Just to the right of the dedication to Tony and Ingrid, dated 2006, are the faint remains of a similar one to Toni and Ana, dated 2004. What will 2008 bring?
From Manuel Fraga’s dreadful Nuevos diálogos, found yesterday on the street (it’s becoming a habit): An old French song reminds us that “the pleasure of love only lasts a moment, while the sorrow of love lasts for ever.” A pragmatic English take, probably also old: What’s the difference between love and herpes? Herpes is for…
Two elderly ladies have just met for the first time and are sounding each other out: A: My dog is so intelligent it stands by the door and woofs whenever it wants to go out and have a poo. B: My cat is so intelligent it comes in at five o’clock in the morning and…
None of the evangelists mention San José, electrician: Here’s a lamb emerging from the tower blocks with which urban planners chose to blanket the lower half of the old market square, which has been jacked up to cover a huge underground carpark: All on this walk.
Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…
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…
I am building a bird table so I can catch tasty little birds with a net and fry them in bechamel for breakfast. Its leg consists sturdy spring, which will cause pigeons, goats and other creatures undesirable for this purpose to fall off before they get to the bait.
Walking down the escalator at Fontana metro, I pass a undistinguished-looking middle-aged woman just as she skilfully inserts her hand into the bag of the girl standing, unaware, on the step below her. I grip her arm and say, Gotcha. Oh no, she says, it’s my daughter, but you’re right to do it: there are…