Cest

A good friend writes: It is quite disturbing when a dating site’s pairing system suggests getting together with one’s sister.

Soundmen

Soundmen are like surgeons: you, the patient, prepare as best you can for what you are about to undergo, but at the end of the day/night your destiny is in the hands of an egoist full of chemicals who hasn’t slept for a week.

Nuther nutter

If you thought the PP’s favourite gay-hater, Aquilino Polaino, was Spain’s biggest psycho, then you really should try Cataloony Oriol Malló.

Choir photos

Here. You don’t need to speak Korean: let the popup open, hit the Photos tab on the right, and open Polifonica on the left. There are also videos floating around that need nailing down, including the TV3 one from last year. It seems that Someone Famous is coming along tomorrow night, so I’m slightly alarmed…

A new insult!

“Nazi-onanism” for “nationalism,” in a good piece by Vicente Álvarez (via Libro de Notas) on the growing intolerance and aggression of regional movements in Spain.

I move upmarket

I have noticed that serious websites have pictures of women smiling and men shaking hands.

Fighting drunk

Last night we were singing at a function and I started needling the French alto about Trafalgar, so she hit me hard with the new “Brits only care about drinking, fucking and fighting” survey, and then we moved on to the “hey, well at least we don’t beat our wives” refrain. A few days back…

Trafalgar dreaming

Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re…

Bipolar vision

Enjoy El Periódico’s deputy director José Sorolla getting his intellectual knickers in a twist trying to figure out how Ahmadinejad can be an ultracon and Rafsanjani a leftie when Rafsanjani is a fan of the Ultracon States of America. Someone explain multi-axis analysis to him. (Jean Véronis@Technologies du Langage notes droitisation and droitiser. Spanish goes…

Eight/night

The temperature is up in the 30s, so Miguel Guash via Amando de Miguel wonders why words for “night” and “eight” are similar in some Indo-European languages. Since even the derangedest of astrologers acknowledge that the notion of there being eight moon phases is culturally relative (damn, we can’t even agree on the Number of…