Portuguese Prime Minister corruption charges

Socialist José Sócrates continues to deny taking bribes from the British developer, Freeport, while he was environment minister. Zazie links to bloggers who expose his official income and assets, and wonders how a chicken can get so fat on so little, and why the two major parties are keeping so quiet.

Jaws is not a feminist shero

Lunch topics: Marianism and genital iconography, as in The Virgin Mary is a hairy vagina. Conclusion: this one smells of red herring–she actually belongs to the sun. The inability of “artists” to fit a proper fanny and a proper face into the same screen. The three best known forerunners of Bob Guccione-style gynaecology, Courbet’s stilled…

The Spanish media and Madoff’s Jewishness

I looked a while back at allegations of a Spanish media obsession with Israel and concluded that they were without basis in fact. Someone of similar political views to the reactionary squatter hooligan leader, Joan Txàpal, said to me last night that the Spanish press would be all over Bernie Madoff’s Jewishness. The numbers at…

Hedgehogs @ €600

When they were detained by the Médoc gendarmes, Georges and Frédéric had the grave misfortune to have in their possession a sack containing ten succulent little bundles of spines. Turning its face from all that the British cherish in France, the criminal court in Bordeaux put animal protection above lavish family meals and fined these…

How a right-wing tree became a left-wing tree

Over at Crónica Verde, about the ongoing destruction by the Andalusian PSOE of the Doñana National Park. This is quite different from the abuse of natural space during the dictatorship because (all together now!) Franco was of the right, while Chaves is of the left, and the people’s friend to boot.

“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…

One less mullet

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

Collared dove-on-window collision

So printed off a couple of this silhouette. Isaac Meyer Marks, Fears, phobias, and rituals: “Wild turkeys of any age try to escape from anything appearing above them in dark silhouette against a lighter background and moving with a certain angular speed relative to the size of the object. Similar escape reactions occur from a…