Dawn

Dawn

Tuesday, February 04, 2014


Yesterday, I mentioned Cardinal Rouco and the deep bow made to him recently by Queen Sofía. Well, he got a different sort of honour when arriving for evening Mass in Madrid on Sunday night. Five or six half-nude young ladies threw knickers at him and shouted rude things in his face. On their bare fronts, I eventually noticed, they'd inscribed "Toño, get out of my coño." Toño is a diminutive of Antonio and coño is, well, something female. The reason for all this is that Cardinal Rouco is widely seen as an unpaid adviser to the government on abortion. Or perhaps 'lobbyist for the Catholic Church' would be a better description.

El Mundo is a right-of-centre paper in the land of a right-of-centre government. But it's been a bit uppity in the last year or so, particularly as regards alleged corruption at the heart of the administration. And now the editor's been summarily sacked. Something which the NY Times described as 'engineered retribution' and as the sort of political interference you'd expect in China and Egypt rather than a European state. They obviously don't understand how things are done here, then. The departing editor has claimed his sacking was "a show of force by a government that wants to send a message to the whole media sector. An attempt to use a time of economic weakness to force the media to be docile, servile and to practice self-censorship." That's how things are done.

A new bit of Spanglish - Hacer un looping. This appears to mean 'To perform a loop', in a plane, in a car or on a bike, for example. And Un looping appears to mean, well, 'A loop'. They never get it right.

Could you make it up? A film director marries his much younger leading lady, who later says his son is that of a previous husband, after the lady has accused the director of abuse of their adopted 7 year old daughter, while turning a blind eye to the shenanigans of her other director friend with a 13 year old. The first director then sleeps with and marries the even younger adopted daughter of his (about to be ex) wife. The ex wife then carries out a 20 year vendetta against the first director, after which the abused 7 year old goes public with detailed accusations. Will they make a film of it? And will Woody Allen direct it? With special emphasis on the US judicial system finding insufficient evidence to prosecute him. And on the slow regeneration of his career, possibly now on the verge of crashing again. And with everyone taking lie detector tests.

The Environment

January: 31 days. On which it rained: 30 - 97%

February: 4 days. On which it has rained: 4 - 100%

Thanks to nocturnal noises on the other side of our shared wall and above-normal bawling at 7.15 this morning, I concluded that Nice-but-Noisy Toni was back from the sea. And I was right. Triple ear-plug time.

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