The most heartbreaking experience I’ve had recently was watching a smallholder digging up the vines he planted during the 60s and 70s boom. Brussels used to pay him subsidies to plant, but now they’ve said that he’ll only be able to earn money by destroying what they regard as his means of production but which…
Crouched on the street with the usual placard. A granny passes: –5 cents, for the love of God! –Sorry, no. –Well then let me give you a lucky gypsy kiss! (Leaps up and embraces the granny, despite her protests.) –Oh all right then. Wait, I want to give you 20 cents. –Thanks, I’ve already got…
Sevillanadas has photoshopped back into place one of the Moorish city’s gates, demolished in 1868 by the same man who restored it twenty years earlier following a serious bout of generalised brotherly hate. Will it now be rebuilt?
Francesc Peirón and his Vanguardia editors don’t know the name of the world’s most famous stock market index. “Down Jones” is used jokingly for “Dow Jones” when the market is falling (it’s up this morning) and in suppressing the Legitimate National Aspirations of the Welsh Race (we have none).
Carlos Muñoz of the Institut Libre Marie Haps in Brussels laments (a) the decline in prestige and airtime within Spain suffered by the standard, educated, Madrilenian accent of Spanish, and (b) the lack of phonetic consistency exhibited by model speakers of the more specifically regional accents which have to a certain extent replaced it. He…
Debating at lunch how long it would be before we’re all eating grass soup (sopa de golf on the costas), we progressed to the devil’s cookbook, and someone mentioned the 16th century colonial chronicler, Bernardino de Sahagún. Back when Bernardino was booking the cooks Mictlan was where dead Aztecs lived–way up north, probably in New…
It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of…
Classic nimbyism, enabled by Spain’s lack of effective central government: Castilla y León has lots of wolves, but other communities which, according to ecologists, should in historical and biological terms have some, don’t want to take the overproduction. So they’re being shot. I don’t suppose we could airlift them to the outskirts of Reykjavik.
Spelled-out evidence suggesting that Expansión, La Vanguardia and various other established Spanish newspapers’ international financial experts may actually know uck all about their subject.