Category Archives: Site news

thebadrash.com and branching out

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Tuesday - 25 October 2011

Hello there! Long time, no see!

Over the years, this blog has evolved. At first I shared links (that's what blogs used to be for), talked about books and music, and explored some of my innocent ideas about politics. Some time after March 2004, I felt inexorably drawn into the debate on Catalan language policy and the Catalan national question in general. And we've had some fun debates here. Who could forget the heady days of the Spain Herald folding, and Iberian Notes closing down? Or the excellent response I got to my 'Some questions…' posts?

The problem was that whenever I wrote about other topics – books, music, links, food, travel, etc – I'd get hardly any response at all. Which is pretty frustrating because of all the topics I ever write about, Catalan independence is… well, it's not the one that interests me the most.

Over the last few months, I've been toying with different solutions to this problem. I decided that I'd either rebrand this blog and try to branch out into other topics of discussion, or I'd keep thebadrash.com for Catalan politics and related topics and start another blog for stuff that everyone else in the world is interested in. I've gone for the latter option.

tombcn.com is my new 'homepage'. It'll be about just about any topic I can think of, except Catalan and Spanish politics. It needs some design and lots more content but it's fresh and new and exciting*. Look, it already has a short post about Martiniquan jazz!

Meanwhile, I do intend to update this place from time to time. Però, poc.

See you at the other place. Until then, adéu siau!

____

*OK that's pushing it a bit.

Scratching another bad rash

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Monday - 19 July 2010

I've adopted a new design. It's not perfect, but neither was the last one (which I think this emulates fairly well). The new look was necessary because the previous theme I was using doesn't support various features of the newer versions of WordPress.

There are still things to be fixed, but I'm pretty much finished tweaking the design for now. Please let me know if there's anything particularly glaring that you don't like about it.

thebadrash.com – problems

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Tuesday - 3 March 2009

Hi! I've not given up on this precious blog of mine. It's just that various little things (busy weekends, lots of work, my hosting service banning my office's ISP – yeah, WTF!?) – are conspiring against me getting any of the posts I've been working on finished.

Those of you who're super modern can follow me on Twitter, but I'll be posting regularly here again soon.

thabadMonth – top posts in the last 30 days

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Sunday - 9 November 2008

These are the five most popular posts on thebadrash this month… the Vagina Institute one is more down to odd Google searches than anything else, and the Nazi Pop Twins one was submitted by someone to StumbleUpon. The alternative poll was linked, as some may have guessed, to a comments thread on another Catalonia-based blog. Next week, I'll go into some more detail about how the Catalans are the most evil people in history and how their insistence on speaking Catalan is worse than the Holocaust. The people deserve to know the truth.

  1. thebadPoll – should everyone understand Catalan?
  2. Nazi Pop Twins Documentary
  3. The weird world of the Vagina Institute
  4. Alternative poll: is requiring a nivell C certificate for all civil servants "the same" as the forced tattooing of Jewish prisoners in Nazi concentration camps?
  5. thebadPoll – Who should be the next US president?

I will probably fin a WordPress plugin to do this automatically for me from now on.

By the way, thebadPoll has been a generally popular new feature. I wasn't sure whether I should write a post summing up each poll's results, or just let the numbers speak for themselves. For the moment, don't forget that you can access all the previous polls here.

It was thebadrash wot won it! Barack Obama takes US presidency

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Wednesday - 5 November 2008

Last night, as I went to bed, the very first precints were announcing results in the US Presidential election. From small areas of eastern states, after about 12,000 votes had been counted, Obama stood at 48% while McCain had 52%. I went to bed with those numbers in my head, convinced that it was impossible for McCain to win but also allowing myself a few fleeting thoughts of just what it would mean if America rejected change for an old man clearly under the spell of the most divisive elements of a radicalising Republican party.

But I needn't have worried. Ever since my original endorsement of Mr. Obama, in February 2007, he has achieved good results in the polls. Now, I'm not saying that part of his victory doesn't come down to the $500m of donations he received, the huge voter registration drive or the support he received from diverse elements of the electorate. But let's face it: there are different degrees of importance when you look at these matters. And my endorsement was one of the important ones.

Seriously though, for those of you who worry that Obama's just not far enough from McCain and the Republicans in terms of policy: you may well be right. But the important thing here is that positivity seems to have won out against the politics of fear, which is, if nothing else, a firm rejection of everything that nasty prick Bush (and his foul team of acolytes) stood for.

Bush remains president until late January next year. He's apparently busy signing anti-environment legislation, destruction of the environment being something close to his heart.

Normal service will be renewed…

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Monday - 18 August 2008

I've been spending quite a lot of time in Tarragona recently, without Internet access (quite a joy, in many ways). Anyway, it's summer and I'm sure everyone out there has something better to do than read some blog. If not, get thee to a beach!

I'm back in work tomorrow, so I'm sure that I'll be blogging fairly regularly again before long.

SyS – political posters and baldness: you decide

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Wednesday - 5 March 2008

I've added some more photos that were sent in to me over at SyS, my new blog about political posters, stickers and graffiti in Spain.

I've also added a post comparing electoral posters for Josep Duran i Lleida and Joan Ridao, two bald Catalan nationalists with different strategies. This is not to be considered anti-bald propaganda or hate-speech.

"Good night and good luck" – Zapatero

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Tuesday - 26 February 2008

Zapatero closed today's big debate with these words, after nearly two hours' bitter argument over the state and future state of Spain.

