Month: August 2008

Squatter eviction proceedings were first documents in Italian

The excellent Mauro Baglieri writes: “The Placito Capuano or Placito di Capua is the first in a number of acts, also known as Placiti Cassinesi. They were written in early Italian between 960 and 963 A.D. : court proceedings allowing the Benedictines from four abbacies to reclaim their lands from squatters that had occupied them…

Anti-tourism

Someone just wondered whether this walk was an anti-tour. Um, not according to Daniel Kalder, aka the first international congress of Anti-Tourists at the Shymkent Hotel, Shymkent, Kazakhstan, October 1999: The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable. The anti-tourist eschews comfort. The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.…

Here’s looking at you, lunch

I think it’s actually a slow worm, but here’s Thomas Decker’s Honest whore anyway: Lord Hippolito. Scarce can I read the stories on your brow, Which age hath writ there: you look youthful still. Orlando Friscobaldo. I eat snakes, my Lord, I eat snakes. My heart shall never have a wrinkle in it, so long…

More inane language punditry from Amando de Miguel

From today’s post: Manuel Gago García es el jefe de la Brigada contra Anglicismos Extravagantes. Su último trabajo es el seguimiento del autobús que llevaba a los jugadores de la selección española (la de fútbol, claro) en su marcha triunfal por Madrid. Don Manuel se fijó en esta frase que estaba pintada en el autobús…

Luna de almendras amargas

So interested was one in the almonds: … that one failed to see perceive twixt the branches: … the incipient eclipse: Most of the almonds could have done with another week or two, but if we hadn’t got there first, hordes of bloody Manchego pensioners would have shaken and whacked down every last one. The…

Brussels dialect for “Valencia is a mafia satrapy”

The belated price for being unable to govern oneselves: “The Commission states that the awarding of the Integrated Action Programmes (IAP), an urban development measure established by Law 6/1994 of 15 November, Valencian Law on development activities (‘LRAU’) and its successor, Law 16/205, Valencian development law (‘LUV’) relates to public works contracts which should be…

Comparison of Oporto and Jerez bodega tourist customer service

“I think the sherry trade could learn a lot from their cousins in Portugal. But of course that’s only if the sherry trade sees any benefit in visitors to their bodegas. I often wonder if they really do.” It’s the old Spanish paradox of shops whose owners seem prepared to go to quite extraordinary lengths…

Why Spain loves rancid foreign musical clichés

Easy: in a country prone to civil war it’s important to have something everyone can agree on, regardless of their local ethnic and linguistic allegiances. The Balkans form the obvious comparison: chronically incapable of even vaguely democratic self-government, they imported German princes in the nineteenth century and are now erecting statues of Bob Marley. So…

Of prostitution in Spain

Since both Spanish prostitution and Henry Mayhew came up yesterday, I thought it would be interesting to combine them and copy-paste from the excellent (though slow) Perseus database at Tufts the latter’s view of the former. I assume his street prostitutes who “traffic for the bare means of subsistence and submit to any and every…