I am amused by this stone bench up beyond the bull ring in Arenas de San Pedro, Castilla y León, central Spain.
Well, not so much amused by the bench, but by the engraving on it, which seems to be extraordinarily apt:
Banco de Castilla no longer exists as an independent bank, but I am glad the benches it sponsored have not been removed. They are indeed bancos de Castilla – Castilian benches.
In the UK, I think people talk of the ‘recession’, but here in Spain we’re not mealy-mouthed – no tenemos pelos en la lengua – so it’s a full-blown ‘crisis’.
Despite the world’s financial problems, though, I’ve been fortunate to have a reasonable amount of work, and I’d begun to hope that things were getting better for other people, too. So I was a bit taken aback to receive this in an email from a translation agency this week (my emphasis): Continue reading “situation critical”
For reasons that will be more immediately obvious to some readers than to others, I was startled to see this subject line in my mailbox (from the digital version of Metro UK):
But seriously… “Gwyneth’s marriage ‘not perfect'”. What marriage ever has been?
Continue reading “great expectations”
Years ago, I used to have an orange-brown tabby. She was a perfectly normal short-haired cat, but skinny and delicate. She had one or two pink pads, but mostly her paw pads were black, and I always suspected this indicated that she had Siamese ancestors.
At last count there were five black cats ranging around the finca and, although I haven’t got close to the two smallest, when I saw these paws on the windowsill, I was struck by the fact that the three siblings born 15 months ago all have black pads.
After some brief on-line research, I find that this is to be expected, although, if I’ve understood correctly, it would theoretically be possible for a black cat to have pink paws.
Continue reading “paws for thought”
Still with telephones – or, more accurately, still in search of phone and internet connections while travelling – I happened upon this:
In the same way that BT is ‘affectionately’ known as British Telecon, the Spanish company Telefónica is frequently called Timofónica. Perhaps this mission statement from their website explains it: instead of spending money on customer service, it’s going towards ‘creating values for [their] costumers’.
Perhaps someone should tell them that dressing it up nicely won’t help if the basic service is a pig’s ear.
don't confuse the narrator 