Here you get holiday

Says Come2Israel.com in my Google ads. With English like that, it’s not surprising the Iranian navy is skipping Israel and taking shore leave in Syria.

González Byass: You will be a message

If you are good (or if you are bad but unsackable) you will eventually get sent on a course where you will eat and drink as much as you can while some loon repeats to you glib mantras derived from Ciceronian oratory. One of these, “you are the message”, turns up slightly disguised on the…

A booth was very pleased by its plasticity and practicality

There is a vague reek of sulphur in the English version of Hoteles Servigroup’s website (fingers say “webstie”: begone swine, and Satan), but the angel with the bottomless pit really lets fly in a puff-piece at a site invented for that purpose, which, because that is what the author, Ms Sauron, would surely want, we…

MIDI versions of player piano rolls

I just found Terry Smythe’s tremendous player piano site, which roughly 5782 MIDI files converted from scanned rolls. The relevance to street organ repertoire development is obvious – an hour’s tweaking and you’ve got something perfectly adequate for purpose. I hope someone, somewhere is writing a PhD answering such questions as: did piano rolls influence…

Google Translate output depends on your default browser language?

If your browser language is Polish, “Grób PaÅ„ski” translates into English as “tomb of the lord”, while if it’s English the result is “Holy Sepulchre”. How does it work? English speakers know what a sepulchre is, but there’s no cognate in Polish so GT looks for a simpler alternative for Polish English speakers? They’ve got…

Death/transfiguration of Vallcarca

An excellent piece by Israel Punzano presents a more balanced view than my La Clota rant of the destruction and–according to some–the rebirth of a decaying neighbourhood.