Some time ago I read about hotels losing money because of people leaving without actually checking out and therefore not paying the bill. Do they sneak out with their bags before anyone has a chance to see them go? The hotel equivalent of the moonlight flit. I imagine the receptionist stopping guests and asking just where they are going with the suitcase.
I was reminded of this because I just read about a bunch of Italians in Pamplona who tried to do a runner from a restaurant and were made to go back and settle the bill: €620! That's rather a lot of money for a restaurant to lose in one night. There were fifteen in the group but still,
that's over €40 apiece. You see, we simply would not have gone to a restaurant with those sorts of prices!
Teachers, even retired teachers, can't afford such things. And now our government is insulting teachers once again by restricting their proposed pay-rise to 1%. I wonder if they will ever realise that if you want quality public service workers you need to play them properly. Fortunately for the government there are still enough people who feel inspired to go and work in schools and hospitals. How long will it last.
Here's a link to another bit of nonsense about schools: testing pupils. The gist of it is that primary school pupils might well learn to punctuate properly and understand when to use a semicolon (something that many adults find really difficult) but if they don't make a perfectly formed comma or semicolon, with the tail of the comma facing in the right direction and the dot of the semicolon at just the right height, they may lose marks. If you have to insert punctuation into a printed text it can be extremely difficult to make the mark in a perfectly neat way, especially if your teachers and parents have stressed you out about the whole thing! Don't the "experts" who oversee the marking of tests realise this? This is not testing but trapping!
But I mustn't get started on the whole issue of testing. Not good for anybody's blood pressure!
I also read recently about female journalists being expelled from the White House press room because of inappropriate dress. Apparently the women concerned were wearing sleeveless dresses. It is summer after all! But female journalists' arms and shoulders are deemed disrespectful. Or maybe it's only the kind of female journalists who might tell "false news" stories. Maybe they should start to carry tasteful stoles to cover their bare arms, as many women tourists do when visiting Italian churches. Or perhaps the White House could invest in those paper cover-ups that some churches, again Italian, hand out as you enter if they deem you to be showing toomich flesh!
I was reminded of our trying to visit the Vatican one summer holiday and Phil being denied entry because of his knee-length shorts! So a middle-aged man's knees are offensive to the Lord, are they?!
Strangely enough, having read about this dress code business, I then saw Kellyanne Conway on the news, standing outside the White House in a sleeveless dress! Shock! Horror! Perhaps she too had been expelled!
Tuesday, 11 July 2017
Sunday, 9 July 2017
Inequalities.
When the temperature got up towards 30 in Vigo recently a friend commented that we probably never get such weather in the UK. When I assured him that it does happen, he assured me that it must be only rarely. And so, here I am at our son's house not far from London, with blue sky and sunshine and soaring temperatures. He assures me that they have had this weather for a good few weeks. (Everyone predicts that it will stop when the schools break up at the end of the month.)
Looking at the weather forecast, I notice that the predicted high temperature here is 27 degrees, as opposed to a predicted high of 22 in Manchester. So there is a bit of regional difference. The Northern Powerhouse is clearly not doing much about the weather.
Here's another difference from once place to another:-
In El Salvador a young woman has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. She was raped, more than once, over and over, ended up pregnant and finally gave birth to a stillborn child. She was found guilty of murder on the ground that she did not seek proper antenatal care. How does that work?
By contrast, in the UK a man has been sentenced to 25 years for killing two women, five years apart, both former girlfriends.
It's a strange world. And there are still places where women poor treatment.
It seems too that inequality also exists in the world of technology. Here is a link to an article about how sexist technology can be. It reports the case of an academic trying to gain access to the locker room at her local gym. She identified herself by her title: Dr. The automatic door system would not let her in because it only recognised Dr as a male title. Therefore she was not allowed into the women's changing room!
Some of this is because computers and computer systems are now capable of learning. By reading a lot of text, a computer can learn that Paris is to France as Tokyo is to Japan. It develops a dictionary by association. And so certain occupations become male preserves, just because on the real world that is more often the case. And when asked “Man is to woman as computer programmer is to ?”, the computer model will answer “homemaker”. Or for “father is to mother as doctor is to ?”, the answer is “nurse”. "Of course", the article tells us, " the model reflects a certain reality: it is true that there are more male computer programmers, and nurses are more often women. But this bias, reflecting social discrimination, will now be reproduced and reinforced when we engage with computers using natural language that relies on Word2vec. It is not hard to imagine how this model could also be racially biased, or biased against other groups."
