One of the words I missed yesterday was kletskop, apparently used in Antwerp to mean “baldie”. I’ve only seen it before in the sense of “chatterbox”, but here I guess that klets is onomatopoeiac, representing the sound made by smacking a bald bonce. A while back a clown was operating outside Zurich on Plaza de…
Of course it is the fault of those damn Muslims: The Marchenero is one of the oldest pouter breeds, and it is a breed that was developed in Spain in a period of time covering almost on thousand years. In order to understand the beginnings or ancient history, a brief history lesson is in order.…
Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo‘s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined…
The raven didn’t hear me coming, so it broke away from the cliff at the last moment, struggled to remain airborne, and then climbed with a clumsy whooshing of wings out of the shadows and above the ridge, where it found the thermal, flexed its wing-fingers, and hung motionless for an age, the sun glinting…
Whatever’s happening in Najaf today, it’s never going to be half as frightening as South Africa. IOL tells of a newsreader trying to interview an on-the-spot reporter while, unbeknown to her, the latter is being robbed by a gunman: As Katopodis crossed live to Thaw at the first take, his cellphone stayed on – with…
Kofi Abrampah was born in Ghana and studied molecular science at Rhode Island College, from which school he subsequently obtained his doctorate. He is currently employed by Amersham as a nuclear pharmacist which, according to Africa’s finest portal, GhanaWeb, means that “he compounds and prepares radio pharmaceutics (radioactive drugs).” So what do you think he…
This cemetery photo was taken near the beginning of an as yet undocumented walk which culminates in a bath in a 30m waterfall. It’s interesting because the flying beast rather resembles a dragon in dove’s clothing. Offhand I can’t think of any dove dragon myths, but there are plenty of references to pigeons and dragons…
In the Middle Ages anyone of any commercial talent (and his/her mum) had visions and stored some human bones in the new toilet chapel extension of the pig shed nave of the temple next to that handy spring holy source on the hillside. Here, extracted by moderately cunning device from Amazon, is the relevant part of the ToC of Eileen Gardiner’s (not completely exhaustive) Medieval Visions of Heaven and Hell: A Sourcebook: