Take Goig Heroin Elixir: From La Vanguardia anno 1912. Their current principal source of immoral earnings, apart from editorial-related state subsidy and tax-(ahem-)efficient paid-for journalism, is, of course, brothel advertising. I seem to recall it worked out at around €1M pa, but now most things do. The first ever front page of this then conservative,…
Apparently we anglocabrones used to think that crossing oneself was prerequisite to being Spanish. Here’s Juan Goytisolo in La Guardia, a short story written in the early 1950s, partly available in GBS: From the window I saw a group of conscripts in parade dress. It was Sunday and the officers’ room was deserted. Its furniture…
MM points out that “Our Mrs of” is a popular variant on the web (289 ghits), although still not quite as popular as “Our Lady of” (7,360,000 ghits). “Our mistress of” doesn’t sound quite as strange to native readers of dismal Tolkien epigonism, but let’s use the net to promote “Our Mrs of”, “Jesus Christ…
I’m in transit quite a lot, and I like getting out of houses anyway, so I’ve built up a list of unofficial workspaces where I can pop in and do email and stuff free and without registering. This arty one is quite close: Down one hill and up another, it’s ca 25 minutes on my…
This is often a work issue–eg with stuff forwarded to attorneys by IT-challenged clients–but also arises when archives digitalise stuff which is way out of copyright but which they still protect from private fiddling around, whether because of a lack of sophistication in their systems or because of some mad bureaucrat stuck up in the…
This piece by Julio José Elías Baturones explains how PSOE lawmakers led by Alfonso Guerra neutralised the guarantees contained in the constitution. I don’t know whether it’s accurate or complete, but it certainly makes recent events and today’s judicial strike easier to understand.
Re Erasmus students returning from Spain with an incomprehensible Andalusian accent, here’s Rafael Alberti learning how to tort proper at the dame’s school to which he has been sent following some inappropriate excretion chez the Sisters of Carmel: With Mrs Concha I learnt some Biblical History, being very impressed by Joseph, who was sold by…