Italy – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Donald for Dalai Lama, or Pope, or Caliph, or something

A Trump Taj Mahal Casino multitrack jukebox, to help make religion rather better than it has been, again.

Entrance to the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, NJ.

A sensational 1810 Parisian fire scene on top of an 1840s Russian barrel organ

But who are the three noseless Austrian ladies?

Robert Hillingford, The Disaster at the Ball Given by the Austrian Embassy in Paris, 1810 (1897).

The debasement of the European mind

A populist US senator meets an Italian organ-grinder in Rome in 1859.

Yiddish and the Italian Welsh

Daffy-down-dilly has been and fled / Her yellow-green gown all stained in red. Featuring Google Translate’s transliteration service for unfamiliar scripts.

Napoleon meets a Welshman (1810-5). Dad's granny's granny used to recount seeing the Welsh march away to fight at Waterloo.

Irregular rhythmic irregularity in southern German music

How to write pastiche inconsistent non-isochronous subdivision for mechanical organ. With metrical analysis of the notes inégales in a bit of the Furtwängler recording of Mozart’s Gran Partita.

The Moravian Mathias Zdarsky demonstrating his new skiing technique (c. 1905), with unknown metrical consequences.

EU working languages & linguistic discrimination

Why pleb-speakers (I’d have thought of Greeks, Bulgarians, Turks(!) before Italians, not to mention the Cataloonies, who a few years ago thought the world was tilting their way…) from outside the EU core will never get a job there. What an immense mess, and how immensely profitable for some.

Borrowed glory

Tim Parks slags some prominent Italian-English literary translators and praises some lesser-known ones in the New York Review of Books: The problem is that it is hard for the wider public or even the critics really to know whether they have been given a good translation, and not easy even for the editors who have…

Mechanical musical instrument invented for the 1851 London Great Exhibition by Henry Mayhew

He also coined “flaxen Saxon.” With other absurdities.

Is the Cibber piper in the V&A a notorious plague-pit drunkard?

Featuring O du lieber Augustin, the Thomases Dekker and Middleton, Daniel Defoe and various disreputable beggars and foreigners.

Cibber's blind(?) piper (dog bottom left) in the V&A.

Miss Hurd strikes again

An Italian libertarian tells me that she and some friends booked to Burning Man were surprised to land in Solihull. Refugees from London are now rowing up the M6 to Burning Man aka Birmingham, Brighton and then Bath and Bristol having become too expensive, but best British value is still to be found in Boro,…