An El Punt hack (900€/month, I’m told) has noticed that, with Atlantic Basin hurricane namers almost through their standard list, the Greek reserves may be required, leaving Spain open to a storm named for the 7th letter of their alphabet. (The Mediterranean is part of the Atlantic Basin, in case you wondered.)
Amando de Miguel says that Aura Grandal says that people in Ferrol, Galicia call policemen “chepas”, and that this derives from “shepherds”, which is what British engineers called the watchmen in the naval arsenals. I’m going to believe it, whether I do or not.
The only useful feature of the new local search tool Noxtrum is the free SMS feature. Unfortunately the enterprise belongs to Spain’s disastrous, dominant phone company, Telefónica, so the service is of course unavailable.
I can’t remember learning to read texts or music, so phonics means little to me. I do remember that different headteachers made us learn to write with different styles, with the result that my handwriting is completely illegible (“That’s not a signature,” stormed my first bank manager, “do a better one!”). Were it not for…
Lord Frederic Hamilton, Here, There And Everywhere (1921): “The Briton contrives an ugly town in which you can live in reasonable health and comfort; the Spaniard fashions a most picturesque city in which you are extremely like to die.”
Chávez’s anti-gringo rhetoric forms the basis of his appeal, but new evidence (which may gull the gullible and disturb yet the already disturbed) suggests that the guiri–the Spanish gringo–may have actually originated in what should perhaps be renamed the República Guiriana. Here’s Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535)…
The last time I was in Caracas a general parked his tank outside the national assembly building and the chamber maid died of cholera. Things haven’t improved since, and Hugo Chávez’s infant daughter has just thrown a spanner in the works of the historic Bonaire invasion project by telling him to drop everything else until…
I already knew that Sant Pau in Sant Pol de Mar (walk) was a damn fine restaurant (Carme Ruscalleda has just bagged her third Michelin star). What I didn’t know is that, since April Fool’s 2004, aeroplane-averse Japanese have been able to patronise a replica in Tokyo. I hereby offer to fix their English in…