Why’s there no Spanish expression for silly season / big gooseberry time / komkommertijd (nl: cucumber time) / Sauregurkenzeit (de: gherkin time) / morte-saison (fr: dead season) / nyhetstorka (sv: news drought) etc? Do the Spanish press and their readers really think important stuff is getting published in August (or the rest of the year,…
Martin Sewell > TheDamnBlog. Panic was once engendered in a stoned drummer in a stuck lift by mentioning to him that the lift brand was named for someone who died (singing Higher and higher, no doubt) when his plane fell out of the sky. (This has nothing to do with Spain, where there are no…
It’s a funny old world in which the celebration of states’ primary ethnic identity passes without comment while people are falling over themselves to ban poor old Chief Illiniwek.
More evidence that our /l/ and /r/ may constitute a single phoneme for Spanish speakers: At Starbucks they always write your name on the cup so that the coffee machine operative can say “Have a nice day, [your name]!” When I give the name “Trevor” it often gets converted into “Trébol”, so this evening I…
Re this, this: A gent from Grolsch is in a bar with colleagues from Heineken and Bavaria. The Heineken man orders a Heineken, the Bavaria man a Bavaria, and the Grolsch man a glass of urine. “Why don’t you get a Grolsch?” the others ask. “Well you’re not drinking beer either,” says the man from…
After WWI French government sold off old Remington rifles to dealers who resold them to rebels in Spain’s Moroccan territories. Writes Arturo Barea in La forja de un rebelde (The forging of a rebel): ‘The bulky lead bullet made a peculiar sound as it left the mouth of the rifle, a sound that resonated on…