I was singing this afternoon somewhere and sang “Haikus in Beirut” instead of “Moonlight in Vermont”, completely by mistake. I was thinking about the time in the middle of the night when we drunkenly tried to hijack a plane to go and kidnap an amateur poet’s true love from her family in the Bekaa Valley…
José Antonio Martínez Torres, Prisionero de los infieles. Vida y rescate de los cautivos cristianos en el Mediterráneo musulmán (siglos XVI-XVII), says (PDF) that Christians captive in Oran and Algiers could go to the pub and church, as long as they paid.
“The first day of this month will be remembered throughout the centuries because of the earthquakes and fires that have destroyed a large part of this city; fortunately, the safes of the royal exchequer, as well as those of many private citizens, have been recovered from the ruins.” (Taken from an article by André Belo…
Missed it. I was into the music before Mr Kusturica started færting around, and it looks a lot more interesting than Glastonbury. Dear Guca, will you invite our gay tea-dance orchestra to play at next year’s festival? (Thankyou, Mr Toenail.)
She’s tabby, about 9 months old and starving up near a spring on Collserola–the drought means there’s very little to eat. From the delicacy of her manners I’d say she is domestic, and my guess is that her owners dumped her when they went on holiday. I can’t take her in, so I’m going to…
The BBC says (background info here) that Researchers in the US believe they have come closer to solving a centuries-old mystery – by deciphering knotted string used by the ancient Incas. Experts say one bunch of knots appears to identify a city, marking the first intelligible word from the extinct South American civilisation. The coloured,…
New Labour aren’t in the Bible (via Al El), but then neither are the dinosaurs, except in Florida (via Popbitch). (One of Dinosaur Adventure Land’s leading researchers is Dean “Million Volt Man” Ortner.)
“First thing we do is break their noses,” says Ukrainian cop, Igor, over at this Don Weber exhibit (via BB). I think that’s also Algerian police strategy: the Algerians who stalk tourists here tend to have omelette noses, nasty limps, parapet dentistry, you name it, while their Moroccan colleagues are usually more or less unscarred.…
For reasons that are perfectly legit and PC, I’ve got to write some phoney Arabic. I am not, of course, the first to fool around with God’s own language. The Dan Rather story is still a giggle, and The Lost City is on my Christmas list.
I’ve been doing some research on The Next Stage. I liked the bit on Stuart Simmons site (merci, Freuzel!) where he says, “People often ask if I had to drink a lot of beer to build an Earthship. The answer is no but it sure helps.” There’s no way you’d get away with proper earthships…