France’s finest trip over their own testicles once again, here alienating the trombone vote. Possibly. (Mercy buckets, Dr Pete.) (Normal service to be resumed soon, so watch yer dirty mouth Manuel. Yes, you. They don’t call me Purple Boner for nothing.)
A snip at $250K, via Dave. The photo of Jake Burkle reminds one that, for all their Portuguese ukelele folk hero trappings, Sousa and his people were essentially industrial pioneers. Amusing detail, from William L Bird, “Better Living”: Advertising, Media, and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership, 1935-1955: Arthur Pryor’s son, Arthur, was hired by…
Abogánster = abogado (lawyer) + gangster. Here‘s some good stuff by Carlos Monsiváis about legal culture in a country where justice is generally viewed as the belonging to the rich. He says that abogánster is a 1940s term whose archetype was Bernabé Jurado, legendary for eating evidence, buying witnesses, overseeing torture leading to false confessions,…
I went into the excellent and apparently men-only Cantina La Fuente in Guadalajara, Jalisco this morning and ordered a beer. An aggressive-looking youngish guy further down the bar started mouthing off loudly about gringos, so I went over to see what his problem was, and it turned out he was a frustrated sysadmin looking for…
Kate Alcock (via Lingformant): children who were poor at moving their mouths were particularly weak at language skills, while those who were good at these movements had a range of language abilities.
Slightly off-topic, but irresistible, from Henry Hiram Riley‘s pseudo-ethnography, Puddleford and its people (New York, 1854): Another amusement, frequent in the country, was the turn-out of the ‘Calathumpian Band.’ … No one knew exactly who its members were; but they were always on hand, soon after a wedding, in full uniform, with all their instruments…
Apart from reliving medieval massacres, there are various perfectly sensible reasons why one might want to thwack the ground in the spring. Mark Liberman has found a worm grunting festival which makes me wonder whether the underlying purpose might not be to wake up the worms, without whom stuff wouldn’t grow. (Worms are like eyeballs:…
