Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, January 10, 2009

I read that Blu-ray has won the HD war but is now facing death because of the threat from the downloading or streaming of HD format films direct from the internet. This is disturbing as I don’t even know what Blu-ray is. It’s a fast world. Either that or I am increasingly out of touch.

Well, I couldn’t find any articles in the print media on the demonstration down in Andalucia yesterday. Not even in El Mundo, which you might think would relish having a stick with which to beat both central and regional socialist administrations. But snow has reduced Madrid to complete chaos so there are obviously far more important things with which to fill newspaper pages. But I did find this article in the on-line edition of El País. Apart from the opening loaded sentence, it seems quite fair. Though somehow the word ‘corruption’ doesn’t make an appearance. That said, I guess the inferences are clear. At least from the comments of disaffected Brits they quote.

Talking of words . . . Who knows what the Spanglish ‘copyleft’ means? I certainly don’t.

Addressing the question of why the Tories in the UK are making only a slightly better fist of pinning the blame for the country’s economic plight on the government than the PP party is doing in Spain, a British columnist has this to say about Mr Brown’s predecessor:- “Still mesmerised by Tony Blair, the Tories have failed to notice that Mr Blair's reputation is gradually fading, his legacy in tatters, and the last thing that the British electorate wants is a return to the slick and dishonest politics of Mr Blair's new Labour Mark I, or a Prime Minister who reminds them of him.” I do hope I live long enough to see whether I’ve been right to say – for years now – that history [or History, as it’s called in Spain] will be very unkind to New Labour in general and Mr Blair in particular. And to become an even bigger embarrassment to my daughters than I was when they were young.

Meanwhile, I’ve just taken delivery of ten books from Amazon, three of which happen to be on Spain’s history/History but only one on Britain’s. Anyway, it got me thinking about the Spanish government’s trumpeted campaign against bureaucracy. Unless things have changed, in the UK, the postperson rings your bell and then hands you the Amazon delivery. And that’s it. Here, you take your box, put it down and then fill in a form with your ID number, your surname and your signature. At least, it used to be a form but today it was a little black box, on the screen of which I had to scribble all these details with a snazzy stylus. This is impressively hi-tech but it still leaves the question – Why? What is it about Spain that makes it necessary for there to be more formalities than in the UK? And what happens in the USA? Or France. Or Holland, etc. BTW – The Spanish postperson never checks the accuracy of my details and signature. Which is just as well.

As for the books themselves . . . Well, there are ten of them and I finally plumped for Henry Kamen’s “The Disinherited – The exiles who created Spanish culture” to tackle first. This promises to be a fascinating read and I will have to resist the temptation to make regular quotes. Like this one in the Preface:- “In Spain, the rejection of outside culture is a persistent tradition that can still be found in the Spanish mind. It has its origins in a folk memory stretching back nearly five centuries and firmly rejects all that is associated with foreign civilisation as tainted.” Even more interesting is the point that, in all Europe, only Spain has a tradition of consolidating its culture via a policy of exclusion, rather than one of offering shelter. I feel almost insulted not to have been exiled . . .

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