Theo van Gogh film @ the Filmoteca

Tomorrow at 7:30 they’re showing old fatso’s low-budget, quasi-real, low/high culture Interview (“The cabinet’s going to fall tonight and I’ve got to go and interview a pair of tits”; Dutch with Spanish subtitles(?)) as part of a Dutch film week. There’s a full programme here (PDF), but I make this the pick of the bunch.

More citizen journalists…

Manel Al Qaafr and the people over at Hispalibertas are launching something. Here are some rules for contributors, and here‘s how to get a look at a trial version. I’m sceptical: I think the future of participatory journalism lies not in sites like this but rather in a combination of mass, diffuse publishing with improved…

Killing the pig

Jayne’s got a photo here, and here’s an old joke which is told in Spain and probably in other places too: A farmer brings home a new horse, which immediately gets sick. The farmer calls out the vet, who takes one look and says, “That horse of yours is in a bad way. Make it…

Overheard

So if that’s Badalona, where’s Goodalona?

For sale: TheBaldie.com

Just received an update reminder for thebaldie.com. Taking offers from baldie.com (not work-safe) and other hairless freaks via the usual channel. If no one wants it, I’ll probably renew it anyway, just so you don’t think baldies come cheap…

Happiness…

… is an extremely drunken Russian musician careering down a street mounted cowboy style on a wheeled drafting plotter. Fortunately no one was killed.

More Baron Sakender/Sakhender

If I were a bit smarter I’d have tried a couple of alternative spellings before posting this. There’s a good chapter by Anthony Reid dealing among others with Sakender in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (ed Stuart B Schwartz) in which…

Names

More from Disraeli’s dad, this time on the peculiarly Spanish (continental?) fondness for long titles: The Spaniards then must feel a most singular contempt for a very short name, and on this subject Fuller has recorded a pleasant fact. An opulent citizen of the name of John Cuts (what name can be more unluckily short?)…

John Triggs

It says here: He was left for dead along a lonely New Mexico road, and another time he broke an elbow. But little things like that didn’t stop John Triggs, 54, from completing his 13-month, 17,300-mile bicycle odyssey over the backroads of the connected 48 states, Canada and Mexico. Just had a glass of wine…