They had the State of the Nation debate in Congress today. BFD. Nobody said anything new or different. Not surprising. I'm not quite sure why we report everything that blowhard politicians say in the Spain Herald, but we do. In case we didn't give you enough hot air, and you understand Spanish, check out Libertad Digital.
It's been a busy week; first some extra work came through that I had to take care of, and then Oscar, who is my little black cat, came down with conjunctivitis in his left eye. With a houseful of cats, of course you have to quickly take care of anything that might be infectious, so Oscar had a very traumatic visit to Lluis the vet, who dumped three different kinds of drops into his eye. While I was carrying him down the street in his basket, he was howling the whole time, and he is an extremely noisy cat. Everyone was staring, of course, and I'm sure they thought I was torturing the poor thing. Well, he's fine now.
You have to read this article from the Times on Spanish trash TV. It's hilarious, and there's always a trash program on somewhere. The difference between Spanish trash and American trash is that ours is almost always focused on lower-class people who live in trailer parks behaving uncouthly in public, and theirs is almost always focused on "famosos," people who are notorious for no particular reason.
The campaign's already on for the Catalan statute referendum, and the Socialists' slogan is, "The PP will use your no vote against Catalonia." It's clearly aimed at Esquerra voters, since their party has come out against the statute as well; ERC doesn't think the statute goes far enough, and the PP thinks it goes too far. There have been some complaints from PP files, as the slogan directly states that the PP is anti-Catalan, which of course it isn't. Anti-Catalan nationalist, yes. I'm not sure I agree with the PP's complaints, since this is a political campaign and all's fair that you can get away with.
Here's some anti-American silliness from the European press I just came across yesterday.
Joan Barril, the rather unintelligent and unattractive columnist for local rag El Periodico, wrote last week about John Irving, who was in town promoting his latest dull novel about Vienna, incest, abortion, genital mutilation, bears, and wrestling:
I suppose you've all seen that FC Barcelona won the Champions League title last night with a gutsy 2-1 win over Arsenal. The players deserve it; they've all done an excellent job all season. Their effort and commitment, week-in and week-out, has been very impressive. Ronaldinho and Eto'o are the stars, but Belletti's game-winning goal showed that the other nine guys are just as important.
Here's a piece from skeptic.com (you'll have to scroll down a little; it's called The Truth Is Out There...Way Out There by George Case) detailing why conspiracy theories are bogus by definition.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali woman who has spoken out in favor of the emancipation of Muslim woman and against clitoridectomy, arranged marriage, and other abuses, has been stripped of her Dutch citizenship and expelled from the Dutch parliament, where she was a deputy for the conservative party VLD. Reason: A documentary shown on the left-wing TV channel Vara demonstrated that she lied about her background in the early 1990s when she came to the Netherlands.
There's been some talk around the blogosphere about the stereotype of the "Ugly American" tourist in Europe. Here in Spain most American tourists actually have a pretty good reputation. Reason: Spain is Europe's Florida. It gets more than 45 million tourists every year, and not too many of them are American, several hundred thousand at most. 15 million of them are British and 9 million are German.