… seems to have come in at the end of the 40s: Arturo heredó la taberna en 1939 y la transformó en bar dos años más tarde. En 1949 hizo una nueva reforma: puso un letrero luminoso, un armario frigorífico y seis mesas de formica: “La Montaña-Cafetería Bar”. Poco después la transformaba en banco. Es…
Vaguely re this post, there’s a strong current of belief here that sees the Civil War as a rerun of the Reconquista, with (here we head into caricature mode) the left viewing both as the destruction of a new age of peace and love (the latter in all its many varieties) by intolerant savages, while…
In Amor se escribe sin hache (Amor is written without H, 1929), “an almost cosmopolitan novel,” Enrique Jardiel Poncela describe Birmingham as “the Albacete of the United Kingdom.” Not to be outdone, José Martínez Azorín (who also gave the Generation of 98 its name) baptised Albacete “the New York of La Mancha.” That all this…
The isleños (islanders), the Canarian-based dialect speakers based in St Bernard parish near New Orleans, are some of the less-publicised victims of the floods. Their victory against age-old enemies in the interests of yet more Anglo hegemony is commemorated in this 1970s song (more links; Mississippi song project): Setecientos setentaisiete, varias familias dejaron las Islas…
Where arse turns up regularly in jokes, proverbs and stories, bollocks–cojones–in CORDE’s version of sixteenth century Spain seem to be confined to medical treatises and to a verse novel of quite extraordinary and possibly unsurpassed filth. The anonymous Carajicomedia (1519) consists of the adventures of the noble Diego Fajardo’s one-eyed trouser snake, which is said…
Check out Jayne over at Pyrenean Notes, who’s plugging the fiesta in Plan, up in the Huescan Pyrenees, and writing about other interesting stuff like mountain walking.
Vaguely re this, I was surprised to find that medieval Spanish local legal codes are thick with arse. Fueros sometimes proscribe face-arse contact and are generally quite stern about insertions of any nature, unless of course they form part of fun-for-all, legally sanctioned punishments. By the sixteenth century arsebanditry has become slightly more fun–unless, of…
I think Stephen Moss is wrong to suggest that the British have only recently become patriotic–I think they probably always were to a much greater degree than BBC programming suggested. Some kind of shift in perceptions of Britain has, however, taken place. Whereas the Union Jack used to associated with the European far right, now…
When I went back to live in Ingerland a few years ago, it took a month before I felt I knew what was going on in meetings where people used new expressions like “the dog’s bollocks” and “a load of arse”. This time I’m preparing my trip and today I discovered that England spin bowler…
Most unfortunate that Tony Blair’s moderate Muslims mostly turned out to be cartoon psychos. Here’s another burst of frivolity, available in several locations, which, like Yasser Arafat, I take to be a spoof: Many of us celebrate what is known as April fool or, if it is translated literally, the “trick of April”. But how…