The
BBC has sacked a radio DJ who played a 1930s song - The Sun Has Got His Hat On - which
contained - unbeknown to him - the verboten N word. Ironically, the DJ had substituted this song
for Frank Crumit's wonderful Abdul Abulbul Amir, which I cited here not
so long ago. He'd decided not to play this as he felt it was racist.
Which I obviously don't.
Incidentally,
the BBC thinks the N word is acceptable if it ends in a, but
not er. Rap artists
apparently use the former. Though you wouldn't know it just from
listening to them, of course. All makes eminent sense to me.
Spain's
Fiscal General (Attorney General?) has said that Spain lacks the laws
and means to counter corruption. Not to mention the political will,
of course.
Which
reminds me . . . The leading PP and PSOE candidates in the imminent
EU elections went head-to-head on TV this week. They didn't, of
course, discuss corruption but preferred to indulge in the
traditional Spanish game of Y tu - You're the same as us, only
worse. The PP candidate said later he'd pulled his punches against
his female opponent because it didn't look good for a man to lick a
woman. This went down well with most female observers and reminded me
of my our Iranian Farsi teacher, who told me my wife was better than
me because women can pick up new things more easily as they have less
in their brains than men. Fascinatingly, the PP guy clearly didn't
realise his explanation was more macho than his beating his inferior opponent. But he doesn't look as if he's going to be paying a price
for it. Incidentally, neither of the candidates mentioned Europe
either. It's only an EU election after all.
One
of the reasons that Spaniards find the 26% unemployment number
dubious is that it's common knowledge that some people on the list
either work as well as claim or don't exist at all. The police this
week arrested 740 people and charged a further
1,241 with operating fake companies. These have been used to launder
money, to get illegal immigrants their paperwork, to obtain social
security benefits and for other 'nefarious' purposes. Spanish
practices, in other words. The companies disguised themselves as
hotels, courier services, gardening and
cleaning, and construction businesses and the police estimate the
various frauds have cost the state €20.5m in the last 2 years. En passant, all the non-existent people surely had ID numbers. So much for them.
Interesting
- but not terribly surprising - to see that the first requests to
Google to have their 'right to be forgotten' respected came from a
child pornographer, a British MP named in the expenses scandal and 'a
company director suspended for dodgy business practices'. I wonder if
the EU Supreme Court really knew what it was doing in prioritising
privacy over free speech.
Finally
. . . I'm not a fan of the expensive Galician delicacy (and alleged
aphrodisiac), percebes.
To me they taste like rubber dipped in seawater. But others adore
their (elusive-to-me) flavour. Anyway, here's an article about them.
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