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…
I suggested to Mark Liberman the other day that the word Frank turns up in western Arabic in the C8th. A provisional apology is due because the first reference I’ve found in a hitherto brief search is not until the first half of the C9th, when ʻAbd al-Malik b Habīb (display problems?) of Granada uses…
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…
