Overheard

So if that’s Badalona, where’s Goodalona?

For sale: TheBaldie.com

Just received an update reminder for thebaldie.com. Taking offers from baldie.com (not work-safe) and other hairless freaks via the usual channel. If no one wants it, I’ll probably renew it anyway, just so you don’t think baldies come cheap…

Happiness…

… is an extremely drunken Russian musician careering down a street mounted cowboy style on a wheeled drafting plotter. Fortunately no one was killed.

More Baron Sakender/Sakhender

If I were a bit smarter I’d have tried a couple of alternative spellings before posting this. There’s a good chapter by Anthony Reid dealing among others with Sakender in Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (ed Stuart B Schwartz) in which…

Names

More from Disraeli’s dad, this time on the peculiarly Spanish (continental?) fondness for long titles: The Spaniards then must feel a most singular contempt for a very short name, and on this subject Fuller has recorded a pleasant fact. An opulent citizen of the name of John Cuts (what name can be more unluckily short?)…

John Triggs

It says here: He was left for dead along a lonely New Mexico road, and another time he broke an elbow. But little things like that didn’t stop John Triggs, 54, from completing his 13-month, 17,300-mile bicycle odyssey over the backroads of the connected 48 states, Canada and Mexico. Just had a glass of wine…

Mobile conversation

Plump middle-aged woman with Marty Feldman eyes, hurrying along near the “ancient” synagogue @ 08:30: “Darling, I love you … Stop being jealous … Of course I love you … Put the chicken on at 12 … “

Leave Mena alone!

José Mena Aguado is apparently being punished on the basis of article 7.31 of the Ley Orgánica del Régimen Disciplinario de las Fuerzas Armadas, which requires neutrality of soldiers with respect to the various political alternatives. Since article 8.1 of the constitution requires the armed forces to defend Spain’s territorial integrity and the constitutional order,…

A Peruvian Anglicism

Everyone’s getting excited because Peruvian president-elect Evo Morales does state business wearing a chompa, which the resident linguists at El País today inform us is an indigenous word for jersey or sweater, and which is a sure sign to the paranoid right-wingers with whom I hang that he’s about to do a Chávez. No worries:…