Funny from a piece by Lamya Tawfik illustrating Egyptian anti-Western paranoia: “Responding to claims that the language used by the youth plays a role in the distortion and erosion of the Arabic language, Nabeel Farouq, a famous Egyptian author of adventure stories for youth, said that this fear is baseless because, to begin with, Arabic…
Sounds like LanguageHat also got approached by Grant Barrett’s minder at McGraw-Hill offering “a look at our book” in exchange for a plug. I invited her to send dead tree all the way to Spain and have heard nothing more, which you may wish to attribute to Spain’s splendidly relaxed postal service or to a…
Ephiphany may, of course, be a play on FIFA; alternatively, it may be telling us something about the state of Sean Ingle’s expenses in Stuttgart, where, according to the Guardian’s man on the spot, the streets are strained yellow.
Colin Davies suggests that people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss political independence until they have achieved domestic independence by moving out of their parents’ home. Since most street terrorist live off and with their mums (as do most people under 30), this seems quite sensible to me, although I’m not sure how easy it would…
Completely off-topic but delightful, this is from The Joviall Crew, or the Devill turn’d Ranter: being a character of the roaring Ranters of these Times, represented in a Comedie. Containing a true discovery of the cursed conversations, prodigious pranks, monstrous meetings, private performances, rude revellings, garrulous greetings, impious and incorrigible deportements of a sect (lately…
Here’s an old foreshadow–give or take the odd sacrifice–of a recent nocturnal trip in the English translation by Grace Frick of Yourcenar’s Hadrian: A few days before the departure from Antioch I went to offer sacrifice, as in other years, on the summit of Mount Casius. The ascent was made by night; just as for…
Apparently one has been booked by an artist with car and video camera to take off one’s clothes and pedal down from Tibidabo to the Columbus statue on the seafront during the first half of The Match, when it is assumed that absolutely no one will be on the streets. The flaw in this plan…
“It has the piercing gaze of the living and the fixed stare of the dead,” says dragonologist Jean-Marie Privat, “[and] breathes only in the shades of a strong, structured, nay, monotheistic state. It is both a representation of, and a figure of the transgression of, power, as testified by its presence in carnival. It is…
From the NYT: A small number of [Sarkozy’s] plainclothes police officers are wearing dreadlock wigs, hoods and Palestinian kaffiyehs to try to blend in with the street toughs. I do hope they remember not to wear their black shoes.