Photos and video of snowstorm in Park Güell
Includes video of snow felling a pine tree and a photo of a municipal bus which almost skated its way down-town.
Category: The material universe
Shipping news
Public auctions of wrecks in Barcelona, Pontevedra and Algeciras, with thoughts on how to reduce blogging competition.
The right and the wrong type of snow, according to Avicenna, Aristotle and Plutarch
With an excerpt from a plea for more state funding by the Bostonian Western Rail-road, in which we are given to understand that snow is not necessarily a bad thing.
The storks of war
A fragment from Italo Calvino’s quasi-17th century folk romance, Il visconte dimezzato/The cloven viscount, uses storks as a portent of battle. Several unconnected 2nd century Greek accounts might appear to do the same, perhaps particularly if one’s a lazy sod and doesn’t read anything but scraps of stuff on Google Books.
Barcelona Airport T1 pics
But getting there is still a pain in one’s posterior end.
A West Cornish Barbary pirate and ghost-ship
“Discontented devil of a blackamoor, why canst thou not be satisfied to live here?” “Avast there; all our gold and diamonds can’t procure us here the bright sunshine and joyous people, nor the rich fruits and wine, of my native clime.”
Why I’m called Trevor
Or, rather, how my grandfather seems to have been named after a minor railway station.
Jingoistic poem celebrating the Battle of Vigo Bay (1702)
Half roasted Frenchmen, some o’er Gratings Broil’d/Do mix with Spaniards in the Sea parboil’d;
Is the anglocabrón longing for sun, sangria and sex a new phenomenon?
Blasco Ibáñez says that actually we have always thought “at all hours of the Mediterranean rim.”
Mosquitoes, alcohol and violence
A Catalan children’s song remembered by Francesc Candel; early rave culture on Central America’s eastern seaboard.