Re this, this: A gent from Grolsch is in a bar with colleagues from Heineken and Bavaria. The Heineken man orders a Heineken, the Bavaria man a Bavaria, and the Grolsch man a glass of urine. “Why don’t you get a Grolsch?” the others ask. “Well you’re not drinking beer either,” says the man from…
After WWI French government sold off old Remington rifles to dealers who resold them to rebels in Spain’s Moroccan territories. Writes Arturo Barea in La forja de un rebelde (The forging of a rebel): ‘The bulky lead bullet made a peculiar sound as it left the mouth of the rifle, a sound that resonated on…
… was one of the comparatively few in which I never sat, hoping that one day things would get better. Anyway, it’s gone. Here’s a memory from someone else, which I hope he won’t mind me quoting: That’s sad – it was quite a place. Full of the strangest people. There used to be a…
One dreadful consequence of writing this blog has been a realisation that ideas whose sublimity none has dared impute in the bar down the alley, Sally, are regularly rubbished by those too distant to receive the hair-mussing they so richly deserve. Here, for example, barrett writes “Ghits”, by the way, is an abomination and reminiscent…
This is apparently an Andalusian trait that turns up with Andalusians in the Americas. Previously is was regarded as demonstrating stupidity and a lack of education, but we’re all stupid and uneducated now.
I’ll publish some photos soon of a virtually unknown mediaeval mural of an infernal animal pageant, during which I’ll be sticking my head again into après moi, le déluge. These guys seem to waste even more time on the net than I do. I hope they’re getting paid for it.
In connection with the La horda business, I’m just reading around a bit. One think I’m interested in is the migration of /r/ in some Spanish speech, so that for example pobre > probe. I’d like to know why it happens (is it along the lines of the al-oud > lute shift, or is it…
There’s a deserved attack here by Franco Alemán on a lousy article by Carmen Montón in La Vanguardia, the paper for people who like to think they know about Foreignistan. She says that “[Theo]Van Gogh had exceeded the most extreme limits of provocation known in civilised countries.” This is not the view of the man…
Strange historical trivia: the codename for Hitler’s programme to help Franco in the war on Spanish Bolshevism (or whatever), Feuerzauber, was used again for the Mogadishu hijack rescue which formed part of the Federal Republic’s war on the Red Army Fraction‘s leftist terror.