Bye Bye Embed on A List Apart

I've just had my first article published on A List Apart about embedding movies without embed. I'm very excited about it.

Let me add a few notes about the videos themselves... The first one I took on April 23 this year in the Plaça Sant Jaume in Barcelona. April 23 is Saint George's Day. He's the one who slayed the dragon and is the Patron Saint of Barcelona. It's also the Day of the Book and the Rose in which people give their partners books and roses. (Generally, the men get books and the women roses, but not in my family :) The whole city is festooned with Catalan flags, roses of every color, and booksellers on every corner. I love it.

It's also one of only two days during the year that they open the Generalitat (roughly equivalent to the American Congress, except about 800 years older) to the public. And people line up around the block to visit and, in my opinion, to declare ownership. When we came out this year into the plaza in front of the Generalitat, we were watching some Sardana dancers and then a demonstration arrived. The demonstrators asked the band to strike up the Catalan National Anthem (Els Segadors) and the entire crowd joined in. It sent chills down my spine. You'll notice a few people holding up four fingers. They symbolize the four red stripes in the Catalan flag. At the end of the song, they chant "In, In-de, In-de-pendencia!" and "Long Live Catalonia".

The wmv video is just a fish store that we happened by one day a few years ago. This was just a little store, on a side street in a pretty average neighborhood. But look at that fish! Does this exist in the US? The more time we spend out of Catalonia, the more I like to remember the normal, everyday kind of things. Like fish stores.

The QuickTime movie was from a night my husband and I went out for dinner (around 9pm) and bumped into these Devils in our neighborhood. I forget even what they were celebrating. They have shopping carts full of firecrackers and huge paper-maché dragons in which they attach them, but often times they just dance around with their own individual lights. And loud drummers. These firecracker devils date from the Black Plague era and are such an institution in Catalonia that they took center stage during the closing ceremonies of the 1992 Olympics. There are 215 clubs listed in the Federation of Devils and Demons of Catalonia. They are the rauxa in the classic description of Catalan character: seny i rauxa, roughly translated as wisdom and craziness.