prensa – Page 3 – don't confuse the narrator

the marrow of life

My elderly mother lives alone. One of her main interests is the vegetable garden, which keeps her busy and fairly fit, but I guess I do occasionally worry that there would be no one there to help in an emergency.

Mind you, this headline from the BBC reasssures me that, while her garden continues productive, she has the means at hand to deal with certain dangers.

Only, I really do think it’d take more than a courgette to deter a ‘200lb (91kg) black bear’. (Some other sites are referring to the weapon as a zucchini, but both the BBC and the Telegraph call it a courgette.)
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verses and versions

One of the joys of speaking two languages is that you get far more opportunities for puns than monolinguists do.

It was with delight, then – and with a language hiccough mid-way – that I saw the following on the El País website earlier today:

Headline: El general McChrystal llega a la Casa Blanca para verse con Obama — Well-versed in military matters?

The word verse flipped my mind into English and conjured the wonderful image of Obama and McChrystal having a flyting contest.

picture perfect?

This double-page advert comes from today’s El Mundo newspaper:

advert for el mundo image processing course — Honesty in journalism?

Is it just me, or is there something slightly disturbing about the press offering to teach people how to ‘retouch’ images?

word power

They say that in Valladolid they speak the purest Spanish. And apparently it’s powerful as well as pure.

From the Castilla y León pages of El Mundo, the headline: “Una pareja de sexagenarios desarma a un atracador en su portal sólo con palabras”.

The story begins:

El poder de la palabra es inmenso, pero no sólo en sentido figurado. Solamente con ese arma, una pareja sexagenaria logró desarmar al atracador que trató de robarles cuando entraban en el portal de su vivienda en […] Valladolid.

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alien affairs

In today’s El Mundo there’s a report entitled Los borrosos rostros de la nueva Unión – “the vague faces of the new Union”. (It’s in the print edition, but it seems you need a subscription to read the article online.) In it, they talk about the new president of the European Union and the “superministra”, Catherine Ashton.

Oops. I nearly typed Catherine Tate.

There are two possible reasons for that slip, I think: one, going back to the Eighties when I first learned about databases with dBase II, an Ashton-Tate product; and two, the fact that the article is accompanied by a photo of a dalek.
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