Category: Empires, rulers and warfare

Crisis, what crisis?

Rodolfo de Angelis’ great 1930s hit explains how to get ourselves out of the mess we’ve got ourselves into.

Gaudí Sands, a retro slave colony?

Gaudí’s work was financed from the fortune built upon Joan Güell’s Cuban slave empire, so if Eurovegas is going to come to the marshes of the Llobregat, what more appropriate way to staff it than by shackling and transporting some of the tens of thousands of locally unemployed Africans?

Question about diachronicity, dreams and nationalist historians

OK, in this dream I’m talking to a pigeon farmer about how folks are more prepared to condone pinioning some species than others, and then a flock starts smothering my face and I wake up with a bit of sheet over my head. So brain 1) meets object in the here-and-now, 2) makes false interpretation,…

Interchangeability of nominative and genitive forms of Spanish patronymics?

I’m thinking of examples like Álvarez/Álvaro, Alves/ Alves, Benítez/Benito, Díaz/Diego, Domínguez/Domingo, Fernández/Fernando, Giménez/Ximeno, Gómez/Guillermo, González/Gonzalo, Gutiérrez/Gutierre, Henríquez/Henrique, Ibáñez/Juan, Juánez/Juan, López/Lope, Márquez/Marco, Martínez/Martín, Menéndez/Menendo, Muñoz/Muño, Núñez/Nuño, Ordóñez/Ordoño, Ortiz/Ortún, Peláez/Pelayo, Pérez/Pere, Ramírez/Ramiro, Rodríguez/Rodrigo, Ruiz/Ruy, Sánchez/Sancho, Suárez/Suero, Vázquez/Vasco, Velázquez/Velasco.

Lexical roots of the eurozone crisis

PIIGS > stable > stability pacts. (If voters consistently elect free-spending hucksters who promise they’ve found a cure for boom & bust etc etc, then isn’t moaning about a democratic deficit as the bailiffs move in ever so slightly pathetic? They had their democracy, but they traded it in for pizza and the X Factor.)