The problem with Catalan “philologist” and “historian” Jordi Bilbeny being a 24-carrot burro is that when he occasionally says something half sensible no one listens. The conspiracy theory which rules Bilbeny’s life is that guys like Columbus and Cervantes were really Catalan, but that a powerful group destroyed all the evidence and then disappeared without…
Following up yesterday’s Galway post, and anticipating yet more “Columbus was Catalan/lesbian/a figure of speech” lunacy on Hispanidad Day tomorrow, here’s the chain of events that led Appeals Court judge William Hughes Mulligan to plump for the Galway connection, as put in a 1972 after-dinner speech to the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick in New…
Someone has been trying recently & kindly to hammer into my thick skull the nature and depth of early Irish ties with Iberia. Here’s a bleeding chunk from a piece called The City of the Tribes: Italian Memories in an Irish Port in a recently cited James Joyce anthology (Occasional, Critical, and Political Writings): The…
Just as reincarnationists invariably turn out to have been princesses in earlier lives, so mad, sad Jordi Bilbeny is incapable of retrospectively assigning any but worthies to the Glorious Catalan Nation. His work on Columbus demonstrates a basic ignorance of historical sources and method–Mr Ockham let loose on Mr Bilbeny would make Sweeney Todd look…
Someone has just suggested something that would make everyone’s life very much easier: that Mr Colom was neither Genoese, Catalan, nor Norwegian, but an invention of Mr Tolkien.
From the Discovery Channel summary it looks like they have had the sense not to haul in local nutcase Jordi Bilbeny in support of the latter assertion (his Brevíssima relació de la destrucció de la Història. La falsificació de la descoberta catalana d’Amèrica must be some of the most comically incompetent history ever written). However,…
Found in order to demonstrate Douwe Osinga’s cool Google date hack: On February 18, 1904 Charles Cazalet, member of an auxiliary bureau of the Bureau de bienfaisance, submitted a report to his fellow members detailing the benefits of establishing a workers’ garden in Bordeaux. This plan called upon the Bureau de bienfaisance to create and…
When Fats Waller sang “Mr Christopher Columbus/Sailed the sea without a compass” he probably didn’t know that the great admiral had acquired his navigational skills at a driving school in Sants, Barcelona (Colón = Columbus). Lyricist Andy Razaf may well have despaired of Mr Waller, who seems more or less to have improvised his version…
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