Left/right

Check out the excellent Mr Butler on how our “socialist” government is handing over, more or less for free, a substantial stake in a nominally Spanish energy business to a Russian oil business with allegedly major mafia participation in order to save a big construction company and hence rescue the domestic financial sector from overt…

“What is art in Latin countries is obscenity in the Nordic north”

JD had a bit more Time than I did and kindly sent me an article from 1930 which turns the tables on the filthy Swedes discussed this morning. It seems that towards the end of Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship the Spanish postal service issued a stamp of Goya’s unshaven maja desnuda. Time writes: The stamps…

Nerd riot

IT a profession for generally peaceful, libertarian innovators sans frontières? Not in Andalusia, where they’re demonstrating with the ultimate goal of excluding those without the correct government diploma. The OECD wants flexible labour markets. Spain wants guilds. Yet I’m sure this kind of thing must happen somewhere else–Gordimer would surely have had some if there’d…

Macbitch in Paris

CC says that Telva says that Jaume Plensa is simply panting to design some sets for Verdi’s Macbetch. I blame Telva’s legions of copy editors this time–they get Toulouse wrong too–but there’s no reason why not: “So this is the story of Lady Macbitch and her husband. The Queen stimulates herself with the props of…

The Italian man who went to Malta

Increasingly huge on the net, but whose script/voice is it? (Via Josep Tarrés. More on “Funiculì, funiculà” some other day.)

Torremolinos, Unesco World Heritage site?

BA’s Highlife mag goes lowlife: “After 40 years of mass tourism, Torremolinos continues to evolve and, away from the coast, it’s a bustling Andalucian town. The high-rise 1950s and 1960s hotels are now admired by fashionable architects. The campaign to make it a Unesco World Heritage site begins here.” I’ve been going to Benidorm for…

One less mullet

A tress stress law would have finished off ETA ages back.

Obscure Spanish footie team told to get rid of Cross of St George on alternative kit

Apparently it might incite violence. Particularly, one suspects, if the directors of the taxpayer-funded Permanent Seminar on International Migration and Foreigners (“an open space for Interculturality and Human Rights“) in Aragon attend home matches of SD Huesca, whose major achievement to date was fifth place in the Second Division in the 1950-1 season. Via Miguel…