Barclays blaze

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?

New Orleans drumming

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.

UN-net

So if Libya gets to chair the human rights commission, will China call the shots on the internet?

Dutch solution to gay marriage

This (via this) is a good story for those of you who, like me, can’t understand why marriage should be in the Spanish constitution anyway.

Language teaching strategy

This is all very well, but the only realistic strategy would involve paying immigrants for progress made rather than increasing subsidies to publishers, most of whom already seem to have quite big lunches. With the amount Maragall spends on entertainment you could bribe the whole population of Bangladesh to pass level C and still have…

Grapes

Proof , thanks to the excellent C.

Slang prof

Explanations of bodagger and the like, over at SlangCity.com. Sez AC Kemp, slang operative since 1996, and now at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, “Last summer I even had a diplomat who wanted to learn slang to understand the jokes during cocktails.” (I don’t really understand why Spanish speakers lag so far behind English…