God ain’t deaf

I find that the rector of the church in Plan, Sobrarbe, Huesca, Spain blasts out his services over speakers, to the distress of neighbours without detachable hearing aids and to the alarm of sheep on the mountains. It’s not 140dB (source), but it ain’t good for tourism neither.

Hilarious Shadow of the wind reviews

Someone’s passed me the English edition, with the usual gibberish-infested flap. The Scotsman describes it as having “a dramatic tension that so many contemporary novels today seem to lack,” while Scotland on Sunday says, “The translation by Lucia Graves is excellent, mixing formality with poetry, so the rambling prose occasionally sparkles with lovely phrases ……

Lizard

Some species sit still and others don’t. Lizards tend to the latter, usually only letting you close on them if they are petrified or ill. This one appears to be neither, and remained reasonably calm even when I almost fell off my log onto its.

Ghost in the cafetera

For a while it sounded like Morse machine being boiled alive, something which probably hasn’t happened for quite a long time, and for sure it’s a terrible thing to be doing anyway. (You may need to turn up the sound. I’m using YouTube and accepting its lack of editing facilities because, like various other famous…

Flutterby

Front elevation: Plan view: These butterflies are incredibly lazy, and there are lots of them. Something wrong there.

Don’t shoot that hare

El Niño de Tetuán singing fandangos (MP3s or him and a superb selection of others). We’re probably talking early 1930s, but I don’t know where–Seville or Jerez seems more likely than Tetuan :-): A esa liebre no tirarle cazaores de la sierra a esa liebra no tirarle porque está haciendo en la tierra madriguera pa…

Nazionals

Yes, I know that modern Aragonese ultra-nationalists aren’t quite the same as old German ultra-nationalists, but that c/z swap does look rather unfortunate, doesn’t it.

How the Moriscos of Granada made poison darts

The action sometimes turned a shade Bulgarian during the Granada Wars–at least that’s what one infers from Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in this extract from Guerra de Granada (paras introduced for legibility): Wounded by two poisoned arrows, Don Alonso [de Aguilar] fought until he fell, disabled by the poison used among hunters since ancient times.…