The head of the Balearics tourism authority, Juan Carlos Alía, has just had to resign following the revelation – brought out by some smart work by socialist deputy, Antonio Diéguez – that he tried to include a trip to one of Moscow’s top brothels, Rasputin, on his expenses claim. Alía was in Moscow to give…
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…
“PRAVDA.Ru doesn’t recommend to use Xerox products”, reads an intriguing footer on the site of Russia’s version of National Enquirer. What seems to have happened is that Pravda took a major investment decision to purchase a USD300 Xerox photocopier. After x000 bumshots the damn thing broke and the USD150 repair fee has destroyed their previously…
Re the Abramovich boat post: I’ve been contacted now by three British newspapers, one gentleman who sounded suspiciously like a Russian investigator, various salesmen and a couple of nuts. Honest, I don’t know where the boat is, I haven’t got the faintest idea how he paid for it, and it doesn’t interest me in the…
Like the British vis-à-vis the French, an influential current in Indonesian opinion remains convinced that the outside world is determined to destroy it with naughtiness. Some believe that, far from being innate or Islamic, the current bout of banning can be traced back to paranoia generated by the CIA’s attempts round 1960 to bring down…
The studied use of archaicisms, vowel transposition and misspelled euphemism means that in spam a couple of hundred English proto-dialects are born and die every day. Here is part of a message received this morning from Jesus: launger eræctoins ma micelnes in eower beran mara sæd betera þe vaigra! When the men in the white…
The following pricelist was received from a spammer who thinks that a Taiwanese email address is worth 70 times as much to me as an American one. America 175 Million Email Address $220 US Europe 156 Million Email Address $250 US Asia 168 Million Email Address $150 US China(PRC) 80 Million Email Address $200 US…
The sports stars interviewed here by Pennsylvania’s Patriot-News confirm what every Dutch child knows already: watch television in your target tongue and you can skip those expensive and boring language classes. Different alphabets are another kettle of fish, however: “I was reading a book that Artukhin had on the bus,” Richardson said. “It was Russian.…
Just a couple of Russian daisies for the chain: One of the aims of the great Russian spelling reform of 1917 was apparently to make War and Peace shorter, thus saving paper. It is strange then that socialists in the rest of the world ended up trading c for k, which actually uses more ink.…
The two reports this morning of sudden waves of deaths in Russia in December from cold and/or respiratory complaints and Klebsiella pneumonia both sound more like residual incidences of pneumonic plague. As far as I’m aware (visibility down to three metres this morning), kids don’t usually get Klebsiella (which resembles the plague), and both cases…