Month: January 2010

Time to behead Fèlix Millet?

On this day in 1466, one Juan Sort, aged 70, was beheaded for the misappropriation of public funds. Millet is said by the auditors to have stolen around 30 million and has fessed to around 10%, but has not been anywhere near a prison, and indeed seems to think that by looking old and grey…

“Mittlestuffe” and illegal Catalan limitations on the provision of tourist services

Picking up linguistic errors by the Catalan government is shooting phish in a barrel–they often have difficulties with Catalan–but my non-empirical impression is that they and other local authorities struggle rather more with German than with English. Classic English errors are still there to be enjoyed, of course: take for example {-gn -> -ng}, as…

Carlos Borbolla (1902 – 1990), Cuban dance organ impresario and piano composer

I just found a piece by Miriam Ruiz Pérez in the Cuban national socialist regime’s magazine, La Jiribilla. Apparently Borbolla was born in Manzanillo of a merchant family which made money from the hire, construction and repair of dance organs. As he moved into the business following musical studies in France, he began to replace…