I love this Jaén olive oil cooking competition, which is held not in Jaén but in San Sebastián, at the other end of the country. Is this because Jaén-ocrats want an annual freebie to the north, or because they’re ashamed of their home town? S, currently designing a collection of wedding accessories for the metropolis,…
Javier López (Estella, Navarra) and Amando de Miguel are unable to locate alcanduz in any dictionary. I think they mean a tree dictionary, because, see, there’s this thing called Google. The definition given in Webster’s English to Aragonese Crosswork Puzzles is “sewer”, so maybe the socialists in La Rioja were hoping to highlight problems with…
Orhan Pamuk: Yes, until I was 30 I didn’t earn a single kopek, and I lived at my divorced mother’s house. I lived the strange life of a crazy boy who might one day become a writer. My friends had real jobs. I just wrote, and I could never get published. I was so ashamed,…
The format used to be /mm/dd/, which made a little bit of sense but not much more and would have meant a load of pain with WP. Now it is /?mes=mm&dia=dd, which still involved a small hack to solve date problems but enables individual items to take /yyyy/mm/dd/ . Examples here if you’re confused.
Rate: percentage of advertising and any other revenues accruing from this site or publication in any other form or medium. So that’s probably about €2 over the next 50 years. Talk to me here.
A helpful response in the debate between Petrarch (what’s the difference between a duck? One of its legs is both the same) might go something like this: Petrarch. I have indeed a great quantity of books. Critic. Leave them in a warehouse about 45mins cycle-ride from your house, and get rid of any you haven’t…
An amply dimensioned gypsy lady is vending six small cacti in pots and two bunches of cut chrysanths outside the municipal market building. An impeccably dressed faux-blonde pija approaches. –Three cactus for five euros! lovely flowers! three lovely cactus for five euros! lovely… –I want three cacti, that one, that one and that one. –That’ll…
Most southern European theorising re that poorly defined construct, Anglosaxonia, is corny racism dressed up as sociology or socialism or whatever. This, however, from one of my favourite reads, is amusing, if somewhat flawed: Lampedusa aroused in me the suspicion that the only country in which law and order are, pregonament, synonymous with civilisation and…
Exhibit 1 features Die Verdammte Spielerei and some blonde and was recorded in what will presumably be the Republic of Flanders by Monday. I suppose France will get Brussels. Exhibit 2 is Tango gitano, which “forms part of a group of field materials documenting Maria Garcia performing unaccompanied Spanish songs from Asturias, Spain on January…
This old bar in Badalona appears to be named after someone who doesn’t have a second surname or a business partner (there’s no room for a second word, so it can’t have been painted out) but who uses the conjunction anyway. I don’t see what’s wrong with being a brazen lover of conjunctions. They are…