Four-times champion Manuel Rivas has been disqualified from the Spanish championships for refusing to submit to random testing. Is my poor record in my favourite neon night bar due to my drinking beer while my opponents snort Columbian yam extract? Or is it that damn talent thing again?
Another sentimental tango from from Tio de la Tiza and the Bebabouched Moors demonstrates a firmly-rooted belief in 1891 Cadiz in the Decadence of the Nation, even before the disaster of 1898 and its long aftermath exacerbated the gulf between a diligently managed press and wild popular fears: Una inocente niña llorando estaba y con…
1) I harboured a vague suspicion that a neighbour was borrowing electricity from our connection, but the stubble-raising shock just received while fixing an extractor fan with the mains apparently turned off suggests that we may be borrowing from him. 2) As the shades of night fall, something resembling a snake in a cleft stick…
Up at what was originally a Civil War AA battery on Torre de la Rovira: In the early 1940s the installations were adopted and adapted by immigrant squatters who built 110 shanty dwellings, known as Los Cañones, on the steep slopes and in the old quarries around them. I believe these homes were demolished around…
This seems a bit harsh on the Barça president but the comparison is a standard feature of any Spanish debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B–eNs5RUWc People I know are voting for the motion of censure on Sunday to fack this one off rather than in the expectation that the next one will be less of a mafioso. Some of…
This is the trailer (currently unsubtitled) for El infierno vasco, about the ethnic cleansing conducted by the nationalist government and the terrorists with a view to reducing the non-nationalist vote and thus achieving a pro-independence majority. The process, of which the latest episode is the removal of the constitutional right to use Spanish in schools,…
Photo 7 on this page shows a lamb being carried by refugees from villages on the Spanish side of the central Pyrenees as the Stalinist-led 43rd Division prepared its famous last stand–the Bielsa Pocket/la Bolsa de Bielsa–against Franco’s advancing Navarrans in spring 1938. Bielsa was completely shattered by the latter’s artillery, but the scorched earth…
Samuel Johnson reports on making acquaintance with London in 1737 that In the last age, when my mother lived in London, there were two sets of people, those who gave the wall, and those who took it; the peaceable and the quarrelsome. When I returned to Lichfield, after having been in London, my mother asked…
George Sandford has left a fascinating comment on this post, which deals with an amusing 19th century literary-historical hoax–purported correspondence between Ferdinand the Catholic and an esoteric global selection of fellow-monarchs. George is family of the alleged editor, Brother Antonio the Goth, and thus of the Christian clan kidnapped by the Moors when they invaded…