Vital details: Rajoy's suit looked cheap and too small; Rajoy seemed much more nervous and uncomfortable while pretending to be calm (the photocall); Zapatero seemed much more nervous during the debate and interrupted Rajoy frequently; Zapatero was, intellectually, the better arguer; Rajoy's confidence won him points. Rajoy's point that people 'don't understand macro economics' seemed somewhat patronising and foolish.

In terms of the actual discussion, there seemed to be a roughly equal balance between who 'won' each point. The general opinion seems to be that this is 0-0, which is beter for Rajoy than for Zapatero.

Cuarto is reporting that Zapatero won the debate easily among males and those aged between 24-50. Women and the youngest voters were much more balanced in their tastes, though Zapatero comes out on top in every single poll.

Good luck, indeed, to the Spanish voters.

==

On a different, but connected note: allow me to introduce Simbolos y Senyals, a new project I've started. It's all about the political posters, stickers and graffiti which many of us see on the streets of Spain. My hope is that, along with what examples I can share, readers will send in photos or documents which can be stored together to create a database and library of political campaign material used by major political parties and smaller activist groups. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Also, please feel free to contact me with any examples of such material which you'd like to share.

Back in black (more site news)

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Wednesday - 30 January 2008

Oh no!

You will, no doubt, be thrilled to know that my unplanned 'maintenance work' is now complete and that the blog is working at full speed again. I have restored all of the posts I lost (mostly in the correct order), checked the permalinks and so on and everything seems to be working.

However, I lost pretty much all of the comments from the last week (though I re-posted some of them Google's cache) as well as my blog roll (which will take an hour or so of annoying copy/pasting to restore). This is not, as some have suggested, a wild attempt at censorship. It was more the result of a situation where by the time I realised what kind of problem I had, it was already too late to back-up my data.

Tip to fellow WordPress users: set up a cron (or use a plugin) to backup your site automatically at least once a week. I recommend the WP-DB-Backup plugin which allows you to schedule backups and have them emailed to you automatically.

Right that's enough geek talk. I'll try and cover Tomas Delgado (the world's biggest arsehole) and silly tax rebates, later this evening.

Kaboom!

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Tuesday - 29 January 2008

I've just managed to recover most of the site after some sort of serious database issue. Some of the most recent comments and posts have been deleted, But I will try to recover them too (I have a DB backup, luckily).

Normal business will resume shortly.

2007 in review

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Tuesday - 1 January 2008

2007 was in essence a pretty nondescript year. Gemma and I were lucky enough to travel a fair bit (Amsterdam, Seville and about 5 trips to the UK for weddings/new year). We also had a near perfect holiday in Benicassim, the principle highlights of which were seeing Iggy Pop play live and the enjoyment of a metaphysical state known only as Ginferno.

In terms of statistics, it has been 'another record breaking year' (which makes me feel like I'm at work!). One day I had about 7000 hits after a link to thebadrash was posted on the Popbitch messageboard. Unfortunately, I didn't have any ads on the site which would allow me to profit from such a large volume of traffic, so I've now prepared myself for the next spike and the inevitable river of gold which Mr. Google will give me. I also had one post which received 48 comments, a new record for the site.

Some more stats:

All in all, I had about 90,000 visits on the site which is quite a good number.

My visitors came from: USA, Spain, 'unknown', Great Britain, 'European country' and Australia (and then loads of others)

Apparently, 89% of visitors came into the site directly (via a bookmark or typing the address in)… not sure if this is true but if it is then it's very good news.

Top keyphrases: Reverend Goatboy, Most evil people in history, Max Carlish, badrash, pimp my Myspace, The Vagina Institute. Barcelona did quite well too.

2008 promises to be a fruitful and enjoyable year and I've got several big web projects in the pipeline which will, I hope, be of some interest to at least some of my visitors. We'll be back in Barna tomorrow, so there's nothing left to say except that I hope that most of you have a pleasant, safe 2008. Oh, and roll on the US elections!

CiU's man and the Mafia boss

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Friday - 23 November 2007

An interesting story has been bubbling away for several months. Antoní Fernández Teixidó, a CiU member of the Catalan Parliament, failed to turn up at court the other day for a hearing into his links with Malchas Tetruashvili, an alleged Georgian mafia boss. Apparently, during an anti-mafia operation, police found a letter from Teixidó, written on official notepaper, thanking the Georgian for dinner. The mafia guy could then take that note and show people how well connected he was. It's an old trick, but a pretty stupid one as most people don't write a note on official notepaper to say thanks for dinner. It makes you look a bit odd. Hopefully more details on the case will emerge soon.

My favourite bit so far is some of the information surrounding Teixidó's failure to turn up at court. Officials said that he must have known about the case because they'd sent him a telegram. A telegram! One wonders why they didn't send the pigeons like normal.

===

By the way: you may have noticed some strange characters and symbols cropping up in my posts. There's some sort of problem with my character encoding settings which I don't currently have time to look into.

Updated: New comments system

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Tuesday - 30 October 2007

I'm experimenting with a new comments system on thebadrash.com. It's called 'Intense Debate' and appears to be designed to allow for a more exciting commenting experience, as well as giving people the option of commenting on various blogs using one user profile (sort of like what OpenID offers). Anyway, those of you who are bloggers (especially if you're not 100% satisfied with the way your platform handles comments) should check it out, or at least keep your eyes peeled for a post on here saying that I've decided to stick with/completely ditch Intense Debate.

Please bear with me while I dick around with my blog a bit more.

UPDATE: Intense Debate looks really promising for the future but it's still a bit too buggy for me. I'm going to keep my eye on developments over there, and hopefully will be able to switch to them in the future.