I think a public intellectual must be rather like a public house, where over-consumption of what seems so attractive at the time shortly and surely leads to idiocy and ruin. All that glitters etc etc (via Barcepundit).
“Chávez … expressed solidarity with ‘president Robert Mugabe and the people of Zimbawe, because both blacks and whites have rights.'” So will Venezuelan land reform also end in famine? (Aside: I fear that those who hope Chávez will do something about the notorious correlation in Venezuela between status and lightness of skin will be grievously…
Re a post by Amando de Miguel in his interesting, if fairly Pleistocene, language column for Libertad Digital, I’ve compiled a little table of hits over time from Mark Davies’ corpus for several Spanish versions of the Great Satan (no hits in there for el Gran Satanás unfortunately). I’ve omitted USA = América because I’m…
Following the news about a Galician politician-trombonist, here’s a Louisianan trumpet-playing coroner: The first time Dr. Minyard ran, in 1969, he lost to the incumbent. But four years later, he and a slate of other candidates viewed as reformers – including Harry Connick Sr., the “Singing D.A.” – were swept into office. Another of those…
I hate the flag-waving and military parades around October 12, particularly when accompanied by the sight of the Spanish prime minister and king embracing a man who clearly regards himself as the next Latin American Mussolini. In it had been left to the church, the ceremony might have been rather different. Here’s part of a…
There’s a curious rant over at the Guardian by A Sivanandan, “a leading black intellectual and anti-racist campaigner” (does concealing one’s first name make one seem more intellectual?), in which he claims that Margaret Hodge, the Work and Pensions Minister, blamed a surge in white, working-class racism on its black victims’ failure to ‘integrate’… In…
This morning we went looking for gypsies and birds at the northern end of Collserola. When it suddenly started looking like it was going to rain very heavily–it subsequently did–we came down off the hills, overtaking old men carrying mushrooms and the occasional deckchair, and did a quick improvised tour of bars (Chuck Norris on…
Nineteenth century nationalism and anti-Papism made it easy to forget the extent of Spanish influence in the Low Countries during the sixteenth century. Much of this influence was literary, with translations and localisations of Spanish classics appearing rapidly and serving as models for several generations of Dutch authors, but Iberia’s greatest gift to the Provinces–like…