We still have some way to go to have a perfectly balanced world.
Looking at the weather forecast, I notice that the predicted high temperature here is 27 degrees, as opposed to a predicted high of 22 in Manchester. So there is a bit of regional difference. The Northern Powerhouse is clearly not doing much about the weather.
Here's another difference from once place to another:-
In El Salvador a young woman has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. She was raped, more than once, over and over, ended up pregnant and finally gave birth to a stillborn child. She was found guilty of murder on the ground that she did not seek proper antenatal care. How does that work?
By contrast, in the UK a man has been sentenced to 25 years for killing two women, five years apart, both former girlfriends.
It's a strange world. And there are still places where women poor treatment.
It seems too that inequality also exists in the world of technology. Here is a link to an article about how sexist technology can be. It reports the case of an academic trying to gain access to the locker room at her local gym. She identified herself by her title: Dr. The automatic door system would not let her in because it only recognised Dr as a male title. Therefore she was not allowed into the women's changing room!
Some of this is because computers and computer systems are now capable of learning. By reading a lot of text, a computer can learn that Paris is to France as Tokyo is to Japan. It develops a dictionary by association. And so certain occupations become male preserves, just because on the real world that is more often the case. And when asked “Man is to woman as computer programmer is to ?”, the computer model will answer “homemaker”. Or for “father is to mother as doctor is to ?”, the answer is “nurse”. "Of course", the article tells us, " the model reflects a certain reality: it is true that there are more male computer programmers, and nurses are more often women. But this bias, reflecting social discrimination, will now be reproduced and reinforced when we engage with computers using natural language that relies on Word2vec. It is not hard to imagine how this model could also be racially biased, or biased against other groups."
We still have some way to go to have a perfectly balanced world.
Friday, 7 July 2017
A Traveller's tales.
Travelling to London in the so-called quiet zone of the train. This works fine for preventing people making noisy phone calls and making a row with their electronic gadgets. What it does not do is legislate for a group of young women talking nineteen to the dozen at the top of their voices.
I was considering reminding them of the quiet status of the coach. And then they were joined at Stockport by a friend who seemingly had a seat booked in another coach but wanted to sit with her friends. She asked if she could sit in the seat next to mine. I pointed out that it was reserved, and therefore she might have to move at some point. Then another passenger came up and said that that seat was actually hers but she had chosen to sit further down the carriage in unreserved seats. And she reminded them that this was the quiet coach! Hurray! It made little difference. Especially as when their friend arrived, she brought alcohol for all of them.
Finally the ticket inspector reminded them that this was a quiet coach! Listening to their not-so-quiet conversation, I gleaned that they were off for a weekend partying in London. The one who got on in Stockport had a case so big and obviously heavy that even her friends expressed surprise!
Here is from the noisy ladies: "As well as a quiet coach, they should have a party coach. If ever I get rich, I'll buy my own train and organise it!"
On the bus yesterday from Vigo to Porto to catch plane to Manchester we were quite amazed at how full it was. AUTNA, the bus company, had even laid on an extra vehicle. We had booked in advance so we were unconcerned about getting a seat but proved hard to find two seats together. At the last moment a British family group got on and walked up and down the bus looking to seat numbers to match their booking. Eventually we put them out of their puzzled misery by pointing out that the numbers really only serve to tell the company how many seats are booked. Even when all seats have numbers nobody takes any notice of them. This has always been the case as long as I have travelled around Spain.
On Wednesday we made a last minute decision to pop over to Pontevedra and have lunch with our friend Colin. We arrived at Urzaiz station in plenty of time but the queue to buy tickets was so long that we opted to follow the recommendation that kept coming over the public address system and had a go at buying our tickets from the automatic vending machines. We successfully put in the numbers of our tarjetas doradas, our over-65 discount cards, and followed all the instructions. When it came to paying for our tickets, the amount seemed higher than usual. Then we discovered that somehow we had bought four tickets. By then there was no time to ask at the ticket office so we scuttled off and caughte the train. After all, it was only a matter of €7.
