Zapatero is biding his time, is the premonitory drift of Quarrell betweene the Dutch & English by Anon (via Polly Curtis@Guardian): The Belgick Frogge, out of the bogge, with Brittish mouse doth strive: The Iberian Kite meane while by slight, surprizeth both alive. While for their shares, of Indian wares, English & Dutch doe brawle;…
I’ve been on planet Mars, writing some arrangements and checking out the deeper side of big band theory, so I’ve only just discovered that the head of the conservative Partido Popular in Orense, Galicia, is a keen trombonist. Xosé Luis Baltar recently suggested to voters that Zapatero’s lot might try to steal the Galician elections…
Mark Liberman is being nasty to our beloved intellectuals, most of whom we manage to ignore most of the time. His frustration may arise from a misunderstanding of the role of the intellectual in European society, which is something like that of a Catholic bishop in the States. I think somewhere in Campo cerrado Max…
Dress code, hand signals, and messiahs apart, there were few important differences between the Falangists and the Stalinists. Hence the bizarre nature of the punchup started by the former at a PR event the other day for a book (Santos Juliá, Historia de las dos Españas) promoted by the latter. Here‘s Arcadi Espada: In a…
A deformed heap of dwarves
Cuts pourpoints in your coat of king;
And the imperial eagle, which, formerly, under your law,
Covered the whole world of thunder and flame,
Cuit, poor plucked bird, in their infamous pot!
“Is it true about the parsley, Your Excellency? That to distinguish Dominicans from Haitians you made all the blacks say perejil? And the ones who couldn’t pronounce it properly had their heads cut off?”
“I’ve heard that story.” Trujillo shrugged. “It’s just idle gossip.”
John Chappell suggests (scroll quickly past the bizarre homophobic rant) that “pull a Spain” (“hacer una españolada“) is becoming the new “pull a Chamberlain”, an expression for poorly reasoned cowardice. That’s clearly true for Americans in pyjamas, but doesn’t yet apply to British+ anklebiters. Here are the official results (in ghits) from the gorpus: …
Stalin apologist Rafael Poch has published an article in La Vanguardia which belittles, falsifies, misrepresents the Normandy landings. That’s a common line here, where quite large numbers of people still believe that Stalin (substitute Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Companys etc as you will) was a benevolent (although misunderstood) genius. All’s quiet on the domestic front…
All last year industry and sections of the PP were saying that there was no way that Spain could meet its Kyoto targets, currently being overshot by more than 100% as a result of the PP’s fine economic record (see below). Economics minister Rato was mugged by a bunch of industrialists in early December in…