I have just been released from hospital after wading across the river Besòs in full, pink, evening dress (with knickers, ladies) playing Arthur Pryor’s variations on The Blue Bells of Scotland on a Conn 8H tenor trombone. Having almost drowned in midstream after being hit by a large patch of floating sewage, I am most…
What has driven Margaret Marks to cook and, presumably, eat Indians? Since Ms Marks has quite clearly gone native, I suspect this of being some bizarre offshoot of Central Europe’s Orientalist anti-Tarzan industry: In Germany after World War I, Tarzan’s sales were so vast that a disgruntled local publisher printed a counter-Tarzan tract called Tarzan…
One of Karim’s commenters is under the impression that Karim is a bad speller. Orthographic genius, I’d say: bussaharain clearly refers to that portion of the African continent that still depends on public transport. (Give or take a few prickles, we are, of course, all African hedgehogs.)
There is the weeniest bit of potential to frustrate the knavish tricks of those bad, bad Greeks and “their” precious feta: the Italianism feta is used in Argentina and Uruguay to mean a slice of cheese or cold cut, so all the Danes and the Germans need to do is slice up their product and…
There’s a rather silly suggestion here (via Onze Taal) to the effect that, with English reasonably close to becoming the only EU working language, it’s about time the UK started paying for everyone else to learn English. I find this a weak argument: with the French Eurocracy converted to the delights of English, it will…
“A [Manx (via Mithridates)] game in which one boy gave a back as in leap- frog, the other boys then leapt over him four times– fore and aft and from each side—each calling out as he did so, spanish fly. The process was then repeated, varied by the cry ‘tip on the bot, spanish fly,’…
GK Chesterton, The defendant: A Spanish nobleman, when commanded by the King to receive a high-placed and notorious traitor, said: ‘I will receive him in all obedience, and burn down my house afterwards.’ Pepys’ Diary: My Lord told me that among his father’s many old sayings that he had writ in a book or his,…
Well it seems that way to me: Now that Saddam-era censorship of movies has lessened, movies with sex scenes and nudity are getting particularly popular in Iraq. Men between the ages of 17-45 are the keenest cinema-goers, although many Iraqis are not happy about these canges. One Baghdad resident complained, “Families can not go to…
I love it when dog owners go on about racial purity: Gammel Dansk Honselhund The origin of this race goes back to around 1710 when for eight generations a man called Morten Bak (who lived in the district of Glenstrup near the cities of Randers and Hobro) crossed gypsy dogs with local farm dogs. So…