Holy Thursday Jew-killing games in Lleida

BS has kindly pointed out that Lérida has a selective digitalised press archive going back to 1896. With ref to this, he notes the existence of similar commemorative genocidal banging by children in the city in the early twentieth century (?): –Where are you off to this early? –To kill Jews, mum! –Don’t you know…

Provincial style

I love this Jaén olive oil cooking competition, which is held not in Jaén but in San Sebastián, at the other end of the country. Is this because Jaén-ocrats want an annual freebie to the north, or because they’re ashamed of their home town? S, currently designing a collection of wedding accessories for the metropolis,…

Welcome to the internet, folks

Javier López (Estella, Navarra) and Amando de Miguel are unable to locate alcanduz in any dictionary. I think they mean a tree dictionary, because, see, there’s this thing called Google. The definition given in Webster’s English to Aragonese Crosswork Puzzles is “sewer”, so maybe the socialists in La Rioja were hoping to highlight problems with…

Hope at hand for Spanish men who live with their mums

Orhan Pamuk: Yes, until I was 30 I didn’t earn a single kopek, and I lived at my divorced mother’s house. I lived the strange life of a crazy boy who might one day become a writer. My friends had real jobs. I just wrote, and I could never get published. I was so ashamed,…

Days now called by different method

The format used to be /mm/dd/, which made a little bit of sense but not much more and would have meant a load of pain with WP. Now it is /?mes=mm&dia=dd, which still involved a small hack to solve date problems but enables individual items to take /yyyy/mm/dd/ . Examples here if you’re confused.

Wanted: English/French/German->Spanish translator

Rate: percentage of advertising and any other revenues accruing from this site or publication in any other form or medium. So that’s probably about €2 over the next 50 years. Talk to me here.

Chopin in Marinated

The celebrated composer is being softened up in absolutely beastly fashion down at the excellent El casareño inglés‘s local. Long after the Chinese have learnt the OED by heart, Spanish bar proprietors will continue to torment the harmless drinker.

Linguistic cleansing

El llibreter quotes and comments a couple of marginalia re the Catalan purification project undertaken at the beginning of the last century by Pompeu Fabra and others, with varying degrees of xenophobia, folklorism, medievalism, and sundry other fuckedintheheadisms. I find it curious that furies continue to be focussed on the big brother, Spanish, when the…

Petrarch on bibliomania

A helpful response in the debate between Petrarch (what’s the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same) might go something like this: Petrarch. I have indeed a great quantity of books. Critic. Leave them in a warehouse about 45mins cycle-ride from your house, and get rid of any you haven’t…