How many deputies do 300,000 votes buy?

Or, the advantages of belonging to a tribe under Spain’s current electoral system: Nice photo all the same: [ Source. Absurd quote last night: “I’m happy Zapatero’s won, he’s good looking, isn’t he! Now let’s see if he can get rid of all these homosexuals this time round.” There’s one vote the PP missed. Favourite…

The Spanish nightwatchman

A revealing note from Fran Harper’s Spanish phrasebook (1963, “text by Joan I de Corvera”): If you stay in a hotel or private boarding house which has no all-night porter, and return after 10.30 p.m. in winter, or 11 p.m. in summer, the outer door will be opened by the “Sereno,” who is a kind…

Sinamay

I’ve spent the past half hour helping a milliner source sinamay, the principal material used in the confection of hats. It is made using small quantities of silk and the fibres of the abacá, a species of banana from the Philippines. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga (Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, researched 1803-5) writes that the…

Narcissists

One reason to get away from downtown Barcelona, which has become a drunken take on Disney World. Spain seems quite happy to be Europe’s Florida. (Dear Gallic lesbians living in my downstairs: this is not a sexuality thing.)

Pasolini and the sacred

Apart from the end of the English Shadow, last night I read JM Castellet’s Els escenaris de la memòria. JM was a literary critic, which is French for vulgar gossip, whose occasional qualms regarding the persecution of Jews and sexual non-conformists in Russia don’t seem to have stopped him attending any number of well-catered Soviet-sponsored…

Queers and gypsies

April 1939, and the Valencian communist and later Mexican entrepreneur Arturo García Igual (Entre aquella España nuestra … y la peregrina, available in part on GBS) has, as a Stalinist commissar, been sent to the elite camp at Agde, France, where night after night unsuspected talents [took to] an improvised stage: actors, comics, illusionists and…

Bestiality in Cádiz

Urquhart, The Pillars of Hercules, Or, A Narrative of Travels in Spain and Morocco in 1848: “I observed, on a placard, the two following signs of progress and civilization, in titles of new works: ‘The defender of the fair sex,’ and ‘The Ass, a beastly periodical.’ The words were ‘Il Burro, periodico bestial.” Re the…

Serbs barter cows for penises

I recently had lunch with a Huescan entrepreneur who sold his dad’s cows in the 50s to buy a car, but this is ridiculous. [ Update: D confirms that Srecko Djordjevic is not an anagram of for example “jive jerks cod cord” and points out that he has form: A man chopped his own penis…

Sex tours, anyone?

Fortunately not all the requests I get at follow the baldie are this interesting: I and my female companoin propose to visit Spain in summer of 2007.We wan to see the following: 1.The popular sites in barcelona during day and night. 2.Nude stage shows where we can see interactive session between male and female and…