Ireland – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

The Singing Organ-Grinder’s top 10 pig songs

Sincerity meets spam.

Pig-shaped terracotta rattle, Cypriot 3rdC BC-2ndC BC.

Two versions of Flann O’Brien’s “The workman’s friend”

With some relevant chunks of Henry Fielding.

Contemporary etching of Fielding from his <em>Jonathan Wild the Great</em>.

Noisy buskers used to drown out the sounds of murder

But were organ-grinders really complicit in the 1817 killing at Rodez of the French politician Fualdès, as the translation suggests, or were the vielles hurdy-gurdies, as you’d expect?

Witness Mrs Manson (sic) confronts murderers Messrs. Bastide and Jausion, heads still attached.

Irish break

Here. I suppose the murder of Nicholas Walsh before he completed his pioneering translation into Irish of the New Testament may have alienated talent from the market.

Rodrigo Rata

Mistranscription revenge in the Irish Times.

The worst translation ever published, hotel foyer penalty shoot-outs, lovers of pigs: paving on the road to hell

Between thieves, who profit from mistranslation, and fools, who know no better (and no profit), there lurks an intriguing class: lunatics, whose often considerable mind is whisked off to unexpected places by absurd fancies as to the nature of their task. The bigot Barnaby Rich writes in The Irish Hubbub (1617): And as the irish…

Fucked translation, the consequence of a strategic choice by the Spanish authorities?

My man in the education department of the Generalitat de Catalunya this lengthy lunchtime: “Why the fuck would we teach them English? Then all the smart ones will fuck off somewhere else to work less hours for twice the money and the Catalan economy will grind to a halt.” The same applies to Spanish teaching,…

The invisible ethnicity of Inspector Richard Tanner of the Met

The British-Jewish detective who hung the German murderer of a London banker. With photos of his tombstone in Winchester’s West Hill cemetery.

Richard Tanner, late Inspector in the Metropolitan Detective Police Force. Born October 30th 1831, died October 19th 1873. [Also wife and mother-in-law.]

El Cas dels Catalans and the House of the British Parliament

Early Day Motions are the British House of Commons’s ineffectual version of Facebook “likes”: they have no significance in the broader flow of politics, and for every signatory who believes earnestly that doing so will induce admiration in an informationally subnormal constituent, there is almost certainly another who a week later will have absolutely no…

The semantic divergence and convergence of “hooligan” and “Tory”

How two bands of bloodthirsty Fenians turned into peaceable middle-aged Englishmen with no known political opinions who smile a lot, are fond of sport and their children, and would probably enjoy a drink with you