Marion 'Cameron' Rajoy; A Sharia state; The EU; Football's Strikers; English; Sky Tunes; & A nice page.

As you'd expect, President Rajoy now sees himself an even more of a Cameron figure than ever - the man responsible for bringing Spain out of La Crisis, who should be allowed to finish the job. Of course, he's rather more burdened by the pervasive corruption in his party than Cameron was but he may yet be forgiven for this by a sufficient number of Spaniards. Así son las cosas en España.

During a debate on BBC TV yesterday, the issue of a Sharia state came up. I thought I'd try to find a description of "The perfect Sharia state" on the internet but couldn't find one. The closest I got was this description of how non-Muslims would be treated in such a state. Interesting reading.

Talking of strange states . . . Whither the EU? According to our Ambros, it's an ailing project that lost its emotional hold over Europe's people long ago and no longer has a plausible claim to economic legitimacy. He goes on to add: It is clear by now that monetary union is fundamentally deformed and will never be stable until there is a fiscal union and an EMU-wide government to back it up, but there is no democratic support for such a Utopian leap forward in any country. . . . . The EMU will lurch from crisis to cris is until the victims of this cruel dynamic rebel through the ballot box, as the Greeks are already doing. Cheap oil, a weak euro and a blast of QE have together lifted the region off the reefs for now, but the deformed structure will be exposed again when the world economy spins into another downturn. Pretty blunt.

I'm not quite sure what's going on but it seems Spain's footballers are not happy with the trifling salaries they get and want more of the money paid for TV rights. So they're going on strike and all imminent football matches have been cancelled. Which means the radio will be much quieter next weekend.

English: 1. When writing this blog, I sometimes wonder if 'which' wouldn't be better than 'that', and vice versa. And I base my decision simply on which sounds better to me. But yesterday I read that there's a "that/which rule", which was news to me. I wonder what it is. 2. This morning I heard the stand-in leader of the Labour party invent the verb - 'To anecdote'. As neologisms go, I quite like this one.

Just in case you live in a cave, here's the Sky News compilation of British political leaders singing "I Swear". And here's an earlier one on Scotland. Excellent stuff. 

Finally . . . I can't recall what I was looking for but I stumbled across this page last week. Some days are diamonds; some days are stones.