Month: May 2008
In praise of toads
Ben Shahn’s maypole
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George Sandford has left a fascinating comment on this post, which deals with an amusing 19th century literary-historical hoax–purported correspondence between Ferdinand the Catholic and an esoteric global selection of fellow-monarchs. George is family of the alleged editor, Brother Antonio the Goth, and thus of the Christian clan kidnapped by the Moors when they invaded…
Something puzzling me on V-E Day on May 8 last week: no one seems to have noticed that Ben Shahn‘s Liberation is a French maypole scene. I believe from the MOMA@NY blurb that it draws on a Cartier-Bresson image, but if it’s a maypole it must surely be celebrating the end of the war in…
Howard Goodall runs a good organ miscellania page here, of which the Sultan and Elizabeth I organ donation anecdote was one of the few useful pieces of information I learnt as a child. Peter English over at Aramco has more: The Grand Signor then commanded for silence. All being quiet, the clock struck twenty-two hours followed…
All praise to Lenox over at Spanish Shilling, who got the shot without getting his head punched. “During the second half, perhaps inspired by a herd of goats being led past by a dusty looking old shepherd and a couple of dogs, the Cabras rose to even greater efforts and by the final whistle (and…
L helped a cause. L joined FACEBOOK EN CATALÀ! 6,121 members – $0 raised People, get your wallets out.
Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.
Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania,…
This non-authentic version of Paquito chocolatero is by King Africa, who is, according to Wikipedia, actually kind of American, and John Major’s favourite artist to boot: Now an authentic version from Mike Oldfield, which doesn’t involve the mass simulation of anal sex popular down south: The next three favouritest tunes are also pasodobles, namely Viva…
Lucanus cervus (Ciervo volante) on the hills above San Juan de Plan in the Pyrenees of Huesca (the second bit of the video is what you’re after): Proyecto Ciervo Volante writes: Flight abilities seem, in principle, well developed. Fight speed reaches 6 km/h (D’Ami, 1981) but dispersal abilities are unknown. There are XIX century tales…
Great tunes, great doggerel, small simians