Franco Alemán over at HispaLibertas has very kindly passed on this article. In it Chicago Tribune ombudsman Don Wycliff tells the sorry tale of how, following an alert from Tim Blair, they had to get rid of Uli Schmetzer. Schmetzer had been with the paper for 20 years, but when he was caught fabricating an…
The most honest blue skies I know from these parts are to be found in the Matisse’s Collioure paintings. The Canon A70 I picked up last summer encourages me to commit a crime often detectable in the photos of other recent immigrants: reducing the light and deepening strategic blues and browns, particularly when the high…
The headline figure this morning is 20%, but the survey (.doc) asks the question twice and the other answer is different. First there’s question 3: I’m going to read you a list of apparatus and new technologies that are being used more and more frequently in Spain. Tell me, please, of each one whether you…
The following pricelist was received from a spammer who thinks that a Taiwanese email address is worth 70 times as much to me as an American one. America 175 Million Email Address $220 US Europe 156 Million Email Address $250 US Asia 168 Million Email Address $150 US China(PRC) 80 Million Email Address $200 US…
Looking for something else, I just found this grammar, lexicon and corpus of Syldavian, the invented language used in the Tintin adventures King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Destination Moon and The Calculus Affair. Since I read Hergé before I learnt Dutch, and since, while old Syldavian uses the Roman alphabet, the contemporary script is Cyrillic, I’d always…
Far be it from me to want to draw attention away from the Carod Rovira roadshow or to mock or criticise Esquerra in any way, but is it really true – as someone in a position to know told me last night – that Carod’s party colleague, Jordi Portabella, is heir to a decent proportion…
Interesting report in this morning’s Vanguardia: The man who in mid-November calls the police station of the Mossos d’Esquadra in Vic says that his 11-year old son has witnessed a kidnapping in Taradell (Osona). The report alarms the autonomous police force, which puts its incident plan into action; the description provided by the infant is…
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953): I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect…” And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect…. I…
Transblawg posts re the adaptation of the language used in British novels for the American market and vice versa. This subject also occasionally exercises John of Iberian Notes (2003/10/17, for example), who thinks that it’s time we Brits started caring again about the eccentric pastimes of folk who were so very rude to us only…
Naar aanleiding van een post over Dalí, vergeleek ik hem de andere dag met Turner. Nu blijkt dat dhr Snor echt een hekel had aan mijn landgenoot: Een totale ramp, het hoogtepunt van romantische sentimentaliteit, en het tastbare bewijs dat het onmogelijk is om tegelijkertijd Engelsman en grote schilder te zijn. Wat ik niet snap…