From Manuel Fraga’s dreadful Nuevos diálogos, found yesterday on the street (it’s becoming a habit): An old French song reminds us that “the pleasure of love only lasts a moment, while the sorrow of love lasts for ever.” A pragmatic English take, probably also old: What’s the difference between love and herpes? Herpes is for…
Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei. What was news to…
Javier López (Estella, Navarra) and Amando de Miguel are unable to locate alcanduz in any dictionary. I think they mean a tree dictionary, because, see, there’s this thing called Google. The definition given in Webster’s English to Aragonese Crosswork Puzzles is “sewer”, so maybe the socialists in La Rioja were hoping to highlight problems with…
From the baldie: Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain…
P tells of an interesting upcoming case in N in southern Albacete. The Forestry Commission planted trees on substantial areas of private land in the vicinity without asking permission and now wants to sue landowners for the value of the lumber. The latter submit that in 12 years none of the trees has grown above…
Such was the worldwide stir caused by my revelation that the Sweeney Todd story is at least a century older than previously thought that I know many of you will be impatient to read this new story of sinister stylists across the water. It’s from a French tutor, Méthode rationnelle suivant pas à pas la…
Apart from the end of the English Shadow, last night I read JM Castellet’s Els escenaris de la memòria. JM was a literary critic, which is French for vulgar gossip, whose occasional qualms regarding the persecution of Jews and sexual non-conformists in Russia don’t seem to have stopped him attending any number of well-catered Soviet-sponsored…
Those tree-hung disks aren’t really for scaring off the deer, silly. Take one home with you and, when you’ve had all you can bear of Hits of Hits or Dirty Dancing II, or when you figure that installing BitWare for Windows wasn’t that smart anyway, take it back and hang it on the correct tree.
