Honorary doctorates

If Spanish universities are giving honorary degrees to one thug and taking them off another, does that mean there’s a finite supply of funny hats? What is this thing universities have with dictators? (More dodgy awards: Westminster, Sindh, anywhere in China or Korea (1, 2), Michigan State or–worst by far–Long Island.)

Boohbah

Here‘s something (via Lucia@Polifônica) to palliate the onset of spring which, as usual, is turning out to be fairly knackering.

Winners and losers

I didn’t know I even had Premium Bonds, but apparently I’ve just won £50 on Ernie, or Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment for long. Meanwhile Buddha has run away with £500,000. It’s that destiny thing, dammit.

Bovine threat

Is it true that Maoists used to sing of the capitalist military-dairy complex, “Say, it’s only a paper moo”?

The power of cement

On Thursdays, after this, I like to cycle round the buildings of the Industrial School/Can Batlló to the Guastavino chimney. On moonlit nights if you glide the last 50m while staring at the 60m chimney top, it’s like coasting down some baked clay Milky Way. There’s a picture here of his Oyster Bar at New…

Botellón

Kalebeul hopes to avoid the widescale unrest we believe will result from police action against nocturnal street drinks parties by implementing two preventative strategies: 30 years ago three gentlemen in Bar Manolo were given a monthly allowance on condition they drink all the alcohol in Spain. Project delivery date: 20:00 17/3/2006. All streeting from the…

Oiquipedià

There’s still no article on Chistabín in the Oiquipedià, the Occitan version of Wikipedia, believed to have around 1,832 legitimate pages (Arabic = 11,824).

Chistabín

Currently doing a bit of literary translation out of one very strange dialect into another, and here’s something not so completely different: a basic grammar of Chistabín, the well-preserved (whatever that means) dialect spoken in the Chistau valley in northern Huesca. There’s a small lexicon, sorry, lesico. I like words like agila (águila in Spanish)…

French challenger to CNN, BBC to broadcast in English

A spokesman for the new channel said: “Eighty per cent of our target audience will be anglophone. If we want pluralism in the field of international television news, we cannot ignore this. Our viewers will be opinion formers, journalists and people who travel a lot, and the language most common to them is English.”