On the train we decided to ask the ticket inspector about this. We explained our stupidity in using machines. His first reaction was to say we should go to the ticket office at Pontevedra and ask there. Not terribly helpful! After a few minutes, however, he came back and scrawled something on the unused tickets. So, arriving at Pontevedra we headed for the booking office. Another long queue awaited us and so we asked at the customer service desk. The haughty lady there indicated that we should join the queue and "comentar" with the assistant there. Another not very helpful moment!
Meanwhile, perhaps because so many people in the queue were mumbling and muttering, another assistant turned up. The one who was there already had spent about five minutes with each customer. Slowly, slowly, the second assistant ambled to his seat. Slowly slowly, he switched on his computer. Slowly, slowly, he sorted out all his equipment. And slowly, slowly, our turn came around. Then everything went into double speed. I was half way through explaining what had happened when he nodded, smiled, and handed us the money we had paid for our unused tickets. Amazing!
Such are the things that happen to this intrepid traveller!
I was considering reminding them of the quiet status of the coach. And then they were joined at Stockport by a friend who seemingly had a seat booked in another coach but wanted to sit with her friends. She asked if she could sit in the seat next to mine. I pointed out that it was reserved, and therefore she might have to move at some point. Then another passenger came up and said that that seat was actually hers but she had chosen to sit further down the carriage in unreserved seats. And she reminded them that this was the quiet coach! Hurray! It made little difference. Especially as when their friend arrived, she brought alcohol for all of them.
Finally the ticket inspector reminded them that this was a quiet coach! Listening to their not-so-quiet conversation, I gleaned that they were off for a weekend partying in London. The one who got on in Stockport had a case so big and obviously heavy that even her friends expressed surprise!
Here is from the noisy ladies: "As well as a quiet coach, they should have a party coach. If ever I get rich, I'll buy my own train and organise it!"
On the bus yesterday from Vigo to Porto to catch plane to Manchester we were quite amazed at how full it was. AUTNA, the bus company, had even laid on an extra vehicle. We had booked in advance so we were unconcerned about getting a seat but proved hard to find two seats together. At the last moment a British family group got on and walked up and down the bus looking to seat numbers to match their booking. Eventually we put them out of their puzzled misery by pointing out that the numbers really only serve to tell the company how many seats are booked. Even when all seats have numbers nobody takes any notice of them. This has always been the case as long as I have travelled around Spain.
On Wednesday we made a last minute decision to pop over to Pontevedra and have lunch with our friend Colin. We arrived at Urzaiz station in plenty of time but the queue to buy tickets was so long that we opted to follow the recommendation that kept coming over the public address system and had a go at buying our tickets from the automatic vending machines. We successfully put in the numbers of our tarjetas doradas, our over-65 discount cards, and followed all the instructions. When it came to paying for our tickets, the amount seemed higher than usual. Then we discovered that somehow we had bought four tickets. By then there was no time to ask at the ticket office so we scuttled off and caughte the train. After all, it was only a matter of €7.
On the train we decided to ask the ticket inspector about this. We explained our stupidity in using machines. His first reaction was to say we should go to the ticket office at Pontevedra and ask there. Not terribly helpful! After a few minutes, however, he came back and scrawled something on the unused tickets. So, arriving at Pontevedra we headed for the booking office. Another long queue awaited us and so we asked at the customer service desk. The haughty lady there indicated that we should join the queue and "comentar" with the assistant there. Another not very helpful moment!
Meanwhile, perhaps because so many people in the queue were mumbling and muttering, another assistant turned up. The one who was there already had spent about five minutes with each customer. Slowly, slowly, the second assistant ambled to his seat. Slowly slowly, he switched on his computer. Slowly, slowly, he sorted out all his equipment. And slowly, slowly, our turn came around. Then everything went into double speed. I was half way through explaining what had happened when he nodded, smiled, and handed us the money we had paid for our unused tickets. Amazing!
Such are the things that happen to this intrepid traveller!
