Dawn

Dawn

Saturday, July 09, 2016

Ponters Pensées: 9.7.16

Spain's Most Expensive Cities: Here's the Top Ten, with the percentage premium to the national average:
I'm surprised to see a Galician city - A/La Coruña - among these. And I can't think why it's more expensive than, say, Pontevedra. Or Santiago. Perhaps because it's because it hosts the HQ of Inditex/Zara. Or maybe Madrileños flock there to escape the unbearable summer heat of the capital city.

Spanish Tourism: The chickens are coming home to roost. And the tarnished goose might soon stop laying its gilt eggs. Residents who've endured decades of cheap tourism are finally rebelling against it. In places such as Mallorca and Minorca, Tourists go home! has been daubed on more than one wall, in protest at one unwanted effect or another.

The EU: The ineffable President Juncker is still at it: Unable to resist gloating - or to understand democratic processess - he's told the EU parliament: I would just note that the proud Brexit heros of last week are now the sad heroes of Brexit. He's even been reported to have wondered out loud how the development would be seen by superior extra-terrestrials. It's surely time for Mrs Merkel to tell him: For god's sake, Go!

RT TV News: I've mentioned its obsession with Turkey. Well, it's now been censured by Ofcom - for the fifteenth time - for lack of impartiality in its coverage of this country. As if they care.

Mental Conditions: Someone once said something like Psychiatry is the only medical discipline to invent not only the treatments to be used but also the conditions to be treated. Here's a list of recent conditions and treatments that I can recall offhand. Some of them are, naturally, not as fashionable as they once were:-
  • Codependency
  • Borderline Personality Disorder (Now called Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder)
  • Momism
  • Electro-convulsive Therapy (ECT). Not such a recent treatment, of course. 
  • Type A and B personality categorisation
  • Transactional analysis (PAC: Parent, Adult, Child)
  • Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Also been around a long time but now rather discredited.
  • Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
  • Mindfulness - The latest fashion, of course.
By the time you've read this, the medical fraternity and the drug industry will have invented at least one more condition and its treatment.

Finally . . .  My friend Eamon in said A/La Coruña has sent me this picture of my neighbour, the lovely Ester, surveying her handiwork in my garden . . . 



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