“Spring is here, spring is here, Life is skittles and life is beer,” sang Mr Lehrer, but first it’s time to park that old Ebro or Simca under an old olive tree (or a holly oak, or whatever takes the wrecker’s fancy): You can see these two rustbuckets (as well as a genuine iron mine)…
PL just sent me what he believes is a made-up story by La Vanguardia’s plagiarist moron in London, Rafael Ramos, the essence of which is that the City thinks that our new leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is just wonderful. There are a number of problems with the article: Various businesses in the City include…
Thanks to the DG for this Mirror item: A DRIVER who tried to run down a pedestrian he thought was terror chief Osama bin Laden has been given a three-month suspended jail sentence. He jumped a red light and sped down a pedestrian street as he chased the bearded shopper. He only failed to hit…
A number of people I spoke to yesterday were firmly convinced that Mr Aznar had himself planted the bombs, and that even al-Qaeda would be better than another Partido Popular term in power. Since most of these people also believe that one can have rational conversations with trees (but not, apparently, with prickly shrubs), it’s…
Very few journalists in any language can compete with Frits Abrahams, who currently writes five days a week for Holland’s best paper, NRC Handelsblad. His current function is that of glocal reporter: documenting clearly and accessibly everyday events that don’t get proper coverage elsewhere and that also happen to be of great importance to the…
Running or cycling whilst drunk may result in unanticipated (but not always unwelcome) entanglements with trees and shrubs. Mr Kouessi A Rene of Benin has monetised this concept and become a “manufacturer of alcoholics extracted from plants,” which he seems to be exhibiting at the 9th Ghana International Trade Fair. I used often to end…
“The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.”
Mrs RodrÃguez opens her front door, walks down the street to the large public waste container, jacks open the lid with her foot, and screams in terror as a very dirty man inside reaches to take her bags. Who needs state-run recycling?
Looking for something else, I just found this grammar, lexicon and corpus of Syldavian, the invented language used in the Tintin adventures King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Destination Moon and The Calculus Affair. Since I read Hergé before I learnt Dutch, and since, while old Syldavian uses the Roman alphabet, the contemporary script is Cyrillic, I’d always…