kalebeul: anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2006 / 03 / 21 /

Columbus beaten by Ming

It doesn’t really matter whether Columbus was that posterior construct, Catalan, or not; the Mings got there first, using trained otters.

Trebucheting China from the moon

There’s a ways and means discussion over at MemeFirst. If Spain hadn’t more or less abandoned its space programme–mentioned in the Voz de Galicia edition plugging Franco’s hon doc–we’d have been able to sell Chávez stuff like this. Not.

Honorary doctorates

If Spanish universities are giving honorary degrees to one thug and taking them off another, does that mean there’s a finite supply of funny hats? What is this thing universities have with dictators?
(More dodgy awards: Westminster, Sindh, anywhere in China or Korea (1, 2), Michigan State or–worst by far–Long Island.)

1/3 French self-declared racists

The way this is going it’ll soon be respectable to be a Francophobe (which of course one is not).

Boohbah

Here’s something (via Lucia@Polifônica) to palliate the onset of spring which, as usual, is turning out to be fairly knackering.

Winners and losers

I didn’t know I even had Premium Bonds, but apparently I’ve just won £50 on Ernie, or Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment for long. Meanwhile Buddha has run away with £500,000. It’s that destiny thing, dammit.

Splog
New piano shopping Calvary (2)

Barcelona. Shop no 1 is closed at 11:30, well within its normal opening hours. The iron street blinds are down and there’s no message posted, so I walk across town to shop no 2. Yes, no problem, pay now and we’ll confirm the delivery date in a moment. The call comes a couple of hours later:
- That model isn’t available right now.
- When will it be?
- We may be able to tell you later this month, so to save trouble why don’t you just buy this more expensive model?
- No thanks. I’ll be over later to get my money.
- Oh, we’ll have to see about that.
I tend to try to buy through foreign suppliers and I pray for the day when the Chinese will be running everything. Call me a racist, but it keeps me out of the loony bin.

“Zapatero announces a bank deposit guarantee of €100,000 per saver” (0)

Man: What’s that?
Woman: A bank deposit guarantee?
Man: No, a saver?

Spanish sovereign debt default (3)

It now seems that Iceland has defaulted, apparently believing Russia will be foolish enough to attempt to protect what’s left of its cod against ETA trawlers from Bilbao. Spain is not going down that road, at least not yet, but one of the more-quoted papers on the subject (De Paoli, Hoggarth & Saporta, Cost of sovereign debt) informs us that it did so thirteen times between 1500 and 1900. I rather liked this Punch item on steps towards a more united Europe, dated September 1 1860:

LATEST CLUB NEWS
SPAIN, put up by France and Austria, as a candidate for admission to the United European, has been blackballed by England, who declines to associate with an Uncertificated Insolvent. Spain is so frantic that she is half inclined to pay her debts, but will probably think twice over so rash an act.

The Dutch haven’t got any genuine armed forces, so they’re sending in the bailiffs to repossess office furniture from the Dutch Icesave, which has also done a runner.

Adopt a wolf (0)

Classic nimbyism, enabled by Spain’s lack of effective central government: Castilla y León has lots of wolves, but other communities which, according to ecologists, should in historical and biological terms have some, don’t want to take the overproduction. So they’re being shot. I don’t suppose we could airlift them to the outskirts of Reykjavik.


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