Following the news about a Galician politician-trombonist, here’s a Louisianan trumpet-playing coroner: The first time Dr. Minyard ran, in 1969, he lost to the incumbent. But four years later, he and a slate of other candidates viewed as reformers – including Harry Connick Sr., the “Singing D.A.” – were swept into office. Another of those…
I hate the flag-waving and military parades around October 12, particularly when accompanied by the sight of the Spanish prime minister and king embracing a man who clearly regards himself as the next Latin American Mussolini. In it had been left to the church, the ceremony might have been rather different. Here’s part of a…
There’s a curious rant over at the Guardian by A Sivanandan, “a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner” (does concealing one’s first name make one seem more intellectual?), in which he claims that Margaret Hodge, the Work and Pensions Minister, blamed a surge in white, working-class racism on its black victims’ failure to ‘integrate’… In…
This morning we went looking for gypsies and birds at the northern end of Collserola. When it suddenly started looking like it was going to rain very heavily–it subsequently did–we came down off the hills, overtaking old men carrying mushrooms and the occasional deckchair, and did a quick improvised tour of bars (Chuck Norris on…
A life-long pessimist suggests that the news that the Dutch parliament complex, ‘t Binnenhof, has been “hermetically sealed” is the police’s way of saying, “Either they’ll blow you up or we’ll suffocate you.” One of the guys arrested, suspected of trying to collect guns and explosives to attack government figures and buildings, was cleared earlier…
Mad Werner Georg Patel wants to be a politician. Here‘s a classic example of his public utterances, and here and here‘s him accusing me of being Spanish and English and a translator (he claimed somewhere else that I do drugs–chance’d be a fine thing…). For the more conservative among you, here‘s a picture of two…
Why is written music featured on birthday cards and in ads always gibberish? Don’t Barclays International care that the musically literate think them a bunch of peasants?
It doesn’t seem to show on Amazon, and it has little to do with Spain, but I’d like briefly to recommend most highly Antoon Aukes’ Second Line. 100 Years of New Orleans Drumming (the website is also his). Antoon is amongst other things a tapdancer, but don’t let that put you off.