Wednesday, 5 July 2017
Weather (again) and graffiti in dreams!
Yesterday was an odd day. It began with intense heat first thing in the morning. While I was down at the pool in the late morning and into midday it cooled down, not enough to cause concern but indicative of a change on the way. By late afternoon the Islas Cíes, outside the Vigo ría but which can be seen from our balcony, were disappearing under a bank of sea mist. And that bank of mist proceeded to roll up the estuary, as it often does suddenly in a heatwave, and cover the port area and the peninsula of A Guía. It wasn't as spectacular as I have sometimes seen it but it was just as effective at bringing down the temperature. This morning we have a grey sky and 19 degrees. What a difference a day makes.
In this town graffiti can be seen all over the place. Sometimes it's just a tag but even these have different levels, from a badly scrawled name to a more stylised set of initials, like ADMS which is everywhere, or the fancier Grey Brus, seen almost as frequently. I would like to know how they manage to produce such careful graffiti high up on walls of buildings or, more frighteningly, on the walls overlooking the motorway!
There are messages as well. There's the simple "TE AMO" (I LOVE YOU), which is written almost without a space, so that I always do a double take when I see it and wonder what "teamo" is. In one place there is a now much out of date wedding announcement; I hope it went well! And on one wall someone has written an apology: LO SIENTO. What did the writer do that demanded a public apology; there must be a story behind that.
In some places the graffiti are really elaborate, a whole work of art. There is a section of the river walk back from Samil beach to Castrelos Park with some excellent examples. It's a shame that sometimes the taggers who feel the need to scrawl their names as inartistically as possible often choose to overwrite such urban decoration.
It was last night's dream that spurred me to write about the graffiti here. In the dream I was out with friends having drinks and tapas. The list of raciones included flamingo. Not a usual item around here. Intrigued, we ordered flamingo, expecting some kind of steak. After all, there are farms that specialise in rearing ostriches in order to sell the meat to restaurants. So why not flamingo meat? When the order arrived it was a plate of tiny flamingo-shaped offerings, impossibly flamingo pink and intended to be eaten whole, like the little sardines or the pescaditos fritos. What did they taste of? My dream memory lets me down on that detail. No doubt ancient Romans or Greeks would have found some interesting interpretation to my dream.
However, I am pretty sure I know what inspired it: a piece of graffiti. Every morning, out on my run, I turn a corner and find myself looking at a bright pinky-orange flamingo painted on a wall. In case you are left in any doubt, the artist has written in large letters FLA-MIN-GO. That must have been the trigger!
Dreams are definitely strange ... and I hadn't even eaten any cheese!
In this town graffiti can be seen all over the place. Sometimes it's just a tag but even these have different levels, from a badly scrawled name to a more stylised set of initials, like ADMS which is everywhere, or the fancier Grey Brus, seen almost as frequently. I would like to know how they manage to produce such careful graffiti high up on walls of buildings or, more frighteningly, on the walls overlooking the motorway!
There are messages as well. There's the simple "TE AMO" (I LOVE YOU), which is written almost without a space, so that I always do a double take when I see it and wonder what "teamo" is. In one place there is a now much out of date wedding announcement; I hope it went well! And on one wall someone has written an apology: LO SIENTO. What did the writer do that demanded a public apology; there must be a story behind that.
In some places the graffiti are really elaborate, a whole work of art. There is a section of the river walk back from Samil beach to Castrelos Park with some excellent examples. It's a shame that sometimes the taggers who feel the need to scrawl their names as inartistically as possible often choose to overwrite such urban decoration.
It was last night's dream that spurred me to write about the graffiti here. In the dream I was out with friends having drinks and tapas. The list of raciones included flamingo. Not a usual item around here. Intrigued, we ordered flamingo, expecting some kind of steak. After all, there are farms that specialise in rearing ostriches in order to sell the meat to restaurants. So why not flamingo meat? When the order arrived it was a plate of tiny flamingo-shaped offerings, impossibly flamingo pink and intended to be eaten whole, like the little sardines or the pescaditos fritos. What did they taste of? My dream memory lets me down on that detail. No doubt ancient Romans or Greeks would have found some interesting interpretation to my dream.
