Here’s another daisy for my chain of Spain-goes-south posts, unlikely to be of interest to anyone at all, although the ads may amuse. Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria viewed China as an imperial basket case. Ricardo Beltrán y Rózpide in La geografía en 1898 (1899) explains why it was to remain so: The…
Here’s another nugget from that dark and dirty vein, Spain’s colonial adventures. It’s from Vital Fité’s Las desdichas de la patria (The misfortunes of the motherland; 1899), in which he reflects on national destiny following the disastrous loss to the US of Cuba and the Philippines: If others’ troubles could console us, a brief examination…
Akiane’s poem no 1 (via Stefan@MemeFirst), with a couple of small changes, brings to mind a story someone else tells about when the municipal cops rushed into a building, truncheons at the ready, to arrest a notorious heroin junk, only to discover, slipping and sliding, that he’d had a little accident: I slipped on the…
Comment spam has dried up over the last couple of months (along with comments), but I do get the occasional strange message from nutters who want to correspond with me or mow my lawn or whatever. One such writes every now and again in Spanish to suggest meeting up so that she (lots of allegedlies…
Since my reader in the northern hemisphere is spending all his time hanging around in a beach bar, hoping someone will talk to him, I’m going to post the occasional bit of new-to-me nonsense from down south until things cool down again in September. I think there’s no question that we’re all going to end…
[link] and no one can remember who stuffed her in there in the first place. That’s a different girl from Spike Jones’ Brownie with the light blue jeans, who was as sweet as liquorice beans, in case you’d forgotten. Nor did the Spice Girls sing, “The race is on to get out on the bottle,”…
Turks care about 5 times more about the living conditions of their fellow Europeans than the Spanish, says this chart, more freebies here. Someone who takes this stuff at face value has got to be pretty damn stupid. (The survey sponsor is the University of Tilburg (UvT), which used to be called the Catholic University…
Zapatero is biding his time, is the premonitory drift of Quarrell betweene the Dutch & English by Anon (via Polly Curtis@Guardian): The Belgick Frogge, out of the bogge, with Brittish mouse doth strive: The Iberian Kite meane while by slight, surprizeth both alive. While for their shares, of Indian wares, English & Dutch doe brawle;…
The Guardian: I never said we should end the CAP now or renegotiate it overnight. Le Monde: Je n’ai jamais dit que je voulais changer la PAC maintenant ou la renégocier en une nuit
I suspect Amando de Miguel’s “se deliveran groserías” comes from Alfredo Ochoa’s “se deliveran grocerías” and that it’s an invention designed to discredit the EU’s future sole official language, Spanglish. I’m not going to believe that a Dominican corner store in NYC would offer to deliver insults until someone shows me a storefront or flyer…