Chronica majora – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Tunisian liberal blogger

The excellent Mouse Hunter links to tn.bl*gs, a Tunisian bloggregator. Tn.bl*gs–which is completely unrelated to Mouse Hunter–includes excerpts from an interesting blog by dissident lawyer, Mokhtar Yahyaoui. Although the regime has avoided the Marxist, Islamist, and nationalist foreign relations disasters of many of its neighbours, any country in which a president “wins” a fourth term…

Blasted

Christmas tree

It’s kind of a game: you bring bits of tree down from the hills and stick them onto a tree in the valley.

Friends

Bit silly of Jacques to call on his “English friends to understand that they have to make a gesture of solidarity for Europe” and help out his dying economy when the man who controls the purse strings is quite clearly from north of the border. Just for the record, the phrase “amigos ingleses” appears once…

Isratine

One anagram of Isratine, the word used by Gaddafi and others for a proposed Israeli-Palestinian state: “satire in”.

But craic

Re the Glens of Antrim: “But craic is what the local inhabitants are famous for.” This may well be true, but unfortunately it has nothing to do with Geoff Pullum and Mark Liberman‘s “butt crack of dawn”, since Ireland is where the sun sets.

Here comes the bike

I finally married my bicycle on Saturday in a ceremony celebrated by a minister of the little-known but damn handy Carpathian Independent Church, and we have both been seriously well-oiled ever since. The downside is that my Ugandan friends have disowned me, quoting this Acholi poem: I hear a bicycle bell, The bridewealth of Laker,…

Is Michael Moore a resurrected Saracen monster?

European acceptance of Michael Moore’s new anti-Americanism has been greatly assisted by the loving detail with which he depicts the country he has invented, bursting with gun- and God-happy fatties and ruled over by a Semitic mafia. Here, from El Semanario Curioso, Histórico, Erudito, Comercial, Público y Económico, El Blasón de Cataluña (1842; cited in…

Standard Dutch

Via Onze Taal: “For years Martin van Acht (39) from Eindhoven thought that the only Dutch in existence was Brabant dialect. What a surprise he got when at secondary school he suddenly had to learn how to talk General Civilised Dutch.” I once joined a local band to learn Dutch and it was only when…

Singing tonight

We are on at el Mercat de les Flors at around 1am, so do come along and make some noise. Over the past couple of years we’ve grown from a fairly messy group with a highly conventional repertoire into a bunch of iconoclasts singing weird shit. True to this new egalibertarian spirit, the workers have…