Não é desgraça ser pobre, there ain’t no shame in being poor, and sometimes it’s better only being able to afford one tranny hooker. By Amália Rodrigues, who I only discovered the other day.
When I saw this first I briefly thought it was Montjuïc viewed from Maians Island, where Quixote first saw the sea. But the sun sets west, not south, and those are mountains in the background, not clouds. So it must be Italy, somewhere. Here’s the text.
Apparently it’s quite well-known, but I only found it this morning in HG Bohn’s A hand-book of proverbs (1855), in the household reading room: To build castles in the air. Far castelli in aria.–Ital. The French say, Faire des chateaux en Espagne. It is tempting although perhaps erroneous to believe that this derives from Frankish…
The proceedings of the Old Bailey are now searchable to 1913. Apart from anything else they are an interesting source of information re the misfortunes of London’s Spanish population, from the refugees from Fernando VII to the anarchist trials in the 1890s. The following testimony to the traditional linguistic handicap of the Iberian tribes was…
–¡Alfonso primero! –¡Alfonso XIII! Probably one of those time-space-specific things. Alfonso XIII strikes me as an infinitely superior as far as witless losers go, but I wasn’t there at the time.
John Chappell links to an old piece from the Stephen Roth Institute in Tel Aviv which claims among other things that “reports about Israel occupy a disproportionate amount of international space in the Spanish media”. If their frame of reference is countries in a similar situation to Spain and and with a similar relationship to…
Nice little video here from this sparsely documented international artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dxLNts4Phg I don’t know what its specification is, and I don’t know the Kassel maker, but this is probably the kind of thing I’m interested in. The mini-pram-type carriage is interesting, but a trike will give me speed and flexibility.
I’m not much good with chordophones, so the closest I’ll get to this is on my fine collection of Swanee whistles. Here’s another musical sawyer playing Vie en rose: For some peculiar reason it makes me want to urinate. I believe 17th century transverse flutes had the same effect on some contemporary French theorist. I…
“I have in my mind the most masterly farts which, however, would be impossible to reproduce.” The farting policeman explains nevertheless how to perform the “Imperial”, the “Terminator” and the “Saturday Night”, which may or may not refer to the comparable artistic frustrations no doubt suffered by the admirable Mr Travolta.