However, I am pretty sure I know what inspired it: a piece of graffiti. Every morning, out on my run, I turn a corner and find myself looking at a bright pinky-orange flamingo painted on a wall. In case you are left in any doubt, the artist has written in large letters FLA-MIN-GO. That must have been the trigger!
Dreams are definitely strange ... and I hadn't even eaten any cheese!
Tuesday, 4 July 2017
Heat, poolside talk and some statistical info!
We've been having another heatwave. When I went out running first thing this morning, the temperature indicator on the advertising hoarding down at the roundabout already registered 30 degrees. And that was at 9.00 this morning. It was 30 degrees at the other end of the street at 9.00 last night so maybe the temperature just didn't go down at all overnight.
Late morning I went down to the pool and a bit of cloud was moving in, and a light breeze. Not quite so hot but still hot enough to make me want to sit in the shade when I wasn't in the water. Opinion down at the pool is that "hay que aprovechar" - we must make the most of it - as the rain is coming on Friday. By which point I shall be in London, visiting our son. The forecast for there is quite reasonable by all accounts.
At the pool I had one of those odd conversations with a very small boy. A series of questions:
"Do you have a swimsuit?"
"Why don't you go in the little pool?"
"Why have I not seen you here before?"
"Can you swim?"
And so on. The sort of question three year olds ask.
He told me his name was Brian, a name I have not heard here before. Or in England since I was a small girl for that matter. All the English Brian's are of my generation I think, like the Maureens. Of course, it could be that the small boy's name is spelt Braian and that it is some traditional Galician or Celtic name.
I read yesterday that there are almost two-and-a-half times as many UK citizens (expats) living in Spain as there are Spanish citizens (immigrants) living in the UK. Most of the expats choose to live near the coast in Spain and about half of them are retired. The figures provided by the National Office for Statistics didn't say where most of the Spaniards live but I suspect a lot of them live in London and Manchester. Most of them are between 20 and 39. 59% of them are employed. Only 5% are unemployed - the Spaniards are not benefits scroungers then! The rest must be students, spouses or children presumably.
There were 219,000 visits of between one and 12 months to Spain by British citizens, mainly not for work or study, so perhaps those with holiday homes in Spain or visiting friends and relatives. We contributed our bit to those statistics. And there were also 13 million visits of less than 28 days to Spain in 2016, the vast majority holidays.
Only 849,00 Spaniards came to the UK on holiday. You'd think they don't like our weather. Considering that most of those I speak to are firmly convinced that we NEVER have hot weather and, in fact, that it rains most of the time, when it's not actually foggy, that is, they probably don't like the weather.
Those I have spoken to have enjoyed visiting London, Edinburgh, the Lake District and, in one odd case, Milton Keynes. I think it was because her son worked there for Banco de Santander, the bank that seems to be taking over the financial world!
None of this explains why the British living in other countries are expats rather than immigrants!
Late morning I went down to the pool and a bit of cloud was moving in, and a light breeze. Not quite so hot but still hot enough to make me want to sit in the shade when I wasn't in the water. Opinion down at the pool is that "hay que aprovechar" - we must make the most of it - as the rain is coming on Friday. By which point I shall be in London, visiting our son. The forecast for there is quite reasonable by all accounts.
At the pool I had one of those odd conversations with a very small boy. A series of questions:
"Do you have a swimsuit?"
"Why don't you go in the little pool?"
"Why have I not seen you here before?"
"Can you swim?"
And so on. The sort of question three year olds ask.
He told me his name was Brian, a name I have not heard here before. Or in England since I was a small girl for that matter. All the English Brian's are of my generation I think, like the Maureens. Of course, it could be that the small boy's name is spelt Braian and that it is some traditional Galician or Celtic name.
I read yesterday that there are almost two-and-a-half times as many UK citizens (expats) living in Spain as there are Spanish citizens (immigrants) living in the UK. Most of the expats choose to live near the coast in Spain and about half of them are retired. The figures provided by the National Office for Statistics didn't say where most of the Spaniards live but I suspect a lot of them live in London and Manchester. Most of them are between 20 and 39. 59% of them are employed. Only 5% are unemployed - the Spaniards are not benefits scroungers then! The rest must be students, spouses or children presumably.
