the scots and the ryanair effect

Re this post, check this article from The Scotsman: A DRAMATIC surge in the number of Scots learning foreign languages has left night classes oversubscribed and academics lost for words. The Celtic thrawness that has seen Scotland languishing at the bottom of the European languages league is softening, and the country is becoming a nation…

Rajoy porn

John B (on John C’s comments) mentions the story doing the rounds about a video which, if it existed, might alarm Mr Rajoy’s more conservative following. What we need now is John A with a pirate version, or at least some decent fakes. (Does no one here know what Photoshop is really for?) Here, meanwhile,…

no price on this one

It took a couple of decades for the rural population to escape the Aragonese Pyrenees. Chernobyl was quicker. Check these photos (via Boing Boing).

village for sale: €650K

Uninhabited village, 25 houses with 80 hectares next to the Ordesa and Monte Perdido national park in the Aragonese Pyrenees for only €650K: I’ve only been to this one once and can’t comment further, but sales of deserted hamlets of this nature are going to become more frequent, even in Catalonia, as the Ryanair effect…

election polls

Giles Tremlett writes this morning in The Guardian that: Support for the Spanish People’s party government is ebbing away as concern about terrorism and separatism dominates the general election campaign, according to opinion polls published yesterday. In fact – apart from the blip in socialist support when the war started – there is no statistically…