The use of an Anglicism, esquàter, is a grave handicap to the popular struggle against the neoliberal Satan and should be resisted. Although esquàter obviously hasn’t yet made it into the Catalan-Valencian-Balearic dictionary of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, okupa, the normal usage, doesn’t appear either. So what does the right-thinking bourgeois Catalan say to the…
No, it’s not a Belgian joke: in Belgium you can send your email and have it delivered, registered, by a smelly man with a severe drinking problem, all for only €9.84. The business offering this innovative service, Certipost, is a joint venture between the dismal old state telecom and post businesses, Belgacom and De Post,…
This is good: the NY Times says that smart dealers are trawling eBay for misspelled items, buying them cheap, spelling them correctly and relisting them: John H. Green, a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them. Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears for pocket watches, which he…
In a country in which even traffic wardens carry guns, both ERC, the party of disgraced politico Carod-Rovira, and its youth wing, JERC, like to refer to ETA as an armed organisation. Why this vagueness? A wolf and a sheep are both mammals, but it seems to me important to be able to distinguish between…
Tearing myself away from puffing the undoubted pleasures of wines of the Penedès for a moment, I would point out that mediaeval Romance languages constitute another possible origin of the use of k- instead of c- or qu- by naughty boys and girls. Here’s a brief and highly speculative sequence of events that I hope…
Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain: One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.…
Following on the tense Berlin climax of the beer-from-Mars post, I suspect that the Tiergarten may also provide the key to the following excerpt from a message posted by a furriner on behalf of the nice Catalan boys and girls who dress up as squatters and spraypaint daddy’s bank (but not mummy’s 4×4) instead of…
Intrigued (and overjoyed, as always) to receive a mail from my good friend, Moses Aziz, in which he writes (my emphases): Dear Friend. As you read this, I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, because, I believe everyone will die someday… I have been diagnosed with Esophageal cancer . It has defiled all…
Coets (“rockets”) refer to the fireworks sold (and presumably concocted) by Drac Màgic, a small business that we pass on this walk. If you inspect the larger version of the photo carefully, you’ll see the Virgin of Montserrat on the ceramic top right. In an initial wave of naive enthusiasm, I thought that the propietors…
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