Category: Orphaned

Taken by death

The famous “Kiss of death / Petó de la mort” memorial sculpture in Poble Nou cemetery, photo by the excellent izarbeltza, regularly visited on this Barcelona walk: A more earthy interpretation, from a Chinese shop, also in Barcelona:

Tagline error in early Indian Chaplin film poster

I think the laugh/laughter thing is probably quite a hard mistake for non-natives to spot. I am consciously aware of about as much grammar as is your dog’s posterior end, so don’t ask me to explain why it’s wrong. (From CaixaForum’s exhibition.)

Public brothel advertisements in Girona

Apparently there is a multi-ethnic casa de barrets (hat-house, from the number hanging there) at the top of the John Lennon Musical Garden–there hasn’t been any music there since people used to pop outside the city walls to have a crap: Here’s the pricelist: Argentines: 80€ Blacks: 30/60€ Catalans: 50€ Romanians: 30€ Columbians: ? Ecuadorians:…

Montserrat Virgin actually blonde

This falls into the same category as the revelation by Arenys de Mar’s thriving community of dope-fiends historians that the three kings were all black. Dunno where that leaves trite lyrics like Siempre que pintas iglesias/pintas angelitos bellos/pero nunca te acordaste/de pintar un ángel negro. (On this walk. Critical discussion of inocentadas here.)

Debauchery at midnight mass, disorderly organists

I’ve only ever been a witness of vomiting and fighting at midnight mass, but none of this is new. One of today’s Libro verde items records that until a few years [before 1848], mass was sung at one in the morning, but that the irreverences of the ignorant made it impossible. Henceforth it was celebrated…

Sinterklaas photos

Re this, some results. The comments in Dutch are grossly libellous, so don’t even try to translate them. I finally managed to get the mitre on my head–Spanish bishops don’t have much between their ears–but the only way the beard would stay on was to jam it over my nose with half of it in…

Nativity scene, Santa Coloma de Gramanet

None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician: Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark: All on this walk.

Holy Thursday Jew-killing games in Lleida

BS has kindly pointed out that Lérida has a selective digitalised press archive going back to 1896. With ref to this, he notes the existence of similar commemorative genocidal banging by children in the city in the early twentieth century (?): –Where are you off to this early? –To kill Jews, mum! –Don’t you know…

Days now called by different method

The format used to be /mm/dd/, which made a little bit of sense but not much more and would have meant a load of pain with WP. Now it is /?mes=mm&dia=dd, which still involved a small hack to solve date problems but enables individual items to take /yyyy/mm/dd/ . Examples here if you’re confused.