Talking
of growth . . . the good news today is that tourism in Spain is well
up on last year, at least in terms of numbers. As ever, though, we
need to know how many days they're staying on average and how much
they're spending. Visitors from the UK still dominate by a mile but
numbers are only fractionally up on last year and, in view of the
weakness of the pound, they may well be spending less.
So,
a male Brit has finally won Wimbledon, after 77 barren years. Of
course, Andy Murray is a Scot and so we can expect Scotland's First
Minister to try to make independence capital out of this but I wonder
whether he'll be at all successful. And I also wonder whether Madrid
noted the masterstroke of having the Scottish flag flying
above Buckingham Palace today. Hard to imagine the Catalan flag above the royal palace in Madrid in similar circumstances.
Today
also saw the start of the annual San Fermin bull-running in Pamplona.
I'm possibly the only person who's written a sentence like that today
without mentioning it was made famous by Hemingway in Death in the
Afternoon. Oh, shit. But, anyway, readers of the Daily
Telegraph were today asked whether it should be banned or
preserved. To my surprise, only 51% opted for a ban. Here's the
relevant article. And here's another one - from the other side of the
political divide - which takes a more antagonistic approach to the
'festivities'. Finally, here's a page where you can see each day's run and decide for yourself.
The British
Library has rather upset the country's librarians by spending 35,000
pounds on an exercise designed to find them a name other than
'librarians'. Like “The Knowledge People”
or “Information Professionals UK”, for example. One wonders why.
Not sexy enough, presumably.
Talking of
libraries . . . Here's a vain scream of pain from a footsoldier in
the war against mobile phone users who think they have a right to
talk wherever they are.
A
few days ago I changed my Facebook status to Married, to see whether
this would stop the avalanche of ads for mating agencies and
over-endowed women. And it did. But what it also did was alert my
friends to a sudden change of marital state. Some of them were a tad
sceptical but more of them were kind enough to send congratu- lations.
Which was a bit embarrassing. Anyway, I've now changed it back and
it'll be interesting to see how long it is before the ads re-appear.
I
know it's been hot in the UK but, to be honest, 30 degrees would be
welcomingly cool for us right now. We've had temperatures up around
37 and 38 for the past few days and we're wilting. Some folk are even
complaining of not being able to sleep at night, which is almost
unprecedented in Galicia. Except in Ourense, of course. Thankfully,
the forecast is for only 28 tomorrow and so I can stop wearing
short-sleeved shirts.
Finally . . . An
unscientific test of search engines - typing in my full name - gave
the following order of success (highest ranking):- 1. Webcrawler, 2.
Duckduckgo, and 3. Google. Food for thought.
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