Dawn

Dawn

Monday, July 08, 2013

More bull from Pontevedra

Recognising that Oporto's airport continues to grow at the expense of Galicia's 3 under-sized international airports in Vigo, Santiago and La Coruña, the Galician Xunta has finally decided to do something. According to a spokesman, "the government is poised to carry out a 'deep analysis' so as to find out the reasons behind the growth of the Oporto facility." If that doesn't do it, I don't know what will.

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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