Apparently it might incite violence. Particularly, one suspects, if the directors of the taxpayer-funded Permanent Seminar on International Migration and Foreigners (“an open space for Interculturality and Human Rights“) in Aragon attend home matches of SD Huesca, whose major achievement to date was fifth place in the Second Division in the 1950-1 season. Via Miguel…
More modern standard Andalusian from El Ciruco: You may fantasise about him blogging here, but someone would have to pay the shelf space for his photo collection.
Le blog du Chì, one year ago, on TF1’s enthusiasm for the apoplectic dwarf who substituted him as opium of the peephole. Another favourite mystification, from El Ciruco:
Foreigners used to have to wheel a barrow of photocopies around half a dozen offices to be rewarded with a small laminated residency card. Then residency cards were declared obsolete, the only catch being that for most kinds of transactions they were not, Spanish practice not quite keeping up with Ayooropean theory. So foreigners had…
The Ayuntamiento de Jerez gets EU money to assist with tourist promotion, but professional translators won’t work with it because it never pays on time. So instead of employing someone who can speak English and knows how to use a spellcheck, translation jobs seem to go to some witless illiterate at town hall who may,…
The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901 is now remembered mainly for the assassination of McKinley by a Polish-American anarchist follower of Emma Goldman. However it was yet another triumph for Thomas A Edison, Inc and its electric chairs, X-ray machines (McKinley might have survived had an Edison X-ray machine been allowed to locate the…
There are various explanations of Spanish anti-Americanism. The post-colonial hypothesis is popular: Spain is bitter about its loss of empire, its defeat in 1898, its not being invited to the G-whatever. An alternative hypothesis is that anti-Americanism is frustration arising from the idea that an implicit bilateral dollars-for-favours deal has been violated. In Luis Berlanga,…
Spain’s up at no 52 on the UN parking ticket corruption index, so that’s between the Ukraine and the Philippines, with average 12.7 unpaid violations per diplomat. The UK averages 0.0. Other crime news: Either the Azerbaijanis or the UAEers have stolen an “r” from Australia. The data’s pretty old, so perhaps Spanish councils’ new…
The chief of police of this small tourist town has apparently published an English version of the municipal bylaws. Among other things he wants you to do is to “Alter public order and tranquillity with scandals, disturbances, brawls and noise.” Will fucked translation constitute an adequate defence for British hooligans? Is the council–whose income from…