Karl Marx – Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder

Organ-grinder tweets for November 2017

More monkey mess from the peripatetic Homerton/Hackney barrel organ.

Rats/mice bearing the cat to his grave in Tarragona, anticipating Russian prints of the scene.

Battles of the if-only-they’d-been-homophones: Mars vs Marx

An optimist might say that the chart shows a Roman deity giving way to a late Old Testament prophet giving way to scientific interest in the world(s) about us.

Juvenal: Will you please … learn the colour of your own bread

Class consciousness didn’t commence in the bakeries of the Industrial Revolution.

Otto van Veen, distribution of herring and white bread after the raising of the Spanish siege of Leiden by the Geuzen in 1574

Berlusconi and the wiseness of Mubarak

“The wisest of men” line isn’t the former’s, but ben trovato it certainly is.

<a href='http://www.flickr.com/photos/cagiflickr/5389372179/'>Tutta colpa di mia nipote Ruby</a>, CC by <a href='http://www.flickr.com/photos/cagiflickr/'>cagiflickr</a>

Biblioteca Virtual de la Filología Española

Why I’ll probably be sticking with the Biblioteca Virtual del Señor Licenciado Pero Pérez.

Solving the crisis in Spain’s public finances, part LXXII: It’s time to ban socks

The Spanish government is determined to retain the 500€ note as a crucial weapon in the fight to reduce tax evasion and money laundering. Getting rid of socks would achieve that same goal effectively without inconvenience to honest citizens and would also provide a stealth-protectionist boost to the economy.

More from the revolution

Communist leader Cayo Lara seems to have copied an incendiary Marx quote from an American satirical news site.

European action on Spanish institutional corruption

Check out this substantial bombshell being chucked at the Spanish establishment at all levels and in all territories for its collective refusal to confront (indeed for its participation in) the flagrant, widespread, long-term abuse of individual property rights. But will the threat of a Bulgarian-style loss of European funds to the common weal be sufficient…

Peasants who don’t know how to cross themselves

Apparently we anglocabrones used to think that crossing oneself was prerequisite to being Spanish. Here’s Juan Goytisolo in La Guardia, a short story written in the early 1950s, partly available in GBS: From the window I saw a group of conscripts in parade dress. It was Sunday and the officers’ room was deserted. Its furniture…

French exam

I omitted one feasible fraudulent etymology from the Viadós post because the etymon in question is little known and less read, even in his own country, whichever that was. Here he is anyway, in another anecdote from Cela‘s late but frequently excellent A bote pronto: Some 65 years ago, more or less, possibly more, when…