Dominical Ponters Pensées 10.4.16

Spanish Working Practices, Its Clock and Its Siesta: Undergoing belated change? Here's a short but interesting interview on the subject.

Spanish Luxury Trains: You can now take week-long trips around Spain from Madrid and Barcelona. The all-in prices range from €595 to €4,575. I think the cheapest one is to La Coruña up on the NW tip of Galicia. Where you can visit the Inditex(Zara) factory and avoid the winds off the Bay of Biscay.

Spanish TV Trash: We now have a program, honestly, called Who Wants to be A Nun? And another one called Adan y Eva, in which young people spend time with each other on an island - permanently naked - to see if they hit it off. And get it off, of course.

Anglo Names: Sometimes the Spanish get these wrong when adopting them. As with the case of the chap mentioned in a newspaper yesterday – One young JHONATTAN.

Irish Travellers: Or gypsies, as we used to call them. Some of these are infamous for making millions from the phony tarmac trick. Arrive with cheap stuff; fail to finish; demand a huge amount to complete; get the cash and leave, having done a crap job. Well, they've been 'doing' Europe for a while, in convoys, and have now arrived in Galicia. It's amazing they can still get away with it. What does this say about Europol?

Russian Propaganda: Russian media fall on a wide spectrum between the very Kremlin-loyal at one end and the very Kremlin-critical at the other. So, naturally, the Panama Papers issue was handled rather differently across this range. How did our friends at RT News deal with it? Aimed at an audience outside Russia - its very short first article on the scandal did not mention the allegations against President Putin. Its second article, the next day, starts as follows: "Anti-Putin sentiment has reached boiling point in the West, and that to a large degree makes it next to impossible to talk about Russia in a positive manner.”

Expat British Fears: No, not about the looming Brexit but about the horrendous implications of the 2012 Modelo 720 'normative' legislation. Click here for a 2013 article on this, headed Expat exodus from Spain as deadline for Britons to declare property and savings at home. One wonders sometimes whether any Spaniards think about the day after tomorrow. Of course, now that the Panama scandal has revealed more data on Spanish offshore holdings, the Tax Office is even less likely to give up their ability to impose gargantuan fines, however illegal the EU declares this to be.

Finally . . . English: How depressing to hear the English football team manager saying several times We was instead of We were. But, anyway, here's someone's view of the 30 most bizarre phrases in English.

Amd here's a foto of the 2 witches I mentioned yesterday, plotting how to take the piss out of me . . .