topical – Page 33 – don't confuse the narrator

lying swine

Well, no, of course, it isn’t the pigs themselves who are lying, and I should probably feel guilty about adding to their bad press, but pigs have had plenty of air-time already on this blog and at least this time the post is about humans dying, not – at least not directly – about pigs being slaughtered.

Looking around the web, swine ‘flu is causing all sorts of reactions, from panic, to ridicule. It’s clearly thought to be important by many, as this screen shot from the BBC site indicates:

the good news or the bad news?

More quibbling of headlines, this time in English news. Today, the BBC website leads with WHO raises pandemic alert level.

Which is all very well, but I glimpsed just the headline on another site and had to go and read the story to clarify if this meant more doom and gloom, or if it meant that things were getting better.

After all, if you advertise a product that “raises spirits”, it would do exactly the same as a product that “lifts spirits”. But “raising the alert level” is pretty much the opposite of “lifting the alert”.
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international book day

One wonders – well, this one does – who decides which “days” are to be allocated to what worthy purpose and which are to be publicised and celebrated. Wikipedia gives a list of international observance, but these things seem to be fairly hit and miss.

Today, the day when Shakespeare, Cervantes and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died in 1616, is officially designated World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO.

However, although yesterday the Google site was displaying a re-designed logo for Earth Day, today there is nothing special about the google.com logo, and on the google.co.uk site the reference is to St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday. (In fact, the birthday is only deduced from the fact he was baptised on the 26th.)
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inconceivable

I’ve always found typical Spanish names a problem: who’d call their daughter Dolores, for example, given that it means “pains”? Or Sagrario, which, according to your reading, may be “shrine” or “monstrance”. Or Purificación or Inmaculada Concepción?

Of course these are traditional Catholic names which are also reflected in dedications of churches and church schools around the country.
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politics with a smile

It’s not often I get political in this blog – that’s not what it’s intended for. But yesterday I stopped for breakfast in the village and found myself watching Hugo Chávez proclaiming la victoria.

I can’t find a video of the exact part of the victory speech I was watching, but this will give an idea of the force of his presentation (warning! turn your volume down a bit if you don’t want to be deafened!).

(Note: I’ve replaced the video I had here originally as it seems to have disappeared off YouTube. This one is equally enthusiastic.)

As I watched, I suddenly realised I was sitting there with an inane grin on my face. Not so much because of the “victoria del sí“, but because the pure unadulterated enthusiasm of Comandante Chávez was infectious. And, of course what he said about it also being a victory for all those who had voted “no” was perfectly true.
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