Francesc Peirón and his Vanguardia editors don’t know the name of the world’s most famous stock market index. “Down Jones” is used jokingly for “Dow Jones” when the market is falling (it’s up this morning) and in suppressing the Legitimate National Aspirations of the Welsh Race (we have none).
Carlos Muñoz of the Institut Libre Marie Haps in Brussels laments (a) the decline in prestige and airtime within Spain suffered by the standard, educated, Madrilenian accent of Spanish, and (b) the lack of phonetic consistency exhibited by model speakers of the more specifically regional accents which have to a certain extent replaced it. He…
Debating at lunch how long it would be before we’re all eating grass soup (sopa de golf on the costas), we progressed to the devil’s cookbook, and someone mentioned the 16th century colonial chronicler, Bernardino de Sahagún. Back when Bernardino was booking the cooks Mictlan was where dead Aztecs lived–way up north, probably in New…
It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of…
Classic nimbyism, enabled by Spain’s lack of effective central government: Castilla y León has lots of wolves, but other communities which, according to ecologists, should in historical and biological terms have some, don’t want to take the overproduction. So they’re being shot. I don’t suppose we could airlift them to the outskirts of Reykjavik.
Spelled-out evidence suggesting that Expansión, La Vanguardia and various other established Spanish newspapers’ international financial experts may actually know uck all about their subject.
I’ve often flippantly wondered whether the taboo on excretion at holy sites so thoroughly documented by Michael Gilleland is the origin of the old joke about the antiquarian who locks his shop during absences to prevent folks depositing even more Dan Brown. Here’s Melchor de Santa Cruz de Dueñas’ take (Floresta española, 1574) on Mark…
One of Spain’s greatest 20th century plagiarists intertextualisers was the novelist Valle-Inclán. His gypsies are substantially borrowed from George of that name, but as far as I know it is only in the following passage from La corte de los milagros, a novel set in the period when Borrow was in Spain, that he refers…