A big gaffe; Reality TV; Necklines; Raymond Carr; Rosalind Franklin; & A name dilemma.

There are 2 Spanish verbs that really shouldn't be confused: Sacar - To take out (and a thousand other things) and Saquear: To plunder. But the Secretary General of the PP party did confuse them this week, congratulating herself and her colleagues for working so hard 'to loot the country'. Which is about the only accurate thing the party's said for years.

And you thought reality TV couldn't get more preposterous . . . . After a fierce reaction from Pamplona, "Spain’s state TV channel has shelved plans for a reality show which would have seen celebrities pitted against each other as they ran through the streets of Pamplona chased by a pack of fighting bulls." The city's mayor complained: "We're working hard to improve the image of the encierro (bull-running) and to give it more artistic and cultural value. A reality show is not the best way of to do this". I wonder what would be. A ban on bingeing and vomiting? And nudity?

Which reminds me . . . Thanks to comments about my reference to Queen Leticia, I've been forced to make a dictionary check, with these results:-

escote - neckline

escotadura - low neckline

escote profundo/pronunciado - plunging neckline

As you can see from this picture, the correct term for Leticia was probably escotadura. But what do I know?

En passant, the bonus from this search was to learn that Pagar a escote means 'To go Dutch'. No idea why.

Spain's papers bid a fulsome farewell to Raymond Carr, a British historian who specialised in Spain and wrote about the country when no one Spanish was in a position to do so. It seems no exaggeration to say he was revered by the current generation of Spanish historians.

I see that Nicole Kidman is to play Rosalind Franklin in a future film. Franklin was the woman who, at my college in London as it happens, produced the remarkable fotos which Watson and Crick then used to determine the helix shape of DNA. Some say they stole these but others say Franklin was naive and foolish in showing the fotos to the ambitious pair. Anyway, I seem to recall that either Watson or Crick once made disparaging comments about Franklin's lack of beauty. So it's a tad ironic that she'll be played by a looker. But, then, there are worse things; she wasn't honoured for her contribution, whilst Watson and Crick were given the Nobel Prize. 

Finally . . . The lady with whom I'm dealing around my burglary is called Concepción but, like everyone else in Spain, she has a diminutive. Having to write to her, I didn't know whether this was Cookee, Cooki, Cukee, Cuki, Kookee, Kukee, Kuki, or Kooki. I plumped for Kuki. But it turned out to be Cuqui. You can't win 'em all.