Mmax says that, on February 14 1929, his great-uncle, Ralph Forte, was listening to Chicago police radio from the offices of AP when he heard some slightly unusual news from North Clark Street. Apparently Mr Forte had just fled Italy after writing an article entitled “Everyone obeys Mussolini except the cats”. Can his welcome in…
Captain Al Cohol (via Papel Continuo; more superheroes) has nothing to do with Al Pernales. I’d hate to think how long it is since I was last ravaged by a bare
When I went out this morning onto the Rambla del Raval, a man was standing up on the boom of the 40 metre crane overlooking Calle San Rafael. He gesticulated and shouted at the firemen in the crane cabin and then wandered out to smoke a cigarette at the 35 metre end. Under the shadow…
Following the post on Mexican organ grinders, someone kindly sent in the following anecdote, posted by Mark Williamson over at the Mechanical Music Digest: The Italian composer Pietro Mascagni was sitting in his study one day when a street musician stopped outside and began to play one of Mascagni’s pieces on his hand-cranked barrel organ.…
Here once again is polemics prof Geoff Nunberg making a dick of himself–check his update–while trying to do the same to George W Bush. Anyone who has spent any time with luvvies or second-hand booksellers will be aware that writing may be regarded as a commodity and that commoditisers are not necessarily unsympathetic idiots. […
Hardly seems worth cutting into vacation beer time for this, but here is the man referring to this over-aggressive post of mine: Trevor has me claiming that the object-present participle form of compounding is a recent invention of the political right and originates with nigger-loving. And in a new post: I was hardly claiming, as…
Sez he: The fact is that the right owns those object+present participle compounds, as surely as it owns values, media bias, the lapel-pin flag, and sentences that begin with “See….” In fact you could trace the whole history of the right’s campaigns against liberals via those compounds — from tree-hugging and NPR-listening back through the…
Funny from a piece by Lamya Tawfik illustrating Egyptian anti-Western paranoia: “Responding to claims that the language used by the youth plays a role in the distortion and erosion of the Arabic language, Nabeel Farouq, a famous Egyptian author of adventure stories for youth, said that this fear is baseless because, to begin with, Arabic…