14/12, Octavi Martí 1950s gossipwank in El País: “Pero hay quienes aseguran, sin embargo, que [Rachida Dati] es una de las ministras más cercanas [a Sarkozy] y a ninguno de los dos les importa que se note.” 18/12, more gossipwank in El País, this time from one JM Martí Font: “El presidente francés Nicolas Sarkozy,…
Wikipedia suggests that H’Angus the Monkey (cartoon) may have been voted mayor first time by local gamblers attracted by the high odds against him. Stuart Drummond failed to honour his “free bananas” pledge, but was re-elected. On this walk.
None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician: Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark: All on this walk.
The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20…
Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…
This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just…
I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the…