Year: 2007

Catalan Green Party calls for bigger airport

I hadn’t noticed that the Catalan Greens were on the December 1 demonstration demanding more roads, airports etc. Funny old world. (That’s a socialist salute, not a fascist one, on their web page, just in case all their xenophobic gibberish had you confused.)

Book dumping

The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20…

People we meet

The other day, on this walk, an elderly Englishman from G. Speaking with an Andalusian accent, he claimed to be one of a group of Brits who, following the abortive Algiers putsch (aka putsch des généraux) against De Gaulle in 1961, fled the Marseilles barracks of the French Légion étrangère and crossed the Pyrenees to…

Ancient circular enclosures in northern Spain

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…

People’s Revolutionary Plastering Squad

This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just…

New walking route

Over Santa Coloma way, taking in Puig Castellar, which I’ve been doing informally for a while. Here are some photos: This is looking back over the river towards the bits of Barcelona no one visits. Badalona FECSA Badalona FECSA and Ryanair Barcelona There are other attractions, but the best bit about it for me are…

Badly parked

Mal aparcado posts photos of absurd and illegal parking. There are often so many cars and scooters parked on the pavements in Barcelona that the only place left to walk is the road. Barcelona shots include a nice one of three Mosso-mobiles illegally parked nose-to-tail to go snacking in a bar. Anecdote: The other day…

Sinamay

I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the…