Category: Mankind

Run like a gypsy

With Imanol Arias as El Lute, retired generaliser George Borrow, and walking and running style as social differentiators.

The Turks' gypsy hangman on the point of giving the Greek hero a new walking style in a scene from a Greek shadow puppet play (<a href='http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=3291073&partid=1&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&titleSubject=on&physicalAttribute=on&numpages=10&images=on&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx&currentPage=6'>British Museum</a>). An Ottoman custom? A Barcelona cop tells me that his Algerian colleagues stamp on the ankles of bagsnatchers, making them easier to identify and capture next time.

Buffalo Bill, first vendor of palomitas/popcorn in Spain?

La Vanguardia in 1889 re Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in Barcelona: A la puerta del hipódromo vimos vendedores de caña dulce y en el interior unos vendedores ambulantes ofrecían otro dulce preparado con granos de maíz y miel. Honey-coated popcorn was already part of Cody’s commercial package in New York five years before, and La…

Alboraya Council’s tinker books

The reforms of the Council of Trent led to parishes registering in five books–quinque libri–the baptisms, confirmations, communions, marriages, deaths and excommunications celebrated there. Quinquilleros, hojalateros and other itinerant pot-breakers and -menders were nominally Catholic but frowned on and frequently persecuted by the establishment, so it’s good to see the Ajuntament de Alboraya drawing them…

Samaranch

Check out Liga Loca on silent minutes and Manuel Stimulo on how “a stupid communist French idea about promoting peace among nations through sports events in which their citizens would participate as amateur idiots [was transformed] into a powerhouse steamtrain of propaganda for competition, professionalism, the Triumph of the Will, battering the weak into submission,…

Catalan language policy: Marxist, Stalinist, Francoist or fascist?

The precedents for, and some possible implications of, the Catalanisation of Barcelona’s cinemas. Plus some crowd-pleasing video of the Quebec language police in action. (Allez! Allez! Allez! And the hell with the economy!) All in somewhat fevered response to an article by Martin Dahms in the Tages-Anzeiger.