Year: 2008

RIP Iñaki Cabo

I don’t normally do births, marriages and such, but Iñaki was rather special. I knew him from Saravillo, and a nicer person you could not meet. (Update)

Water crisis

But not in Pedralbes: If only shots were that cheap at my local.

A heathen named Guiri

“The Mahávansa and the Rájaratnákari state, that the king Walakanabhaya, or according to the latter work, Deveny Paetissa, caused the temple of a heathen named Girrie (doubtless Giri) to be destroyed, and caused to be constructed upon its site twelve temples consecrated to Sákya, which communicated with each other; and in the midst of which…

Bar Morryssom

This example of hostelries unable to spell their own name is rather interesting because of the two signs Bar Morrisson is clearly older than Bar Morryssom. Does this mark a decline in Spanish literacy–they used to be able to spell it–or are they merely trying to please various orthographical markets? (Background: Spanish speakers find it…

Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen’s views on beauty in women

T Bell, MD, Kalogynomia, or the laws of female beauty (1821): Professor Blumenbach of Göttingen, whose profound science and perfect impartiality no one can doubt, does not hesitate to say, that the English are the most beautiful people on the globe. Nor is this wonderful when we consider that ENGLAND, perhaps exclusively, presents the combination…

Apparent gender confusion in French “native-speakers”

It is slightly strange that this should surprise anyone, since Romance languages are notorious for their variation in the attribution of gender to nouns (Latin neuter -> almost universally Romance masculine, but you then get swaps, and doubling ups, and all kinds of mayhem in the various modern languages/dialects). One wonders whether the regional background…

Birthday pics

Thanks all for kind wishes. Cake under attack from fish: Afterwards I got to go walkies, and chose one of the old junkie trails to Can Tunis, made vaguely notorious in rather different form (before they built the freaking motorway and destroyed the old port and beaches) in Juli Vallmitjana’s interesting (he helped Picasso get…

Haute cuisine

Some British pubs take their French rather literally: Fellow hippies will know that if you stack your chips right on the day of the winter solstice and then chant a magic spell, the sun’s rays will fall in such a way as to create a shadow image of pretty much whichever megalithic construction you fancy.