Enjoy El Periódico’s deputy director José Sorolla getting his intellectual knickers in a twist trying to figure out how Ahmadinejad can be an ultracon and Rafsanjani a leftie when Rafsanjani is a fan of the Ultracon States of America. Someone explain multi-axis analysis to him. (Jean Véronis@Technologies du Langage notes droitisation and droitiser. Spanish goes…
The temperature is up in the 30s, so Miguel Guash via Amando de Miguel wonders why words for “night” and “eight” are similar in some Indo-European languages. Since even the derangedest of astrologers acknowledge that the notion of there being eight moon phases is culturally relative (damn, we can’t even agree on the Number of…
Akiane’s poem no 1 (via Stefan@MemeFirst), with a couple of small changes, brings to mind a story someone else tells about when the municipal cops rushed into a building, truncheons at the ready, to arrest a notorious heroin junk, only to discover, slipping and sliding, that he’d had a little accident: I slipped on the…
[link] and no one can remember who stuffed her in there in the first place. That’s a different girl from Spike Jones’ Brownie with the light blue jeans, who was as sweet as liquorice beans, in case you’d forgotten. Nor did the Spice Girls sing, “The race is on to get out on the bottle,”…
The Guardian: I never said we should end the CAP now or renegotiate it overnight. Le Monde: Je n’ai jamais dit que je voulais changer la PAC maintenant ou la renégocier en une nuit
I suspect Amando de Miguel’s “se deliveran groserías” comes from Alfredo Ochoa’s “se deliveran grocerías” and that it’s an invention designed to discredit the EU’s future sole official language, Spanglish. I’m not going to believe that a Dominican corner store in NYC would offer to deliver insults until someone shows me a storefront or flyer…
This and the huge and prosperous French population in SE England just go to confirm the notion that Britain is where the French go to work, while France decays gradually into a gigantic agricultural theme park dotted with wildlife reserves dedicated to obscurantist and ageing political dogmatists. Spain, on the other hand…
I’ve been on planet Mars, writing some arrangements and checking out the deeper side of big band theory, so I’ve only just discovered that the head of the conservative Partido Popular in Orense, Galicia, is a keen trombonist. Xosé Luis Baltar recently suggested to voters that Zapatero’s lot might try to steal the Galician elections…
Dr Weevil has noticed that Espasa-Calpe has published a collection of shorts by William Sidney Porter, misspelling his pen name. I thought at first that they’d Oirish-ised it for marketing reasons which I cannot conceive, but they’re just plain stupid. (Do writers whose first name begins with “o” avoid initialising it to prevent this kind…