Tag: kaleboel

National stereotypes

As a Brit, I wonder if there are also Americans who roll around laughing when they discover FranklinCovey’s Mission Builder (“Use our Mission Builder exercise to add focus, direction, and a sense of purpose to your daily decisions”). I suspect not, because whereas Brits usually look at me as if I have suddenly produced a…

Who’s afraid of the big bad Wolof?

I once read some complete nonsense by UCD prof Clarence Major, so I do kind of wonder whether he’s got any evidence for the claim (Prentiss Riddle → MSNBC) that relates hip “to the Wolof verb hepi (‘to see’) or hipi (‘to open one’s eyes’)”. The Peace Corps Wolof-English dictionary (PDF) lists xippi, but they…

Introducing the Aragonese albino dragon slug

Nick Lloyd notes that “The spread of mad cows disease into Spain means that, following EU rules, dead cows, sheep and goats can no longer be left in the countryside, and must be destroyed.” Fortunately for Brussels this is not all that remains of a sheep but one of Spain’s rarest creatures, the Aragonese albino…

Speaking of football…

However much you hate football, this is the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile. Ah, say people, Ronaldinho is able to do that kind of stuff because he is Brazilian. We liberals know better than to believe any such nonsense. When I was a lot smaller, I saw ex-England keeper Gordon Banks play…

Zapatero already more notorious than Chamberlain–in the US

John Chappell suggests (scroll quickly past the bizarre homophobic rant) that “pull a Spain” (“hacer una españolada“) is becoming the new “pull a Chamberlain”, an expression for poorly reasoned cowardice. That’s clearly true for Americans in pyjamas, but doesn’t yet apply to British+ anklebiters. Here are the official results (in ghits) from the gorpus:  …

Medium/message

NYC is dispossessing newsstand owners in order to make the streets more monotone and generate ad revenues: Mary Whalen, whose family has owned a newsstand at the corner of William and Wall streets downtown since 1922, said her stand is “an institution” — not just a structure. “We’re part of what makes New York New…

How Beijing financed the Dutch secret police

According to a book by ex-spook F Hoekstra, the Dutch Secret Service (BVD) set up a Maoist party, the Marxist-Leninist Party Netherlands (MLPN), to figure out the extent and nature of Chinese influence among students and scientists in the 70s. Operation Mongol was so successful that Holland’s genuine Maoist parties didn’t get any of the…

Drongos from Mars

There’s a good post over at Confrontación about the current Telefónica hard sell, which involves pestering hapless consumers with something worse than they’ve already got. Someone I know down south just had to wait four months for a line to be put in, and no, I really don’t want to hear your own Telefónica story.…