Semi-naked Spanish rugby players

All praise to Lenox over at Spanish Shilling, who got the shot without getting his head punched. “During the second half, perhaps inspired by a herd of goats being led past by a dusty looking old shepherd and a couple of dogs, the Cabras rose to even greater efforts and by the final whistle (and…

Ethnic prejudices confirmed

L helped a cause. L joined FACEBOOK EN CATALÀ! 6,121 members – $0 raised People, get your wallets out.

Elizabeth I in the pay of Spain all along

Watching Helen Mirren last night. Quoth the people of Spain: Elizabeth -> Bess not Beth because it was given her by her Andalusian seseo-masters. And one was snoring too hard to disagree.

Good piece on current American “translation will save the world” hype

Asks Mr O’Brien: “[A]re foreign funding agencies getting any smarter about how to get more of their countries’ literary works translated into English? The answer is “not much,” or not at all. The country that has made this easier, for Dalkey Archive at least, is Japan. Other countries are on a kind of cusp: Romania,…

Most popular musical number in Spain

This non-authentic version of Paquito chocolatero is by King Africa, who is, according to Wikipedia, actually kind of American, and John Major’s favourite artist to boot: Now an authentic version from Mike Oldfield, which doesn’t involve the mass simulation of anal sex popular down south: The next three favouritest tunes are also pasodobles, namely Viva…

Flying stag beetle

Lucanus cervus (Ciervo volante) on the hills above San Juan de Plan in the Pyrenees of Huesca (the second bit of the video is what you’re after): Proyecto Ciervo Volante writes: Flight abilities seem, in principle, well developed. Fight speed reaches 6 km/h (D’Ami, 1981) but dispersal abilities are unknown. There are XIX century tales…

Adam Aston singing Czerwone maki na Monte Cassino

One of the first times I played in public as a kid was at the local Polish club, and I remember trying to figure out what all these old folks were doing in this neighbourhood, amid numerous refugees from newer tyrannies in Asia and Africa and Latin America. After that it was a short conceptual…

5500 whistles?

We do not aim to follow in the tangled path of “the Evangelical-Lutheran town church pc. Jakob in Rothenburg whether that deaf ones” (via Transblawg) Further news: an advisory panel is being formed. Apparently the next Archbishop of Canterbury is too busy, but there will be big names in there. And we are getting closer…

El ropavejero y la belleza

–Hola, buenos días, ¿tienes ex-votos? –Yo nada de botos señor, pero la suegra se ha dejado hacer las domingas y están bastante bien. // Later, someone is getting on the bus driver’s nerves. So: –¡No me toques los botones!

“Islamic bridge of civilisation to the West over-rated”

Sylvain Gouguenheim’s ‘“Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel” (Editions du Seuil), while not contending there is an ongoing clash of civilizations, makes the case that Islam was impermeable to much of Greek thought, that the Arab world’s initial translations of it to Latin were not so much the work of “Islam” but of Aramaeans and Christian Arabs,…