Foreigners used to have to wheel a barrow of photocopies around half a dozen offices to be rewarded with a small laminated residency card. Then residency cards were declared obsolete, the only catch being that for most kinds of transactions they were not, Spanish practice not quite keeping up with Ayooropean theory. So foreigners had…
Josep Pla, El quadern gris, November 6 1918: Coromina and my brother–a chemistry student–get entangled in an endless discussion about science. Coromina attacks–to my great surprise–my brother’s rooted conviction of the absolute priority of science in any system of human knowledge. Like all anti-rationalists, Coromina creates beautiful, brilliant phrases: he says, for example, that the…
The Ayuntamiento de Jerez gets EU money to assist with tourist promotion, but professional translators won’t work with it because it never pays on time. So instead of employing someone who can speak English and knows how to use a spellcheck, translation jobs seem to go to some witless illiterate at town hall who may,…
So printed off a couple of this silhouette. Isaac Meyer Marks, Fears, phobias, and rituals: “Wild turkeys of any age try to escape from anything appearing above them in dark silhouette against a lighter background and moving with a certain angular speed relative to the size of the object. Similar escape reactions occur from a…
“What is really worrying for contemporary Spain is not that it is a country of waiters. What is worrying are the habits and manners of its waiters, their training and their crossed nobility, that thick-set-blue-beard-festooned grin.” Arcadi is certainly your man if you enjoy the extremes of 100% pseudo-intellectual introverted wank or simple, straight-forward abuse.
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the…
Check out this good short piece by Pedro Soria-Rodriguez on how for party political ends Spanish national and regional government have ensured that DVB-T/TDT will not increase choice for consumers. This is not a direct issue for me–I only see the telly in Spain in bars (the same applies in France and the UK)–but it’s…