How to flavour your cake with shashlyk for free

This Nasreddin Hodja story (via Ray Girvan) reminds me of the custom in at least one particularly poor part of England in the early 20th century of having the man in the cornershop slice one’s bread with the ham knife in order to add taste.

Error squared

Regret the error includes an item from the Denver Post: Because of an editor’s error, a sentence on page 8D on Tuesday in a story about Rockies prospect Hector Gomez buying a bus was changed from “On the back he put ‘Los Peloteros’ which in Spanish means ‘The Ballplayers'” to “he put ‘Los Plotters’ which…

Camel trammel

RMF over at Fum i estalzí has the lowdown, with before and after pics, on the death of a camel (or is it a dromedary?) at Ataturk International Airport. Grey Wolf would not have been chuffed. (More on Google in English.)

Spanish spelling reform

“Eñe rrepresenta balore ma elebao de tradision ispanika y primero kaeremo mueto ante ke asetar bejasione a simbolo ke a sio korason bibifikante de istoria epañola unibersa,” and so forth, via JPQ, and without apologies to whoever wrote what may be the original.

Nicked

Barcepundit has caught Julio Valdeón Blanco in El Mundo plagiarising Julie Bosman in the NY Times. Julio’s narrative style is characterised by his brilliant use of language, unless it was he who wrote his Wikipedia profile. (PS Whatever happened to Rafael Ramos? Nothing, of course!)

Walking Kennedy to Manhattan

I’m not a big fan of his writing, but this is cool. Once somewhere similar I used to walk to work to burn off beer and pizza reserves and ended up going cross-country, cross ditch and thru hedge, to avoid car-bound colleagues who would stop and ask if I was OK.

Tent

Thomas Wright’s 1857 Dictionary of obsolete and provincial English says it is an inferior alicant wine, and used as a general term for all Spanish reds (ie from tinto), which seems somewhat at odds with his quote from Ward’s diary (16×2): “I drank tent with Mr. Hartman. It is a very sweet and a luscious…