The freeing of Ali Lmrabet

… by Mohammed VI of Morocco is the Maghrebi story making the international headlines today, Reporters Without Borders even going to the ridiculous lengths of expressing gratitude to the king for freeing someone who shouldn’t have been banged up in the first place. What most of the papers miss is that – apart from the…

Americans more popular than Moroccans in Spain

What with wars and everything, this is a turn-up for the books. The November poll (Word) of the national stats institute, the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas asked the Spanish people how much they liked Johnny Foreigner:   a lot quite a lot a little not at all don’t know didn’t answer Americans 4.9 35.0 32.2…

Taken by the gypsies

Interesting report in this morning’s Vanguardia: The man who in mid-November calls the police station of the Mossos d’Esquadra in Vic says that his 11-year old son has witnessed a kidnapping in Taradell (Osona). The report alarms the autonomous police force, which puts its incident plan into action; the description provided by the infant is…

MTV

Should the lawyers of what sometimes used to be known as Music Television be talking to those of Motos TV (or Motor Bike Television or whatever), or is this simply a hobbyist wrecking his van?

Duck-billed dog

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953): I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience “noticing an aspect…” And I must distinguish between the ‘continuous seeing’ of an aspect and the ‘dawning’ of an aspect…. I…

Walls

The good, the bad, and the quite ridiculously ugly.

etymology of guay: update

Three people tell me that 10-15 years ago when they were kids they used to use guay amongst themselves in the way Ms/Mr Fages suggests in my original post, eg Esto es guay de(l) Paraguay. One thought the phrase came from a song or radio ad but, strangely, none of them was aware of the…