Death of a monkey mascot

Anecdotes from the frozen wastes of Spain and Britain, with a brief burst of the usual twaddle.

Obscure Spanish footie team told to get rid of Cross of St George on alternative kit

Apparently it might incite violence. Particularly, one suspects, if the directors of the taxpayer-funded Permanent Seminar on International Migration and Foreigners (“an open space for Interculturality and Human Rights“) in Aragon attend home matches of SD Huesca, whose major achievement to date was fifth place in the Second Division in the 1950-1 season. Via Miguel…

Iron Maiden in the frontline of the flag war on Basque terrorism

An extreme nationalist Basque group, ANV, was recently banned for being the latest in a succession of ETA front organisations. In Navarre their political representation promote Anschluss with the Basque Country proper, and in a small town called Villava their councillors hung the Basque flag (representing the race, the feudal laws, and the Catholic faith)…

Biological phagocytosis of Spanish

Apparently the UPN, the PP’s brand in Navarre, is doing deals with the PSOE, feeling itself fagocitado by the PP. Phagocytosis is the incorporation by a cell of solid particles, which it may then store or break down. A brief glance at CREA suggests that in Spanish the nouns fagocitosis, fagocito etc are almost exclusively…

For Ronaldo

Não é desgraça ser pobre, there ain’t no shame in being poor, and sometimes it’s better only being able to afford one tranny hooker. By Amália Rodrigues, who I only discovered the other day.

Change of nationality

To the extent that I ever was English, I hereby relinquish all claim. I was talking to an Ecuadorian the other day who, having observed the relative position of his country and Spain in the atlas, said he was a native of the Low Countries, los Países Bajos. Ecuador, Holland, anything but England.

World Cup stalkers

I was sitting peacefully on a bench yesterday when an Italian architect came and sat beside me. (I knew he was a architect, because all the Italians here are architects. I don’t know why.) He asked me where the nearest supermarket was, but I knew this was just what chessplayers refer to as the Berlin…

Panna

The Guardian lists a bunch of furrin terms used in football, including panna, used in Holland to refer to the nutmeg and, apparently, especially in Surinamese Dutch. It would be interesting to know where it came from. The only remotely related word I can find in SIL’s brilliant Suriname languages site is the Carib pena,…