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.

Hilarious Shadow of the wind reviews

Someone’s passed me the English edition, with the usual gibberish-infested flap. The Scotsman describes it as having “a dramatic tension that so many contemporary novels today seem to lack,” while Scotland on Sunday says, “The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, mixing formality with poetry, so the rambling prose occasionally sparkles with lovely phrases ……

Lizard

Some species sit still and others don’t. Lizards tend to the latter, usually only letting you close on them if they are petrified or ill. This one appears to be neither, and remained reasonably calm even when I almost fell off my log onto its.

Ghost in the cafetera

For a while it sounded like Morse machine being boiled alive, something which probably hasn’t happened for quite a long time, and for sure it’s a terrible thing to be doing anyway. (You may need to turn up the sound. I’m using YouTube and accepting its lack of editing facilities because, like various other famous…

Flutterby

Front elevation: Plan view: These butterflies are incredibly lazy, and there are lots of them. Something wrong there.

Straw woman

Giant Haystacks would be more accurate but disrespectful to the memory of the great wrestler. This ain’t Barcelona, so no lonely farmers bumping themselves off at the sight of Heidi’s mountains.

Queers and gypsies

April 1939, and the Valencian communist and later Mexican entrepreneur Arturo García Igual (Entre aquella España nuestra … y la peregrina, available in part on GBS) has, as a Stalinist commissar, been sent to the elite camp at Agde, France, where night after night unsuspected talents [took to] an improvised stage: actors, comics, illusionists and…