I want to do something quite simple: change from Vodafone to Movistar or Amena-Orange so I get reception in the Pyrenees, while keeping the same phone (a stream-personalised Nokia 3310), number and pre-pay accountability. When I say this shop assistants laugh uneasily and reach under the counter for the bat, and online things are no…
I failed to get into the Agbar tower a while back with a bunch of tourists who had agreed to impersonate a business delegation. Eulàlia Petit, however, has been inside and up Jean Nouvel’s phallus suppository rocket volcano-fired geyser. Its colours are red for fire, blue for water, and white for steam, and the irregular…
This is the promised translation of the chapter in Pío Baroja’s serialised novel The adventures, inventions and mystifications of Silvester Paradox / Aventuras, inventos y mixtificaciones de Silvestre Paradox (1901) in which Silvester takes up with an English conman, quack, amateur pugilist and exponent of inventions such as the translatoscope called Macbeth. The source is…
The claim by jokers like Jordi Bilbeny that whatever contains the odd Catalanism must have been written by a Catalan is obviously and completely ridiculous because it ignores a basic truth of the Mediterranean littoral: that multilingual jostling and experimentation has been going on here for as long as people have had horses, boats and…
There’s a bunch of mad old guys in the neighbourhood who come out and feed the pigeons, which then crap all over benches, bicycles and toddlers. One of the locals has discovered how to make them stop. He puts a handful of salt in his pocket, lies in wait till he sees them emptying their…
If the sentence “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever” does actually mean a cessation of drug dealing, beatings and other criminal activity, then the IRA have scored today’s big news. However there are still plenty of bad people in the world. Pedalling along this afternoon, on my way to see hear fellow-biker…
Of course it is the fault of those damn Muslims: The Marchenero is one of the oldest pouter breeds, and it is a breed that was developed in Spain in a period of time covering almost on thousand years. In order to understand the beginnings or ancient history, a brief history lesson is in order.…
Two old people were arguing this afternoon under the memorial to Joan Amades on Calle Carmen in the Raval about whether the pigeons should be fed. The argument proceeded along roughly the same lines as in the 1950s Parisian skirmish recorded in Juan Goytisolo‘s Señas de identidad (1966), in which the old man is determined…