They’re photoshopping Jane Austen, so where will it stop? One writer who could do with some help is Al-Jahiz (776-868). Now known as something of a medieval Gollum, he killed and sold fish along the canal in Basra as a small boy, progressed into being a “notably ugle writer with ‘goggle eyes'” (hence جاØظ العينين)…
‘Sídí Abú Yahya, who had been governor of Cordova, said of its people, “They are like the camel, which fails not to complain whether thou diminishest or increasest its load, so that there is no knowing what they like.”‘ (Gyangos, History of the Mohammedan Dynasties of Spain, quoted in Adolphus, Letters from Spain in 1856…
The otherwise excellent Margaret Marks has ruined a peaceful Saturday afternoon by pointing out that St Columba was, apart from the first person to meet the Loch Ness monster, also on the wrong side of the first copyright case–or so says the Catholic Herald. Columcille copied a Jeromian psalter belonging to Finnian, King Diarmit made…
Amando de Miguel says that Zapatero is Spain’s worst ever ruler, with the possible exception of Fernando VII, Witiza and someone else. Wittiza was very naughty and nasty indeed–he “taught all Spain to sin“–and, to crown it all, he invited the Moors into Spain to help him fight Wodewic. Maybe there’s a Visigoth somewhere who’d…
Unlike the hairdressers of Clonycavan and Croghan, Egil ( “an ugly, irritable, brooding individual … deaf, often lost his balance, went blind, suffered from chronically cold feet, endured headaches and experienced bouts of lethargy … unusual disfigurements of his skull and facial features”) was clearly a trombonist
A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive…
Vaguely re this post, there’s a strong current of belief here that sees the Civil War as a rerun of the Reconquista, with (here we head into caricature mode) the left viewing both as the destruction of a new age of peace and love (the latter in all its many varieties) by intolerant savages, while…
Most unfortunate that Tony Blair’s moderate Muslims mostly turned out to be cartoon psychos. Here’s another burst of frivolity, available in several locations, which, like Yasser Arafat, I take to be a spoof: Many of us celebrate what is known as April fool or, if it is translated literally, the “trick of April”. But how…
David de Ugarte writes that “Al-Qaeda is the first distributed armed organisation that is open and based on open-access technology, ideology and gear.” The rest is debatable, but the word “first” is wrong. What about all those networks of early-warning hill-top beacons in Scandinavia 1000 years ago, used to rouse people with home-made weapons and…
Here‘s a note (in Catalan) on the fest in Barceloneta where I took down Sale el sol por la mañana last year. The first fruits function of the Judaic Pentecost explains why the locals dress up in food on their return from their trip out to the country, but I guess this relationship was lost…
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