Once again we stray from the straight and narrow of our mission onto the great scrubby heath of linguistic hilarity. The double airco and window/door configuration here clearly forms an elephant’s eyes and trunk, suggesting a menagerie shared with the one-eyed trouser-snake, but this is an MOR clothing retailer in Manresa, not a boutique dedicated…
Wine-buff Víctor de la Serna (via Carlos Ferrero) has nailed Domecq Bodegas for an amusing slip on the otherwise impeccable site, “When did you born?” I haven’t really looked for literary or scientific evidence, and I’m pretty ignorant of non-me dialectal forms, but I’d hazard that this form is actually quite common among some groups…
In a world of staggeringly incompetent amateurs the website of Textiles Athenea is just run-of-the-mill hound-dog, so I wouldn’t even mention it if someone hadn’t wept an empathic tear at a job ad of theirs that came flashing past. Hmm, to be the sparkling hub of their textile pattern design, collection formation and trend spotting…
Chez Lexicool, via MM, Katia, who, using Facebook in English, described herself as being in a civil union with Juan, only to have a lucky escape from her mother-in-law, who, using Facebook in Spanish, had understood that this was in some sense a homosexual union, and was just about to order some educational literature from…
Peter Harvey has discovered two spacious rooms, lightly high in the Alhambra. “Room of the beds” is the literal translation of “Sala de las camas,” which must lead not a few visitors to giggle and wonder what the difference is between a “room of the beds” and a bedroom. Traditional use in English for such…
La Información’s reporter says that this publication by Education First, a teaching multinational with an interest in making target clients nervous, shows that of the European countries examined, only the Russians and Turks had worse English skills than the Spanish. He then left to finish his primary school geography class, and so didn’t have time…
amanda steggell: The Emotion Organ (2007) is a synaesthetic simulacrum machine where players can explore the sensational interplay of feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling and motion. It is also a time machine – a re-engineered pump organ from 1895 that combines both old and emerging technology and builds upon a trajectory of several centuries-worth of ideas…
I was thinking about simple visual metaphors to communicate organ works, but digressed. Cue Nick’s World of Synthezisers. Favourite quote, from the slinkyfied Springatron: “I used the golden ratio to work out the lengths of the springs, this was to prevent resonances occurring at the same frequencies and at harmonically related frequencies.”
“Time has passed us by,” Maury said at once to me. “Our electronic organ is obsolete.” “You’re wrong,” I said. “The trend is actually toward the electronic organ because that’s the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won’t sell one spinet a day; the spinet will be a…