Month: October 2016

Did the house that Jack built come from Spain?

Or, How to cook the old lady who swallowed a fly without stooping to cannibalism. Cumulative songs (and monstrous nested stuffing recipes) in Quixote and Estebanillo González, with the grossest video you’ll see today.

Cruikshank, The progress of passion (1792).

PTSD

A friend who died recently lived his life in two halves. In his youth he was the boisterous, swaggering, electrifying bass drummer with a lederhosen band. An excellent natural lyric tenor addicted to the schlager repertoire, a fighter of German marines during wine festivals, a charmer of the ladies, he seemed destined to become an…

Angelo Saxon

Someone taking Pope Greg (non angli sed angeli) seriously? Nope, just the fashionable new spelling,

Why doesn’t Radio 4 have a Friday Worship slot for Muslims?

Marvelling at the Norman apologist just after 18:00 on Sunday Worship, and wondering why we have no comparable access, with simultaneous translation, to for example the sermons of the imam of the Dar-ul-Uloom Qadria mosque in Walthamstow, whose adherents have been handing out booklets apparently endorsed by him calling for the murder of those, like…

Why aren’t the Andalusians building the Middle East’s new walls?

Scott has made a handy list of Trumpian walls being built across the still-smouldering Ottoman Empire, and a quick check reveals that none of them appear to be being built by Spanish contractors. Now, around Spain local governments are renovating, but more usually simply new-building medieval (Moorish) walls for the tourist trade (in monstrous contravention,…