There were 219,000 visits of between one and 12 months to Spain by British citizens, mainly not for work or study, so perhaps those with holiday homes in Spain or visiting friends and relatives. We contributed our bit to those statistics. And there were also 13 million visits of less than 28 days to Spain in 2016, the vast majority holidays.
Only 849,00 Spaniards came to the UK on holiday. You'd think they don't like our weather. Considering that most of those I speak to are firmly convinced that we NEVER have hot weather and, in fact, that it rains most of the time, when it's not actually foggy, that is, they probably don't like the weather.
Those I have spoken to have enjoyed visiting London, Edinburgh, the Lake District and, in one odd case, Milton Keynes. I think it was because her son worked there for Banco de Santander, the bank that seems to be taking over the financial world!
None of this explains why the British living in other countries are expats rather than immigrants!
Monday, 3 July 2017
Nationalism, of one kind and another!
Years ago when the British spent holidays abroad, in our case at that time mostly in northern France, which was just about within drivable distance from the Northwest of England, there were usually two things that we really truly wanted on our return: fish and chips and a proper cup of tea. The longing for fish and chips has faded, at least in our case, but the yen for a good cup of tea remains. The continental Europeans seem incapable of making a good cup of tea. The basic principle of pouring the water on the teabag immediately it boils is a thing unheard of. But then I know Italians and Spaniards who make similar complaints about the British and coffee. Phil and I pride ourselves quite outrageously on being able to make both beverages to a more than adequate standard!
It used to be that here in Spain the closest you could buy to decent tea was the comically named English Breakfast Tea, which might be what effete Southerners drink for breakfast but is not at all like what is drunk in the North. Even then, you had to hunt for it. Nowadays, just as you can buy chorizo, jamón serrano and even ready-made tortilla española in Tesco, so I can pop down to the Mercadona next door and buy Typhoo Tea and PG Tips. And since it is now much easier to buy proper milk, instead of sterilised rubbish, a decent cup of tea is easily acquired ... at least in our flat!
We just need to find a source of Cadbury's chocolate and all will be very well indeed!
Down at the port, in the A Laxe shopping centre, there is an American Food Shop. As far as I can tell from a quick visit, it seems to sell mostly American sweets and soft drinks. Somebody must miss those items and feel the need to buy them here.
In Christchurch, New Zealand, there is a grocery store called A Little Bit of Britain, which largely caters for British expats. (Now, there is a conundrum for another day: foreigners who go to live in Britain are migrants or immigrants but when the British emigrate they are expats!) That store has recently had a delivery of the breakfast cereal Weetabix (also available in Mercadona supermarkets here in Spain) seized and impounded. A rival cereal company, Weet-bix complained that it could confuse customers. Weet-bix is apparently a staple in many New Zealand homes and the company claimed their copyright was being infringed.
These antipodeans must be easily confused! And I am not sure that the solution will really reduce the confusion. Lisa Wilson, the co-owner of A Little Bit of Britain, received a letter saying her cereal shipment would be released if she placed a sticker over the offending Weetabix label once the item was on her shelves, and blanked out the name Weetabix when she sold the cereal online. So it goes!
And here's another tale of seizure of a different kind. Austria's highest court has upheld a decision to expropriate the house in Braunau where Hitler was born, ostensibly to stop it becoming a pilgrim site for neo-fascists. It seems that the government was renting the house and using it as a centre for people with disabilities. How appropriate; Hitler must be spinning in his grave! The rental agreement came to an end in 2011 when the owners refused to carry out renovations.
Nobody knows what the government will do with the building. Proposals to demolish it have been met with resistance from politicians and historians.there is a suggestion it might be used by a charity. Every year on Hitler’s birthday, anti-fascist protesters organise a rally outside the building, where a memorial stone reads: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism, millions of dead warn.”
However, I fail to see how this appropriation will prevent pilgrimages, by both anti-fascists and neo-fascists.
