A
few of the people involved in the Concordia cruiser tragedy of a year
or so ago have been tried, convicted and sentenced. My reaction on
reading this was "Only a year!?". Here in Spain, the trial
of those accused after the Prestige oil disaster of 10 years
ago continues to wend its way through the courts.
Talking
of dilatory processes . . . There's a house in Pontevedra's old
quarter for which it's taken 6 years - yes, 6 years! - to get
permission to restore it. The process was described as a viacrucis,
or a 'way of the cross'. Which is a phrase - like calvario or
'calvary' - I rather like. Work has recently begun on two other
long-standing eyesores in the old quarter and I wonder whether
they've both been similarly mired in the bureaucratic mud.
To be more
positive, here's a foto of one ex-eyesore, recently finished. Of
course, it'll be an eternity before a shop opens on the ground floor.
Which reminds me . . . We have yet another frozen yoghurt outlet in
Pontvedra. And another place specialising in chocolate products. Is the birth rate booming?
Listening
to a BBC podcast on the Scottish drive for independence, I was both
surprised and impressed to hear that, if you display any sign of
anti-English attitudes, you're immediately expelled from the Scottish
Nationalist Party. Contrast Cataluña, where it's obligatory, I suspect, to display a visceral anti-Spanishness.
"L'état,
c'est moi". Who said that? No, not Louis XIV but Spain's
President Rajoy. Responding to questions about corruption, he replied imperiously "The state will not be subjected to blackmail." Along the same lines, the Minster of the Economy has told us that stability is Spain's main strength. The message being - Don't endanger it by going on and on about corruption in the PP
governing party. Stop seeking Sr Rajoy's removal as this will bring about the
collapse of the Spanish state. As if. Incidentally, El Roto had a
nice cartoon in El País the other day. It was the blindfolded figure
of Justice, saying - "Don't seal my ears. Seal my nose."
If
you've got between 140,000 and 11m euros lying around and are
thinking of investing in a property in Spain, here's a few examples
of what you can get for your money. I rather like the look of the one
with an 85% price reduction. Some of the rest leave me stone cold.
My
friend Phil translates chess stuff from Spanish into other languages.
He was saying yesterday how hard it was sometimes to deal with very
long convoluted sentences in Spanish. Which reminded me of a thought
I've had a few times - viz. that it's always easier to read an
article translated from English into Spanish than to read an article
written in Spanish. The reason is that someone translating
English into Spanish will stick to the shorter, less flowery
sentences of the original.
Finally . . . An
arresting thought; it takes a minimum of 4 litres of water to
make a litre of bottled water.
Publisher's Note: If you're a
regular reader of this blog, you may find the easiest way to access
it is via an RSS reader. I used to use Google Reader for
the blogs I read but Google killed this a month or so ago. There are
several alternatives, all free, but I've gone with Old Reader as it pretty accurately replicates Google Reader.
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