Dawn

Dawn

Friday, March 18, 2016

Tidbits

Spanish Tidbits:
  • The city of Valencia is considering no-kill bullfights. Maybe one day.
  • The Podemos party is facing up to more realities and has sacked one or more of it senior members for promoting factionalism – the besetting sin of far-left parties.
  • The Teflon-covered ex Mayoress of Valencia city – who knows nothing of the corruption that wallowed around her – is to face a disciplinary procedure within the PP party – infamous for unpunished corruption. No one will regard a punt on the outcome worth the outlay.
  • The town of Borja in Zaragoza will, naturally, continue to commercialise the restored painting of a pained Jesus which saw him converted into an sad orang-utang. Pix here. Wiki here. I should be so famous as Sra Cecilia Jiménez for a comprehensive cock-up. So to speak.
  • According to some survey, when it comes to happiness, Spain ranks only 36th. internationally, with the UK coming in at 23. If this wasn't hard enough for Spaniards to take, the top position went to Gibraltar. Yes, Gibraltar.
  • Talking of Gib . . . Spain still labels this a tax haven/fiscal paradise, while overlooking the likes of fellow EU members Ireland, the Netherlands and, gold medal winner, Luxembourg. The rest of the world doesn't agree but, then, they're talking finance, not politics.
International Tidbits:
  • Russia says it's leaving Syria because there's nothing left for it to do there. Pictures of Syria's cities suggest this means there's nothing more to raze to the ground.
  • A Cambridge professor has won around half a million ponds for proving Fermat's Last Theorem “by way of the modularity conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves”. This has been eluding some of us for 3-400 years.
  • There is a US Congressional Friends of Ireland, but not a Congressional Friends of Britain, its closest ally. Perhaps it isn't needed. 
Local Tidbits:
  • When I was in Jávea, the houses behind mine – built over 5+ years on a granite escarpment noisily hacked out of a rock face – suffered a landslide after heavy rain. The water and debris crashed into the houses and effectively destroyed their ground floors. Fortunately, only about 10% of them were ever sold. The builder and developer went bust years ago, so one wonders what'll happen now. Meanwhile, I'm a bit miffed to have missed the fun.
  • Another local (kamikaze) driver has been stopped going the wrong way down the autopista. Normally, I'd shake my head but this happened at a badly signed and badly lit junction where I did this myself one midnight a couple of years ago. So, the recently introduced new signs and road markings don't seem to be working, then.
Finally . . . A 73 year old man has been arrested for the Ferrol birthday party murder. Relatives of the victim claim the murderer was assisted by his 2 sons and 4 nephews. But most of all by his wife, who screamed at her husband: “Kill him! Kill him! Blood for blood! Life for life!”. A letter in a local paper yesterday said it's not good form to mention ethnicity when reporting the developments. But, as the accused is a heroin and cocaine addict and as he's been arrested many times for drug dealing, this probably isn't very necessary. Still less when one reads that members of the two family groups have been advised by 'a Patriarch' to stay indoors for a while. All very biblical. George Borrow would have understood.
The FB foto: Here's yesterday's 3 pix, automatically converted by Google into a lovely panorama. Clever bastards.


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