Stereotyping at Puticlub [ie Brothel] de Luxe

… where, it seems, very fat men with beards and skirts are DJs, very thin men with beards and skirts are gogos, and semi-wrapped Egyptian mummies with not very much hair at all are barmen. Since it seems increasingly unlikely that I will ever be a daddy, maybe it’s time to ditch the dress and…

When’s La Vanguardia going to fire Rafael Ramos?

I read the guy briefly a couple of years ago while I was learning Spanish and asked La Vanguaria’s ombudsman and a couple of execs what they proposed to do about a London correspondent who was functionally illiterate in English and not averse to invention and plagiarism. Nothing, came the whisper from the cave. Now…

Online fatwa service

Here. A fatwa is, of course, legal guidance of any nature, so calm down and pay more attention, youse at the back.

Porland

I thought “Porland” was just Spanish for “Portland”, as in cement, but it turns out that it’s a registered trademark in Turkey…

Ésadir.com

This must be good for something, but I haven’t yet discovered quite what. (Found it.)

Press excerpts for language learning

This is cool: BebaManno reads the Guardian, which means I don’t have to, and I get to learn Italian at the same time. (I see Italian as a kind of easy back door into Provençal.) BM’s previous post links to the Mandarin section of Corriere della Sera. I am not sure whether this is aimed…

Danish cartoons were published in Egypt in October

And no one took a blind bit of notice. Check Sandmonkey. Takes a while to crank up a mob… (Meanwhile, the Romans are reported to be about to invade again unless we ban this. The druids are unhappy, too, and they know where my house lives.)

What about my religion?

I fear commissar Franco Frattini is not thinking of protecting radical anythingarianism when he proposes introducing self-censorship in Europe. Franco (that man gets everywhere!) has taken this new-old approach to quite an extraordinary degree on his personal site. Dear Boris, Mr Frattini is from the Italian right, friends of freedom indeed…

Before/after you’ve gone

In Amsterdam Dutch the term boterbrief, “butter-letter”, is used for a marriage licence. In English a bread-and-butter letter is written to thank one’s ex-host (or -spouse, presumably) for that which one has consumed. The former has its origins in the Latin literae butyricae, a permit issued by the church enabling consumption of meat and dairy…

Nigger? Moi?

I was cycling to a barrel organ meeting last night when I passed a group of Moroccans, one of whom threw something at me while another shouted “Nigger!” If I’d been slightly more awake, I’d have done a bit of ironic chromatic inversion on Blake.