Ñ is the cultural supplement of the Argentine daily, Clarín (here, via A&C, attacking norms established by the Spanish Royal Academy for a language spoken in 20 countries). Someone told me the other day that I should look up some numbers of a 40s Falangist publication called Y. Happy I was, till I discovered its…
Fabio Montermini’s excellent granny, who says in dialect (no army or navy in sight), “I can’t speak dialect and never have,” reminded me of a hilarious moment the other night during a meet-the-people TV show featuring the not so excellent Mariano Rajoy, struggling leader of the allegedly non-nationalist Partido Popular. Why, asked some poor mum…
Good fisking by John Chappell of a completely nonsensical piece by a troll who calls himself Ignacio Russell Cano and who publishes in the Jerusalem Post. Has the author ever visited Spain? I doubt it, but there’s a considerable volume of native anti-Zapatero lying to deal with as well–check out RMF at fum i estalzí…
Amando de Miguel says that Zapatero is Spain’s worst ever ruler, with the possible exception of Fernando VII, Witiza and someone else. Wittiza was very naughty and nasty indeed–he “taught all Spain to sin“–and, to crown it all, he invited the Moors into Spain to help him fight Wodewic. Maybe there’s a Visigoth somewhere who’d…
PP senator Carlos Benet has said that Pavía entered Congress on a horse (during the 1874 coup), Tejero with a pistol (this is the 1981 coup that failed), while Zapatero arrived by suburban train (the reference is to the Al Qaeda train bombs before the elections two years ago). I don’t think Pavía actually went…
La Vanguardia really does struggle at times. Here‘s roughly what Juan de la Mota of S&P said yesterday: El consejero delegado de la entidad en España, Juan de la Mota, explicó hoy en rueda de prensa que, aunque todavía quedan muchos detalles por definir, la calidad crediticia de las autonomías debería salir beneficiada de estos…
Silly me: I thought you were meant to paint fascist graffiti on fascist memorials. There must be some branding issue. (The definition I use is roughly the same as the American Heritage one: statist + nationalist + anticonstitutionalist.)
A little more reading (Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, Hispano-Arabic Literature and the Early Provençal Lyrics) suggests (possibly unjustly) that Wallada was famous not so much for her poetry as for being the caliph’s daughter and having poetry written about her by Ibn Zaydun. It’s a shame that in our enthusiasm to find ancient heroines inoffensive…
Were Zapatero to read the Bible as thoroughly as we Carpathian Independents, he’d be in a better position to understand the significance of the first photo-album of his glorious Alliance of Civilisations: the crowds sent to die in a desert in connivance with Morocco, the stigmata on the hands of those who make it over…