It used to be that here in Spain the closest you could buy to decent tea was the comically named English Breakfast Tea, which might be what effete Southerners drink for breakfast but is not at all like what is drunk in the North. Even then, you had to hunt for it. Nowadays, just as you can buy chorizo, jamón serrano and even ready-made tortilla española in Tesco, so I can pop down to the Mercadona next door and buy Typhoo Tea and PG Tips. And since it is now much easier to buy proper milk, instead of sterilised rubbish, a decent cup of tea is easily acquired ... at least in our flat!
We just need to find a source of Cadbury's chocolate and all will be very well indeed!
Down at the port, in the A Laxe shopping centre, there is an American Food Shop. As far as I can tell from a quick visit, it seems to sell mostly American sweets and soft drinks. Somebody must miss those items and feel the need to buy them here.
In Christchurch, New Zealand, there is a grocery store called A Little Bit of Britain, which largely caters for British expats. (Now, there is a conundrum for another day: foreigners who go to live in Britain are migrants or immigrants but when the British emigrate they are expats!) That store has recently had a delivery of the breakfast cereal Weetabix (also available in Mercadona supermarkets here in Spain) seized and impounded. A rival cereal company, Weet-bix complained that it could confuse customers. Weet-bix is apparently a staple in many New Zealand homes and the company claimed their copyright was being infringed.
These antipodeans must be easily confused! And I am not sure that the solution will really reduce the confusion. Lisa Wilson, the co-owner of A Little Bit of Britain, received a letter saying her cereal shipment would be released if she placed a sticker over the offending Weetabix label once the item was on her shelves, and blanked out the name Weetabix when she sold the cereal online. So it goes!
And here's another tale of seizure of a different kind. Austria's highest court has upheld a decision to expropriate the house in Braunau where Hitler was born, ostensibly to stop it becoming a pilgrim site for neo-fascists. It seems that the government was renting the house and using it as a centre for people with disabilities. How appropriate; Hitler must be spinning in his grave! The rental agreement came to an end in 2011 when the owners refused to carry out renovations.
Nobody knows what the government will do with the building. Proposals to demolish it have been met with resistance from politicians and historians.there is a suggestion it might be used by a charity. Every year on Hitler’s birthday, anti-fascist protesters organise a rally outside the building, where a memorial stone reads: “For peace, freedom and democracy. Never again fascism, millions of dead warn.”
However, I fail to see how this appropriation will prevent pilgrimages, by both anti-fascists and neo-fascists.
Sunday, 2 July 2017
Recycling stories!
The telecommunications people R must be branching out into other fields, diversifying. We found a letter in our letter box all about R Optica (mobile phones to glasses!!), with a clever little pair of cardboard glasses inside, intended to be a copy of the kind of thing the optician uses to measure your eyes and the kind of lenses you need. People get paid good money to come up with advertising ploys like that! Anyway, we didn't want it so we put it in the box outside the door, the one labelled "publicidad".
I think that box was intended for advertisers to put their fliers in back in the day when the outer door to the entrance to our block still had a working lock. Nowadays the advertisers can get into the outer vestibule where the letter boxes are and pop a flier in each letter box. When we empty all the tat out of our letter box and can't be bothered to go out to the big waste paper collecting bin in the street, then we pop it into the box labelled publicidad. It disappears as if by magic!
Whoever does the disappearing trick clearly took one look at the envelope from R, saw that it was addressed to "El señor residente", ie the occupier, at our specific address and took umbrage. For the opened envelope appeared back in our letter box with a message: "Hay una papelera en la calle"; in English "There is a waste paper bin in the street". Oops! We shall consider ourselves told. It will not, however, prevent us from putting anonymous, untraceable advertising propaganda into the "publicidad" container!
We do believe in recycling though. It's just that such a lot of tat gets stuffed into our letter box.
Someone else who believes in recycling is a chap described as the "crazy bottle guy". He has been filling empty plastic water bottles with sand and using them as building materials to make a house in a refugee camp in the Western Sahara. Here is a link to details of what he has been doing.
"I was born in a sun-dried brick house,” he says. “The roof was made of sheets of zinc – one of the best heat conductors. Me and my family had to endure high temperatures, rain and sandstorms that would sometimes take the roof off.
When I came back to the camps, I decided to build a place for my grandmother to live that was more comfortable and more worthy of her.”
