Fatwa nut bar

Cat in Rabat has a hilarious post re continuing attempts by beards in Morocco and elsewhere to make us dress up silly and prevent us from inspecting each others’ fatwans and stuff.

Spanish omelette trick

From John Henry Pepper, The Playbook of Metals: Including Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper, and Tin Mines; With a Large Number of Interesting Experiments Relating to Alchemy and the Chemistry of the Fifty Metallic Elements (The Author reserves the right of translation) (London, 1861), chapter entitled The Tricks of the Alchemists: Another…

Spain, a moral good

Just about the only folks who subscribe wholeheartedly to the same stark raving dungbrain discourse as the separatists (albeit without the latter’s threatened recourse to arms) are our bishops.

Cup of light and gall

Here’s an unchecked and unpolished translation of something from 1955 by Manuel Altolaguirre:

Bassi bomb

It’s good to be reminded occasionally that it’s not just Muslims who go round trying to blow up idiots and innocents. Sounds like the Christians had a go at all-round prat, Leo Bassi, last night with an incendiary device in his dressing room, without causing any damage. Like a whole bunch of British standups still…

Royal English College, Valladolid

Here‘s what QEI had proclaimed: The King of Spaine, for furthering of other intentions against Englande, has dealt with Cardinal Allen and Father Persons to gather together with great labour uppon his charges a multitude of dissolute youthes to begin this seminary of Valladolid and others in Spaine. The Royal Scots College in Salamanca is…

Ladino lovers in a hole

Just in case you thought Sephardic morality tales were all doom and gloom and putrid canines, here’s one in which true love triumphs over promiscuity, dodgy geology and a thoroughly nasty little weasel: A girl fell into a pit while on the way to her father’s house. A young man appeared in the mouth of…