“one of the most rooted wine families in Jerez”

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,…

How singing can save your life

César-Javier Palacios reports on the cyclist, shot dead by a hunter who mistook him for a boar. When in death’s dark vale loud singing usually suffices to drive off hell’s hunters. Hunters know this too. In his romance, Count Arnaldos, hungry hawk in hand, falls prey to a sailor (love, glory or death, true or…

No dog launching in Algorfa, Alicante

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…

Plague of “Our Mrs of”

MM points out that “Our Mrs of” is a popular variant on the web (289 ghits), although still not quite as popular as “Our Lady of” (7,360,000 ghits). “Our mistress of” doesn’t sound quite as strange to native readers of dismal Tolkien epigonism, but let’s use the net to promote “Our Mrs of”, “Jesus Christ…

Our Mrs. of Gracia

Wikipedia has found a homely name for a church in Carmona, Seville province.

Fucked society

The most heartbreaking experience I’ve had recently was watching a smallholder digging up the vines he planted during the 60s and 70s boom. Brussels used to pay him subsidies to plant, but now they’ve said that he’ll only be able to earn money by destroying what they regard as his means of production but which…

Recession rations

Debating at lunch how long it would be before we’re all eating grass soup (sopa de golf on the costas), we progressed to the devil’s cookbook, and someone mentioned the 16th century colonial chronicler, Bernardino de Sahagún. Back when Bernardino was booking the cooks Mictlan was where dead Aztecs lived–way up north, probably in New…

From beyond the grave, Metternich on Brussels

Deogolwulf has translated the Grand Inquisitor’s Mein politisches Testament: In the internal arrangement of the empire, the nationalities gained a position which was bound to be expressed by the selection and in the activity of public officials from the lowest rank to the highest. In a state thus arranged, it is for natural reasons difficult…