Here’s the real-life flipside to Valley of the wolves, Iraq: a Turkish military court has released the phenomenally brave gay consciencious objector Mehmet Tarhan. An excellent piece by Bernard Bouwman in Dutch in the NRC describes how our man decided after 9/11 that this fight was not his in any sense and–traitor!–refused to serve when…
Life is skittles, life is beer, and, where possible, life is adultery. There’s a lovely bit in Enrique Jardiel Poncela’s But … were there ever eleven thousand virgins? where he says that amor is Spanish for two people eating stew together. Resistance is futile, my dear, particularly with the roses up in the Cervantes gardens…
A semi-literate, a verbose nitwit, from Writer’s Block. Romance language speakers are nothing like as innovative or as welcoming of innovation as the Dutch.
I don’t know whether they’ll be good for anything else, but I do hope there’s a piano lying around somewhere in the Veena Vadini School at Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh.
Apart from reliving medieval massacres, there are various perfectly sensible reasons why one might want to thwack the ground in the spring. Mark Liberman has found a worm grunting festival which makes me wonder whether the underlying purpose might not be to wake up the worms, without whom stuff wouldn’t grow. (Worms are like eyeballs:…
Having a gunwoman riding pillion on the scooter seems a good idea, rather like female coxes in boat racing. One can imagine few worse distractions from one’s enduring preoccupation with road safety than having some big sweaty guy fiddling with his gun behind one’s back.
Unlike motorcars, bicycles take you through village centres and allow you to park outside at any interesting-looking drinking hole you encounter. Friday afternoon on my way up-country for a weekend engagement I stopped at a village café in the mountains between Montseny and Montserrat, where a nice but weary barmaid was serving brandy to some…
From the NYT: A small number of [Sarkozy’s] plainclothes police officers are wearing dreadlock wigs, hoods and Palestinian kaffiyehs to try to blend in with the street toughs. I do hope they remember not to wear their black shoes.