Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Bloody 'ell!  . . . "Thai police arrested a first-class passenger at Bangkok airport early yesterday after he tried to smuggle out leopards, panthers, monkeys and a bear that were drugged and packed in his check-in luggage."

Every year, to coincide with the Cannes film festival, there is a festival of short films in the Galician town of Cans.
Here's their web page in English. As ever, no native speaker has been within three metres of it.

Here's one reaction to the accounts of FIFA shennanigans by Lord Triesman this week - "Widespread corruption at the heart of world football’s governing body? Blimey, next he’ll be telling us that the voting in the Eurovision Song Contest isn’t, after all, a transparent model of democratic accountability." As we will see tonight.

Something called "slut walking" appears to have become fashionable in Anglo Saxon countries. Essentially it's feminists protesting in their underwear about stock male attitudes. Unsurprisingly, there's a spectrum of opinion among female commentators. One such has written - "To be a slut was, to my mind, mostly fun, and to do with wearing and doing what you liked. My mum told me that when she had wanted pierced ears and my grandma said that was sluttish, she walked into the hall, stood in front of the mirror and pierced her own ears with a hat pin. She also wore an anklet that the neighbours said was a sign of being a prostitute. " This reminded me of my mother once taking from a young me a foto of Diana Dors, wearing a bathing costume and sporting a bracelet on her ankle. Although this foto had been issued by my father's employers (Bulmers Cider), it was deemed unfit for my eyes as she was "obviously a prostitute". My response - "What's a prostitute?" The answer? "A bad woman". So that was clear.

Here's the view of the (admittedly eurosceptic)
Daily Telegraph on the current state of affairs on the Continent - "The only thing that is clear is that the eurozone is in an almighty mess. A modern, dynamic core – both France and Germany yesterday posted blistering growth figures – is yoked to a bankrupt periphery. Jettisoning the weaker members would be fiendishly difficult; but the price of rescuing them is so high that the French and German political classes, high priests of integration, could find themselves disowned by their own voters. . . Europe is back on the [UK] agenda with a vengeance – not thanks to the campaigning of Eurosceptics, but because we are intricately connected to a project whose elitist agenda, entrenched by supra-national institutions over many decades, is manifestly ill-suited to the political and economic reality. The EU may be too big to fail, in the sense that France and Germany will resort to almost any measures to hold it together. But they will be desperate measures, and will pose painful dilemmas for a strongly Eurosceptic country whose government relies on the support of a party of extreme Europhiles – that country, of course, being us."

Finally . . . Two or three years ago I set up the
Anglo Galician Association, for those speakers of English with an interest in Galicia. For one reason and another, it didn't flourish. On the assumption it was ahead of its time, I'm having another stab at it. So, anyone interested in going on the circulation list should contact me on colindavies@terra.es  Any nationality. Any location.

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