As far as I know, this is the first online translator that supports all the native languages spoken in Spain (Castellano, Catalan, Galician and Basque). And don’t forget that (should you feel the need) you can always conjugate your Catalan verbs here.

És bastant impressionant el que poden fer avui.

Starting today Montreal is a non-smoking city (the ban applies throughout Quebec). No smoking, not even in bars — a big change for the culture. Predictably, people went out with one last immense puff of glory last night… I’m still in Barcelona so thankfully didn’t have to put up with that toxic cloud — but I can’t wait to check out the newly smokeless Montreal scene! Soon enough.

Spent an extended weekend in Ibiza, including a day in Formentera. A mix of delight and disgust — the sights are beautiful (no, I’m not just talking about the “human sights” ;-), the water is transparent, the rock formations magical and the locals have a nice relaxed way of life. The disgust comes from the manic tourism and development (especially in places like Eivissa city and Sant Antoni). I had little interest in going to the largest club in the world or drinking myself silly until 8am. Ouf, I can’t imagine this place in summer… Our hostal was small and inexpensive (caught the tail end of low season), out of town on the coast, with a perfect view of the sunset.

Now if only they’d implement that smoking ban in Spain it would be perfect…

Well, the blog has started getting bombarded by spam comments — recently I’ve had to moderate (aka delete) about 30 every day — so I’ve turned back on the “feature” that requires users to log in before posting comments. Since there are so few legit comments, this shouldn’t affect anyone too much…

On a happier note, my flamenco guitar lessons continue today here in Barcelona. I’ve been practicing non-stop (it seems) since my first lesson on Thursday, after discovering I’ve got to unlearn (thank you Yoda) some bad habits.

Went to see a couple of shows at the Flamenco a Nou Barris festival, including the very famous dancer Antonio Canales (Friday) and Grupo Trevenque Flamenco (Saturday). All the musicians were superb, the singers and dancers too — strangely, the one I was least impressed with was Canales himself. He was technically very precise but his performance had a very strange energy (in fact, at first we wondered if he was drunk, but eventually figured the strangeness must be part of his act). There was no passion in his performance, only a creepy kind of “superstar vibe”; everything was performed with the precision that comes from having performed these dances to perfection for many years — without a connection to the audience, without soul. Without duende, some might say.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I arrived in Barcelona, and what a welcome I received! The weather was beautiful (compared to the grey raininess of Montreal of the past week) — ah, the joys of life with doors and windows open at all times. To top it off, people cheered, chanted and launched fireworks all night(!) to celebrate my arrival.

Well, yes, that all happened but I can’t claim to be the inspiration for it. In fact, last night Barcelona’s football (”soccer”) team Barça won the European Champion’s League final in Paris (Canadian take on it here). I’m not a big fútbol fan but even so it was incredible to be a (small) part of it. In every barrio across the city people launched fireworks; booms echoed through the streets and lasted most of the night (think of the stockpiles each house must have). I could see fireworks in every direction. Close. At times it sounded like a war…except more joyful.

Here’s a snippet to give you a taste — it was recorded from the balcony when El Barça scored their second ¡GOL! (to at last take the lead in this nail-biter!)… Even a poor dog can be heard “celebrating”; the only person oblivious to everything is the guy you hear power-sanding his floor. With doors and windows open all the time, there is no such thing as a “private life” — you hear all and are all-heard. Get used to it.

Here is another snippet from the moment the clock ran out. The subsequent several hours are when the lion’s share of explosives were launched (skyward, I hope, for the most part). There was much hooting and hollering, and yes, some looting and loitering. Then it seemed that everyone hopped on motorcycles and scooters to get down to Las Ramblas for some serious mayhem! As for my jet-lagged self, I went to bed and tried to forgive the noisy welcome.

It’s not over — the gran celebración is scheduled for tonight when the conquering champions return home.

…something. On Google, that is. But for what? And who is doing all this searching, and from where?

• Of course, Canada is practically the only country searching for Tim Hortons, and also first place in Hockey. Predictable.
• Seems Americans are all searching for things like Bush and Iraq and things (#1 ranking country for all those words).
• Countries obviously searching for “something” more than “nothing”: United States, Australia.
• Countries obviously searching for “nothing” more than “something”: Sweden, Belgium, Finland, India.
• Countries pretty evenly split on that whole “something” versus “nothing” thing: Philippines, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom.
• Country most searching for love: Philippines, by far.
• Countries most searching for war: Australia, New Zealand, United States.
• Almost everyone searches for women more than men. Interestingly, the country that searches waaaay more for women than for men is Iran.
• The Spanish cities that search most for Montreal: Zaragoza, Santiago de Compostela, then Leon and Barcelona more or less tied.
• The Canadian cities that search most for Barcelona: Etobicoke (go figure!), Richmond Hill (also in the greater Toronto area), Vancouver.
• Worldwide, the top four cities searching for the meaning of life are from Australia (and #5 is from New Zealand!). What makes those southern hemisphereans so pensive and introspective? The top Canadian city came in at #6, and was… Calgary? (when they’re not busy searching for William Shatner, something at which they’re world leaders). Do you mean to tell me that Montrealers are not in that list of navel-gazing big-picture-seekers? Okay, no, I see — we’re apparently too busy searching (along with folks from Brussels and Amsterdam) for different kinds of pictures… Good grief! Then again, you need to be careful with the interpretation, and put these relative numbers into perspective.

Searching is good wholesome fun.

[Search factoids courtesy of Google Trends.]

