October stats

Webalizer says that daily averages last month were 1977 individual visits and 7987 page views, which is a record. The top 10 search strings haven’t changed much: unipeak, indonesian porn, abramovich yacht, gitanas, skinheads, pelorus, madrid masters models, pelorus yacht, tranny, troll. Lesson: humans don’t change but their numbers increase.

Defender who cheated death

Death row / Fila de la muerte by Pedro Patricio Escobal sounds like a good read. I’d also know more about football trainer, Mr Petland, who apparently engineered some kind of “English revolution” in Madrid and in the Basque country.

Jumping immigrants

Every night Africans try to climb over the razor-wire fences into Spain’s North African colonies; some don’t make it, and are robbed, raped, murdered by Moroccan “security” forces. Real Madrid employs some phenomenally well-paid Brazilians. El País’ homepage this afternoon.

Feijoo on artificial respiration

I don’t know when cardiopulmonary resuscitation was first performed, but here’s a 1753 citation by Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (Cartas eruditas y curiosas) from the London news para in the Madrid Gazette of 1753/4/17 of something that was apparently new to Spain: It was believed that a man who had suffocated on the fumes produced by…

Ahistorical Albacete

Unlike Carlos, I’m actually rather fond of Albacete, and not just because its ugliness is on a smaller scale than Birmingham’s. Although generally more energy tends to be devoted to damnation than to praise, I found out the other night, flicking through a book called Historia de la provincia de Albacete, that I’m not the…

Aub on burning Barcelona

Seeing hordes of plump Barcelonans engaged in public Tai-chi–imagine Jackie Chan on lard–and reading of the dreadful internal purges inflicted by Johannes Itten–who seems to have believed himself a Tibetan monk–on Bauhaus students before the parties started, I remembered that I was going to translate a bit more Aub’s Campo cerrado. So here, at top…

Fire!

Pere at Saragatona has photographed a building with two texts carved on its front, the first of which reads, CHARITY ENNOBLES LABOUR DIGNIFIES Graffiti in Barcelona’s Sans/Sants district expresses a different point of view: Labour doesn’t dignify, fire does I can’t remember which (piss-)artist it was who said that if Madrid’s Prado museum were burning…

Wanted: 150-year-old palmist

I think I can show that the term guiri is traceable to Semitic roots, and I will do at some stage, but I’d just like to add a little bit of very vaguely circumstantial evidence to an alternative hypothesis discussed here. At the time I turned over in bed and muttered: So was the term…

“Blair’s hiding something from us”

La Vanguardia invests a lot more in foreign coverage than some other Spanish newspapers but still ends up getting a lot of things wrong, sometimes intentionally. Here, however, is an absolute pearl of paranoid ludicricity from its even more downmarket colleague, El Periódico: Tony Blair’s government has imposed on its fellow citizens a policy of…

And the obscure horse came o-lympiang in

“Dark horse” is the normal racing term, so I suspect the Telegraph is referring to our very own black burro of the Apocalypse, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, when it says that “Madrid had been regarded as the black horse.” Or something. It’s too hot here to think straight.