Paronamic views

More modern standard Andalusian from El Ciruco: You may fantasise about him blogging here, but someone would have to pay the shelf space for his photo collection.

Silvio Gesell disciple in Barcelona

In my mail this morning: someone calling himself Miguel Yasuki Hirota is giving a talk on complementary currencies for sustainable development at 19:30 on the 15th at Argentona 11. Gugel reveals that “Miguel” is a fan of the author of The natural economic order, of whom almost everyone’s favourite (since last month, anyway) liberal fascist…

Carles Miró on Baltasar Porcel

Baltasar Porcel is a Mallorcan writer who is said to believe that his Nobel is grossly overdue. I find his columns and novels unbearably egoistic and confused, and the excellent Carles Miró in a brief review of Porcel’s career and latest novel suggests that I am not alone.

Sarkotraficante

Le blog du Chì, one year ago, on TF1’s enthusiasm for the apoplectic dwarf who substituted him as opium of the peephole. Another favourite mystification, from El Ciruco:

Content theft on the web

Patricia Metola is a fine illustrator who’s had enough of people ripping off her work for profit or not. This contempt for intellectual property is an overwhelming concern for designers unable to afford lawyers, and is a major factor in limiting the availability of products online, where ripping is easy as plum pie. I’m particularly…

George Formby singing Funicula

As well as dancing the old fandango, being a brigand on the mountains, etc. His father was a something from Barcelonia. Here. Can anyone make out the entire text? (This isn’t Funiculì funiculà.)

Getting round Spanish bureaucratic madness

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…

Rationalists

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…

“one of the most rooted wine families in Jerez”

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,…

Collared dove-on-window collision

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…