Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, May 17, 2014

The N word; PP fool v. PSOE fool; Phoney figures;The right to be forgotten; & Percebes


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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