Category: War and amusements

Crisis, what crisis?

Rodolfo de Angelis’ great 1930s hit explains how to get ourselves out of the mess we’ve got ourselves into.

Gaudí Sands, a retro slave colony?

Gaudí’s work was financed from the fortune built upon Joan Güell’s Cuban slave empire, so if Eurovegas is going to come to the marshes of the Llobregat, what more appropriate way to staff it than by shackling and transporting some of the tens of thousands of locally unemployed Africans?

Chino de los mandados = errand boy

Chinese because of his servility and/or size, or a genuine Indiana Jonesian Short Round? From Bogota, and perhaps relatively recent, but here (it reappeared) is Walter Silva from distant Casanare singing a sentimental but memorable ditty about how his mum etc looked after him when the store wouldn’t put the groceries on the tab. Can…

Interchangeability of nominative and genitive forms of Spanish patronymics?

I’m thinking of examples like Álvarez/Álvaro, Alves/ Alves, Benítez/Benito, Díaz/Diego, Domínguez/Domingo, Fernández/Fernando, Giménez/Ximeno, Gómez/Guillermo, González/Gonzalo, Gutiérrez/Gutierre, Henríquez/Henrique, Ibáñez/Juan, Juánez/Juan, López/Lope, Márquez/Marco, Martínez/Martín, Menéndez/Menendo, Muñoz/Muño, Núñez/Nuño, Ordóñez/Ordoño, Ortiz/Ortún, Peláez/Pelayo, Pérez/Pere, Ramírez/Ramiro, Rodríguez/Rodrigo, Ruiz/Ruy, Sánchez/Sancho, Suárez/Suero, Vázquez/Vasco, Velázquez/Velasco.

Breogán redux

Featuring Sophie Tucker’s “There’s Something Spanish In My Eyes”

Ear, ear

How to get drugs without a prescription on match days.

Castells, for real

A mad, mad Japanese video, and a human ladder at the Muslim siege of Aleppo in 637.

Roman double testudo, from Potter <em>Archaeologia graeca</em>. I'm told that the optimal shagging angle for turtles is 30º, so this counts as deviant.