…that’s what bugs me and many other people this time of year — the sexual activity of trees. They’re cranking out pollen and doing what “comes naturally” in order to procreate, but it sure makes the lives of many humans hell for these months. So quit whining, blow your nose, scratch your eyes and take a pill — love is in the air! And there’s no real cure…

What I have is what this article describes as oral allergy syndrome. Yes, they finally have a name for this weird allergy to many raw fruits, which people spent the last twenty years of my life telling me — as if I didn’t know — is “really weird”. Yes it is weird. I was an innovator to have it twenty-some years ago, but now it seems to be increasingly common. Blame it on the birch. (I know those yellow things in the picture are from maple trees, and yes, pollen is too small to be seen…)

I finally went to an allergy specialist a few years ago, and got shots for the past two years. This spring, I decided to give them a pass — they seemed to help somewhat, but (as the article mentions) the hassle of being in town, going to the clinic and having shots for 10 weeks in a row and then every three weeks ’til mid-summer was too much for me. And I was “lucky” — I got to have two shots per week, one in each arm that subsequently swelled up and was itchy for several days (don’t forget waiting for a half-hour afterwards to ensure you don’t go into anaphylactic shock). Believe me, they crank a lot of liquid into your arms — the doctor at the clinic was always shocked at the colour of the stuff she was told to shoot me up with (thick and dark, like maple syrup) and the amount of it she was supposed to squeeze into my arms (so much that it would take a few days for the subdermal lump of liquid to be absorbed).

I gave in to temptation this week and bought myself a little regalo. It’s one of my weaknesses: cameras. I’ve always wanted a long-zoom camera with full manual control, and in fact my first digital camera was a Minolta Dimage 5, which had a 7x zoom but was unsatisfactory in several ways (including awkward size and shape; focusing difficulties; short battery life; bad low-light handling; too much blur when using the zoom). Still, I managed to get lots of good photos out of it.

My priorities then shifted to portability above all else, and I moved on to a really small camera with long battery life — the Canon S410. It only has a 3x zoom but takes fantastic photos.

Last year Canon came out with the S2 IS, a new series of “semi-compact” long-zoom cameras with optical image stabilization (its competitor from Sony has almost identical specs, but I wouldn’t buy a Sony still camera). The image stabilization is the key to long-zooming, and also to non-flash low-light shooting. Somehow I managed to hold off on buying this 12x beauty last year.

Canon just released the successor to this camera, the S3 IS. And that camera is my new baby (of course I’ll still use the old S410 baby when I want to be able to carry a camera in my pocket).

The zoom is incredible — I can’t believe the quality they can squeeze out of such a small CCD! Obviously an SLR would be better, quality-wise, but there’s no way I’m going to carry around a heavy SLR and a 432mm lens… The “S IS” series from Canon strikes a good balance of portability against zoom quality. And (in the tests I’ve seen, for example Sony DSC-H1 versus the S2 IS) the Canons give the sharpest zoomed pictures (tripod-mounted or hand-held) of the entire set of cameras competing in this space.

To give you an idea, here’s a quick shot I took on the way home from the store. In the full-resolution (6 megapixel) version of the bottom photo you can easily read license plates, street signs, etc.:

Looking along rue Rachel from Parc Jeanne-Mance, fully zoomed out.

Looking along rue Rachel, fully zoomed in. This image is the bit at the very centre of the top photo… and blur-free!

I was off to Manitoba last week, visiting with family and (generally) enjoying friendly small-town life. They do have the Internet in small-town Manitoba but I didn’t really have access (or interest) while I was away. The weather wasn’t great most of the week but I spent a lot of time reading Anna Karenina, and then on the weekend it was warm, sunny and beautiful.

Went to Spruce Woods Provincial Park on Saturday, in the glorious blazing sun. There I found sand dunes — like ones you’d see in California or Spain — not in a desert or on a beach, but in the middle of green Manitoba! Little more than 10,000 years ago there used to be glaciers covering the area (in fact, covering most of Canada), and when those melted the sand and sediment from the lakes and river deltas fanned out to form the unique Spirit Sands. This small and sacred area is the only part of the vast Assiniboine Delta exposed by glaciers and still unvegetated.

I came home to find a thick 2006 Canada Census form waiting for me to fill out. Actually, there were two of them (one in English and one in French, just in case). I did my civil duty today — online (yay!), though that means those thick booklets were printed for no reason! I was randomly selected for a “long form”, and I had fun completing that. Hopefully my “odd” (but truthful!) answers will statistically shift “normalcy” for the next five years, at least in Montreal. I have to admit I did find some of the questions a bit odd, such as:

• 71) Has global warming caused structural damage to your igloo?
  • yes, total melting / partial collapse
  • yes, noticeable ice-block slippage requiring seasonal reinforcement
  • no serious damage, merely the annoyance of cold drips on the forehead while sleeping
  • no effect
• 88) How many hours in the last week did you spend playing hockey? (If you answer “none” to this question, you should skip questions 89-93, which all relate to hockey.)
  • 50+
  • 40-49
  • 35-39
  • 5-34
  • none

Canada has grown 10,000 times larger in the 340 years since the first real census was done by Jean Talon (that was for the colony of Nouvelle-France) by Jean Talon. Obviously its count of 3,215 inhabitants did not include native populations. Doing some quick math, that means we had an average annual compound population growth of over 2.7% per year since then. Of course, this is a huge oversimplification (These days, Canada’s population grows, through immigration and birth, by about 0.9% per year. Some countries in Africa — like Angola, Chad and Mauritania — have growth rates in that 2.7 to 2.8% range. The fastest-growing countries today are in Africa and the Middle-East, and have annual growth rates in the high 3 or even 4% range).