Apparently the sand-filled bottles work a treat, insulating just as well as traditional sun-dried bricks, and have the advantage of not crumbling away. Well done, "crazy bottle guy".
And here's something from the Huffington Post that I found myself in agreement with, and which I think applies to the countries of Europe as well as the USA:-
"Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue. I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece: I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 % for my fast food burger if it means the person making it can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.
I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.
If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP.
Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.
I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see.
I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters. There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage, fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).
But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you. I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.
The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling."
It's all about making the world work for all of us!
I think that box was intended for advertisers to put their fliers in back in the day when the outer door to the entrance to our block still had a working lock. Nowadays the advertisers can get into the outer vestibule where the letter boxes are and pop a flier in each letter box. When we empty all the tat out of our letter box and can't be bothered to go out to the big waste paper collecting bin in the street, then we pop it into the box labelled publicidad. It disappears as if by magic!
Whoever does the disappearing trick clearly took one look at the envelope from R, saw that it was addressed to "El señor residente", ie the occupier, at our specific address and took umbrage. For the opened envelope appeared back in our letter box with a message: "Hay una papelera en la calle"; in English "There is a waste paper bin in the street". Oops! We shall consider ourselves told. It will not, however, prevent us from putting anonymous, untraceable advertising propaganda into the "publicidad" container!
We do believe in recycling though. It's just that such a lot of tat gets stuffed into our letter box.
Someone else who believes in recycling is a chap described as the "crazy bottle guy". He has been filling empty plastic water bottles with sand and using them as building materials to make a house in a refugee camp in the Western Sahara. Here is a link to details of what he has been doing.
"I was born in a sun-dried brick house,” he says. “The roof was made of sheets of zinc – one of the best heat conductors. Me and my family had to endure high temperatures, rain and sandstorms that would sometimes take the roof off.
When I came back to the camps, I decided to build a place for my grandmother to live that was more comfortable and more worthy of her.”
Apparently the sand-filled bottles work a treat, insulating just as well as traditional sun-dried bricks, and have the advantage of not crumbling away. Well done, "crazy bottle guy".
And here's something from the Huffington Post that I found myself in agreement with, and which I think applies to the countries of Europe as well as the USA:-
"Like many Americans, I’m having politics fatigue. Or, to be more specific, arguing-about-politics fatigue. I haven’t run out of salient points or evidence for my political perspective, but there is a particular stumbling block I keep running into when trying to reach across the proverbial aisle and have those “difficult conversations” so smugly suggested by think piece after think piece: I don’t know how to explain to someone why they should care about other people.
Personally, I’m happy to pay an extra 4.3 % for my fast food burger if it means the person making it can afford to feed their own family. If you aren’t willing to fork over an extra 17 cents for a Big Mac, you’re a fundamentally different person than I am.
I’m perfectly content to pay taxes that go toward public schools, even though I’m childless and intend to stay that way, because all children deserve a quality, free education. If this seems unfair or unreasonable to you, we are never going to see eye to eye.
If I have to pay a little more with each paycheck to ensure my fellow Americans can access health care? SIGN ME UP.
Poverty should not be a death sentence in the richest country in the world. If you’re okay with thousands of people dying of treatable diseases just so the wealthiest among us can hoard still more wealth, there is a divide between our worldviews that can never be bridged.
I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see.
I cannot have political debates with these people. Our disagreement is not merely political, but a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society, how to be a good person, and why any of that matters. There are all kinds of practical, self-serving reasons to raise the minimum wage, fund public schools (everyone’s safer when the general public can read and use critical thinking), and make sure every American can access health care (outbreaks of preventable diseases being generally undesirable).
But if making sure your fellow citizens can afford to eat, get an education, and go to the doctor isn’t enough of a reason to fund those things, I have nothing left to say to you. I can’t debate someone into caring about what happens to their fellow human beings. The fact that such detached cruelty is so normalized in a certain party’s political discourse is at once infuriating and terrifying.
The “I’ve got mine, so screw you,” attitude has been oozing from the American right wing for decades, but this gleeful exuberance in pushing legislation that will immediately hurt the most vulnerable among us is chilling."
It's all about making the world work for all of us!
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