Irrigation folds

Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión (1901): “su admirable sistema de irrigación por medio de acequias y canales.” There are few sights and sounds more satisfying than this system of horizontal soaks and vertical sluices in action.

Glowworm jumps

Rollover. (Glowworm is freaky, WWWWontserrat accurate.)

Justifiable absence

We’re away for a couple of weeks, playing here and drinking beer here. Photos and Libro verde items will continue to appear automatically, and there’s always the company song to cheer you up.

Birds shat-up by dung-beetles

Laura Gibbs is posting, translating and commenting Latin fables. Today’s is rather good: “The Birds were in a terrible Fright once, for fear of Gun-shot from the Beetles. And what was the Bus’ness, but the little Balls of Ordure, that the Beetles had rak’d together, the Birds took for Bullets.” Read the rest.

More on the Google Docs debacle

Response from Sales to one Peter Harvey re the new release: “We at google use our own tools and have been using this new interface for a while now and I have not experienced any dire loss of functionality with it. However, we do have requests for more sorting functionalities – by name, by file…

Banned language methods

Foreign language tutors are quite common in lists of books banned by the Inquisition. Check for example this page in the 1844 Indice general de los libros prohibidos, which records the proscription in 1797 of a French-Spanish commercial correspondence course and of an English-Spanish conversation primer published in 1719 by the Anglican minister in Seville.…

Pasolini and the sacred

Apart from the end of the English Shadow, last night I read JM Castellet’s Els escenaris de la memòria. JM was a literary critic, which is French for vulgar gossip, whose occasional qualms regarding the persecution of Jews and sexual non-conformists in Russia don’t seem to have stopped him attending any number of well-catered Soviet-sponsored…

The great god Fart

Over at Michael Gilleland’s place. I am laid low by village water, which comes out of the hill unpurified, which is fine, but which ravages stomachs lacking the correct ecology of flora and fauna, which is tough on me and even tougher on the porcelain. Beware the great god Fart under such circumstances.

God ain’t deaf

I find that the rector of the church in Plan, Sobrarbe, Huesca, Spain blasts out his services over speakers, to the distress of neighbours without detachable hearing aids and to the alarm of sheep on the mountains. It’s not 140dB (source), but it ain’t good for tourism neither.