Ceci n’est pas un bar, or hostelry Spanish-style

Our entrance is barred by a little man with a beret and a moustache: –You know this isn’t a bar? –Of course! –No problem then, I’ll get the landlady. Later, in conversation with the landlady: –Aren’t you worried by the EU ban on making your own vermouth? –If this isn’t a bar then why the…

Tijuana Brass covers

Over at WFMU, probably the best music station in the world. Not much from this neck of the bosque, although they’ve got Los desechables, who I didn’t know, and the vile Eléctrica Dharma, who I do know and whose only merit is in having given rise to our freestyle pakrock outfit, Eléctrica Shoarma.

I assure you that if you trust us, you will not regret

Lenox has more here: In Essan Translations we work with specialized translators whose job is excellent. Therefore, if you need translation services, whether translation of documents, web pages, books, letters, etc., as well as searches of information in other languages, altogether with the corresponding translation, please, do not doubt in communicate it to us. I…

This is pleasent to walk there the night

The excellent Lenox Napier points us to http://www.ibiza-tourism.net/. This is one of a legion of sites dedicated to spamourism–posting ostensibly useful, functionally redundant tourism information with the sole genuine purpose of harvesting Google adclicks. The domain registree, who is apparently based in France, is too thick or too lazy to use machine translation, so we…

Why London and Dublin are full of Spanish waitresses

Someone just sent me this job ad to illustrate the kind of shite people suffer in Barcelona. It’s a six month contract in a city centre branch of a chain of cafés. The morning shift is Mon-Sun 06:00-15:00 with alternating Sat and Sunday free, which adds up to 54 antisocial hours a week (the EU…

Competition videos from the Portuguese Racing Sardine Club

The British Sardine Racing association (popups) is “dedicated to breeding a better Sardine, revolutionising training methods, and the breeding of both pedigree fish, and Hybrids, such as the Sardine/Shark crossbreed.” The Living Age (1919): “… eagerly bending over a long, narrow tank on the floor. They were racing sardines, taking them out of a tin…

“Before the devil knows you’re dead” trailer, before and after dubbing

In English: Dubbed into Spanish: If the standard of dubbing wasn’t so amateurish then maybe we could accept the fact that very little stuff is original version with subtitles, resulting in half the freaking Chinese talking better English than the Spanish. (I’m talking about the standard of voice acting, not the way Spanish post-production has…

Fuck Bicing

Being Barcelona Council’s corporativist scheme to marginalise private bike ownership and bike shops: 59euros is going round chaining random stuff to lampposts in protest at the council’s policy minimising facilities for non-council bikes and then removing perfectly roadworthy examples from the streets to make way for yet more council bikes and illegally parked motorbikes. Saltada…

How regional language policy in Spain is pissing off foreign investors

Here’s most of the second half of an article dealing with the Air Berlin affair in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, a MOR German daily: Hunold said … that he was proud that on internal Spanish flights they managed to have at least one Spanish-speaking stewardess on board. Introducing another language would be impossible. “Am I meant…