On the same day the Enola Gay dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, a small Mexico City pharmaceutical manufacturer offered the distinguished Hungarian Jewish contract bridge player, George Rosenkranz, work synthesising progesterone from inedible yams. He fell in love with the city immediately: I saw the blue sky, the volcano, and heard this music outside my…
I went into the excellent and apparently men-only Cantina La Fuente in Guadalajara, Jalisco this morning and ordered a beer. An aggressive-looking youngish guy further down the bar started mouthing off loudly about gringos, so I went over to see what his problem was, and it turned out he was a frustrated sysadmin looking for…
Nando’s acquired one, and here’s the video. The world is about to be swept by yet another théremin craze, and I hope to bring you tidings more thrilling yet soon.
I’m still researching the new Filth walk, which I hope to market multilingually in conjunction with another blogger. One of the things I’ve been looking at is the profusion of illegal, self-built housing, lacking in all basic services, which exists on old factory terrains and in other uninviting places. I met a bunch of Moroccans…
I think you can still use the following Dutch rhyme: Allah is groot en Allah is machtig, Allah heeft een lul van één meter tachtig. … as long as it is accompanied by the following English translation, to be pronounced with the London glottalstoppery of the gentleman with whom I spent a year in a…
Since I’m arsing around this morning, here’s some more chicken news. There’s a good story developing up in Pont de Molins, a small village near Figueres, at the moment, where Adela Sánchez has been put on trial accused of murdering Mercè Catalán’s rooster, Matildo. Adela and her daughter, Paqui, had previously sat up at night…
Is the term used for Fuck Patois by Carlos Mayor and Eduardo Iriarte in their Spanish translation of Tom Wolfe’ I Am Charlotte Simmons. (Via Taccuino di traduzione)
In a surreal exchange, mediated by Carlos Ferrero Martín and Margaret Marks, and with the usual machine googleation, “in declarations conducted in Majorca days ago, our minister of Culture, Bald Carmen, pronounced the following phrase: ‘Before cook I was fraila’.” Whereupon the journalist said, ‘Bis bald, Carmen,’ but was severely beaten by the Balearic pun…
Last week I snapped a Scandinavian blonde Maria in Vilafranca del Penedès. Joan Amades (El pessebre (1959)) tells us that, in Catalan nativity scenes, the Mother of God was always represented by a young, very white girl with hyper-perfect features, and that her whiteness is both traditional and proverbial (“white as a Mother of God”).…