Bread and peace. Those are the basics (is peace a basic?) that the strikers are demanding.
I’ve just watched the TV news and there are huge crowds demonstrating in Plaza Colón and around the fuente de Neptuno. But this photo was taken just north of Neptune about five hours ago, when the mass of manifestación was elsewhere. The tall building just visible in the far distance (click the image for a closer view) is up by Colón. 
I see from the BBC website that “CIA director David Petraeus has resigned from his post, admitting he had an extra-marital affair.”
“Unnamed officials” say the affair was with his biographer, who is described in the article as having spent months “embedded alongside the then-general in Afghanistan while researching her 2011 book, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”
Leaving aside that use of the verb “embed”, I think the story raises a few questions:
Did she include details of the affair in the biography? If not, can we trust the accuracy of anything else in the book?
Between a biographer and their subject, is there not a “power-relationship”? After all, she could make him look better or worse depending on how she expressed the information? Was he coerced?
She, too, was married. Is she going to resign as a biographer? (It seems to me that the affair impinges more directly on her work than on his.)
After a couple of weeks involving a lot of travelling, I returned to the pueblo late on Monday. Then I had to leave again on Wednesday and make a quick trip to Scotland for a meeting. Which entailed leaving the house on Wedesday morning and going by car, bus, metro, plane, taxi, taxi, shuttle bus, plane, taxi, taxi, taxi, plane, plane, taxi, taxi, bus and car, and getting back here at lunchtime today, fifty hours later.
For reasons which may be understandable, I was half asleep this morning on the bus back to the village. I realised just how dozy I was, though, when it lumbered over a speed bump and I woke up thinking – “goodness! Have we landed already?”
Having woken up, I started looking around and noticed this sign on the window behind the driver:
Which is all very well, but there were no seatbelts to wear.
I think perhaps the best thing about the sign, though, is the marvellous brand name: Fecalbus. I know the local bus company isn’t brilliant, but I didn’t think it was that bad.
I hate it when previously comfortable shoes get rough on the inside and start to rub blisters. But if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post, so I guess there’s a silver lining. Or perhaps a latex or leather one.
ventilative, bibulous and can avoid foot stink and ache.
Personally, I much prefer “ventilative” to the more common “breathable”. After all, air is breathable, which is quite a different quality to that of the materials insoles are made of.
Continue reading “sole-destroying”
It has been attributed to me, and the poem is available online, so I don’t think there’s a big problem. I do, however, wish that they’d contacted me and told me they wanted to use it. After all, it’d be nice to be told they thought it was good. Equally, it’d be useful – though not as nice – to know if they were using it to demonstrate what /not/ to do.
I don’t seem to have posted it on the blog, so here it is:
Continue reading “in the woods”
don't confuse the narrator 