Tom (who is these days blogging less and twittering more) encountered this proclamation on entering Ciudadela de Menorca, and suggests correctly that it refers to the publication in the Boletín Oficial del Estado of a fascist decree, promoted by education minister Manuel Lora Tamayo and signed off by Franco on Christmas Eve 1964, protecting the…
Christmas time is ham time. It’s also a time when, knowing that some of you may have had one or two bottles too many, some tapas bars and restaurants will flog you cheap ham as something rather better – cat for hare, as the Spanish say. In the run up to Christmas last year the…
Over at Mr Harvey’s place, to whom and all a happy Christmas. One day I’ll explain how for certain folks “Vamos a comprar un pato” came to mean “Let’s get stoned out of our fricking tree,” but today is a day of joy, hope and peace, and so they may slumber on while I cook…
One of the more interesting developments at the guided tours business over the past few years has been an increase in the proportion of weird walks sold as younger customers have started using decent, cheap handheld-hosted apps to cover the basic “¡Look! ¡Ze catedral!” legacy (OK, zombie) guide territory. Real-time optical character recognition with machine…
Picking up linguistic errors by the Catalan government is shooting phish in a barrel–they often have difficulties with Catalan–but my non-empirical impression is that they and other local authorities struggle rather more with German than with English. Classic English errors are still there to be enjoyed, of course: take for example {-gn -> -ng}, as…
The council’s Christmas greetings–some of which include Spanish, the city’s common language–wish passersby “Fröhe Weihnachten” instead of “Frohe Weihnachten”. Regional president José Montilla’s kids go to the German School in Barcelona, so presumably they didn’t get to proofread.
The sun dog is seen above reborn, having previously mysteriously died at the end of the solar year: While its soul wanders the underworld, its old and weary body is barbecued and consumed in dark hovels by fearful peasants: I’ve forgotten who it was who believed the Old Testament was originally written in English, or…
Avert your eyes, epilepsy sufferers, as the Flash animations load, but stay on for the fucked goodies on the Bohórquez family estates, “where the brave bull wanders”, “the horse gallops to his whim”, and everybody else simply skips to their Lou as the sun withdraws discretely behind the “intricate skirted passages of ever bloomed plant…
From The Parish Clerk (1907) by Peter Hampson Ditchfield: Robert Dicker, quondam cabinet-maker in the town of Crediton, Devon, reigned for many years as parish clerk to the, at one time, collegiate church of the same town. He appears to have fulfilled his office satisfactorily up to about 1870, when his mind became somewhat feeble.…
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