kalebeul: anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
kalebeul's barcelona walking tour service
kalebeul anythingarian bubbles and troubles from the land of the fretting nun
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/ kalebeul / 2006 / 07 / 19 /

Moroccan goatherd who fought for Franco

Or rather, to get slightly richer rather quicker than would otherwise have been the case. He gets a monthly Spanish government pension of €3. One of a series of profiles in El Mundo.

More amusing translation

“It is found in the Catalan region of Pendeés, in the upper area witch rise 216 meters.” What you see depends on how much you drink, or on how much Capità Vidal is prepared to pay for translations.

UFOmism

Communist film-maker and translator Joaquim/Joaquín Jordâ died last month. One of his last productions was Veinte años no es nada, a red-tinted nostalgiamentary which traces the subsequent careers of some of the participants in the occupation and brief management by workers of the failed Numax fridge factory in Barcelona 25 years ago. Juan Manzanares and [...]

Frying pan/fire

Tim Stannard at La Liga Loca suggests that coach Javier Clemente may not be the smartest bet for a Serbian national team in desperate need of an image upgrade. Dutch coaches seem to travel rather better.

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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