cross-country, cross ditch and thru hedge, to avoid car-bound colleagues who would stop and ask if I was OK.

Tent

Thomas Wright’s 1857 Dictionary of obsolete and provincial English says it is an inferior alicant wine, and used as a general term for all Spanish reds (ie from tinto), which seems somewhat at odds with his quote from Ward’s diary (16×2): “I drank tent with Mr. Hartman. It is a very sweet and a luscious…

Catalonia is in South America

Excellent news that the Catalan skating federation has become a member of the South American body. Maybe they’ll fuck off on the same boat as the nation of Breogan.

Bad losers

Amusing that Stanley Payne believes that “the Left has had a super-legitimacy complex, as if it had the right to govern… In this way the Spanish Left does not accept the fact that it might lose, it does not accept any adversaries.” I had understood that since the 2004 elections this belief was the property…

American communists unimpressed by Albacete nightlife

From a piece by Cecil Eby on the not particularly lovely time had by the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in the Civil War: In their time off, the recruits prowled the city; they sampled the local conac [sic], said to have been blended from equal parts of rancid olive oil and low-octane gasoline; and they bought…

Gypsies providing protection services to police station in El Prat de Llobregat

An amusing and completely credible post from Avui. Meanwhile Tío Lele has confirmed via a spokesman that he is completely happy with this, the final version of his corporate website. Apparently its brutal emptiness is a metaphor for the intangible aspects of making do without the brand. It would have been nice to include at…