Missed it. I was into the music before Mr Kusturica started færting around, and it looks a lot more interesting than Glastonbury. Dear Guca, will you invite our gay tea-dance orchestra to play at next year’s festival? (Thankyou, Mr Toenail.)
One of the words I missed yesterday was kletskop, apparently used in Antwerp to mean “baldie”. I’ve only seen it before in the sense of “chatterbox”, but here I guess that klets is onomatopoeiac, representing the sound made by smacking a bald bonce. A while back a clown was operating outside Zurich on Plaza de…
Brits tend to see Trafalgar (search) as the stage on which British naval hegemony was established. The French official view, on the other hand, is that it is just another anniversary. For some Spaniards, meanwhile, apart from being a reminder of the perils of entrusting project management to the French, it recalls imperial glory (we’re…
I’ve been on planet Mars, writing some arrangements and checking out the deeper side of big band theory, so I’ve only just discovered that the head of the conservative Partido Popular in Orense, Galicia, is a keen trombonist. Xosé Luis Baltar recently suggested to voters that Zapatero’s lot might try to steal the Galician elections…
From the Washington Post: “Asked to respond to reports that Arafat is brain-dead, [French foreign minister Michel] Barnier replied, ‘I wouldn’t say that.'”
This seemed to me an interesting view of the media-meets-multiple-state-man scenario we’re now in: In the Everett many-worlds interpretation, which does not single out observation as a special process, both states persist, but decohere. When an observer opens the box, he becomes entangled with the cat, so observer-states corresponding to the cat being alive and…
The public left-wing aggression, organised via mobiles, that I think most people accept was crucial in the Spanish elections this year is often taken as having been the first successful application of flash mobbing to politics. Dheera Sujan, in Gods and Monsters: the Saffronisation of India, a programme on the Dutch International Service, suggests that…