OK, this blog is officially enamoured of Quaderns, which as well as calling Kaleboel un fenomenal poti poti now says we’re indispensable. A brown envelope is on its way to a smoke-filled office in Andorra.
The good news for mourners of dead tongues is that in Northern Ireland they’re inventing new languages, dialects and other officially authenticated and subsidised cultural goods at such a rate that the province will soon be exporting the surplus to the Amazon delta. As Jason Walsh points out: In Northern Ireland during the 1980s the…
Say what you like about the Hamsa squatters, but their PR operation is slick, and I’m 99% sure the following graffiti is their work. It appeared roughly 24 hours after the outbreak of a riot at the Quatre Camins gaol here which left a deputy governor in intensive care: The revolting state of Spanish prisons…
No help for the beardless wonder in the search for Conan Doyle’s Reminiscence of Cricket, but I did find two wonderful poems by South Asian schoolboys. Cricket Teams by Raza Shahban Ali of Fatimiyah Boys School, Karachi would have been an outstanding review of the world scene, had his laudatory couplet about England not been…
We knew Georgia was in trouble, but it’s worse than we thought, if we are to believe this article from News24.com: Georgia, Adjara – Militia in Georgia’s renegade province of Adjara on Sunday blew up the main bridges linking it to Tbilisi as Georgian warships circled overhead in a new escalation of violence in the…
I have been up the coast a couple of times this week (off again tomorrow) and I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many spring flowers. Their profusion is partly a consequence of heavy rainfall, and partly of the fires last summer that burnt away heavy shrubbery and young pine woods, clearing the ground. However,…
Sheesh! Someone called Luistxo has invented a complicated spec–read and shiver!–with which you have to comply in order to have a proper bilingual blog. Kaleboel has dropped its forked-tongue strategy, having discovered that people get much more excited when you are rude about them in English rather than their own obscure dialect. But that, of…
Maybe the British have had more practice than the Spanish, but while the Metropolitan Police and MI5 (“keep garden areas free from dense shrubbery“) public information campaigns are very professional, here I haven’t seen anything. Does the Spanish state really have such a low opinion of its citizens’ abilities?
Just about the only politicians who fear for the nation and for the national religion/myth and language as much as the French are the Malaysians. A couple of days back, Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Rais Yatim said that Malaysians were destroying Bahasa Melayu by using it in a rojak manner, mixing it up with…
Mel Gibson has decided to make a movie version of the legendary sacking of London by Essex Girl. He is apparently hoping to film most of it on Friday night, before the Vomit Comet heads out east once more. Tennyson sets the scene quite admirably: