Further aimless thoughts while listening to KHYI out of Dallas (click on "Click Here to Listen"):

The wildcat strike at El Prat lasted all day yesterday, though the airport is functioning more or less normally now. The strike caused more than 500 flights to be canceled yesterday and a great number to be diverted to other airports, thus thoroughly messing up the rest of Spain's air travel sector as well. Today more than 100 flights had to be canceled as well, about 20% of the scheduled number.

What happened is that the mainstream labor unions, the UGT and CCOO, called an informative meeting of the Iberia handling workers yesterday at 9 AM, and the meeting got out of hand. Radical elements led by the anarchist labor union CGT took over and passed a wildcat strike motion; the runways were immediately blocked. Finally, at about 7 PM, an agreement was reached in which the workers went back to work and management promised to do something so no one would ever ever get fired again no matter how much crack he smoked on the job.

The question now is who is going to reimburse all the passengers who missed flights because of the strike. If you figure there were, I don't know, 10,000, and if they paid an average of, say, €250 for their tickets, that's a pretty good chunk of change.

Note: The anarchist union that panicked the workers' meeting, the CGT, is also the bunch whose logo appears on the "Israel Estat Genocida" banner (scroll down to the fifth photo for a good view) at last week's anti-Semitic demo. These guys are left over from the old CNT-FAI, the most powerful anarchist organization ever at its peak in late 1936.

The boats are still washing up on the Canaries; there have been several more deaths among the West African illegal immigrants who make up the boat people. Over 600 of them arrived just this week.

The world's number one blowhard, Hugo Chavez, told Al Jazira: "The Jews are doing the same thing to the Lebanese that Hitler did to them." Chavez's next stop on his world tour is Iran.

Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock got married. The sheer redneckiness (redneckosity? redneckization?) is overwhelming. Let's hope the kids have her looks and neither's brain.

I didn't make this up, but it's always seemed accurate to me: The difference between white trash, rednecks, and hillbillies is that, if they get invited to a wedding, white trash throw on a stinky old Iron Maiden '82 tour T-shirt and a torn-up pair of tennis shoes and show up. Rednecks, on the other hand, put on a brand-new freshly-ironed Dale Earnhardt Jr. T-shirt along with their biggest, roundest belt buckle and a pair of alligator-skin cowboy boots and show up. Hillbillies, on the third hand, put on the suit their great-grandpappy Jethro was buried in and show up with a chicken under their arms.