So the PP infighting is getting worse: the San Gil and Rajoy supporters have each called demonstrations by SMS for this afternoon. This is a terrible, irresponsible idea, and Gustavo de Aristegui, at least, agrees. A political party that's going to win an election needs to show an undivided front; if it can't make up its own mind what it wants, then it's never going to convince the voters.
The average retirement pension in Spain has increased 7.3% over the last year to €813 a month, which is an improvement but still not enough for old folks who have worked hard their whole lives. So I guess Zap can claim to have done something more or less useful, for once.
Let me clarify that I am by no means a tax-and-spend left-liberal / social democrat--I'm generally in favor of keeping taxes and spending as low as possible--but when it comes to helping out people who deserve it, I think we can afford to be generous. More money for retired people, and less for consultant reports and agricultural subsidies and culture ministries and state-owned TV and concerted Church schools and subsidies to the press and foreign aid to Cuba and propping up decaying rust-belt industries and supporting a bloated bureaucracy and payoffs for underemployed Andalusian "agricultural laborers" who for some reason always vote for the PSOE.
The goddamn squatters had themselves a big old time here in Gracia last night; they torched 25 plastic garbage containers. So how much is it going to cost us taxpaying citizens to replace them, and where do we put our garbage in the meantime? This ain't Naples; we don't live in filth around here.
I hate these dirtbags. They contribute absolutely nothing to the community, and they detract from it by committing vandalism and and shoplifting and living rough and dirty in abandoned buildings. So I bought a black indelible marker pen, and I've been writing "Okupas fuera" and "Okupas = parasitos" on the fly-posters they stick up on all the walls calling for anarchy and freedom for Franki.
So with all the foreign news out there they could be reporting on, La Vanguardia devotes a page to Ellen DeGenerate inviting John McCain to be the best man at her lesbian wedding. Wow, that's hot breaking political news. The most interesting part of the whole thing is that they spelled McCain's name wrong.
Get this. It's very weird. Santiago Cañizares, Valencia's goalie, formerly on the Spanish national team, is being investigated for child sexual abuse and has been subpoenaed to testify. Cañizares is known for having, well, unusual ideas, and hanging around with occult psychic cultish pseudophilosophical types. Specifically, he's been hanging around with a Uri Geller-type called "El Brujo," or "The Wizard." Seems that The Wizard has been charged with sexual abuse by 15 young women between the ages of 11 and 22. The Wizard instructed the girls that they needed to have sex with men as part of their "recovery" therapy. That's rape. How exploitative. What a betrayal of trust. Well, one of the girls has identified Cañizares as one of those men.
The Wizard was jailed in February 2007, and refused to testify until February of this year. Cañizares's agent denies any wrongdoing, but says Cañizares will not make any public statements. I say if he did it then we lock him up.
Headline from La Vanguardia: "Moving performance by Raimon in Madrid commemorates student revolution during dictatorship: 1000 people, among them ministers Sebastian, Soria, Aldo, and Salgado, attend singer-songwriter's concert."
You know an "artist" sucks when he's the official singer-songwriter of the current political regime. Here in Spain, there are several alleged artists--Llach, Sabina, Serrat, Ramoncin, and that lot, of whom Raimon is probably the worst--who pretended to be all radical back in the Sixties but never actually got beat up themselves. Now all those parlor-pinko lefty chuckleheads who think they were cool back in the good old days pretend to like these clapped-out used-up old farts.
The thing about Raimon is he cannot sing, he cannot play the guitar, he cannot write melodies, and his lyrics are stupid.
3 comments:
Strange, I just had a conversation about this with my girlfriend. She always says and writes 'MacDonalds' instead of 'McDonalds'.
It seems LaVangua did the same. Her defense is that Spaniards, being so cultured and knowing that originally 'Mc' and 'Mac' meant the same thing in Gaelic ('son of') they choose to use 'Mac' thus making it easier to pronounce. Because the 'i' sound we use for 'Mc' doesn't exist in Spanish.
When I informed her that although it's true that originally 'Mac' and 'Mc' were the same, that was many moons ago and now, at least in the States, they are not the same. Case in point, the founders of Mc-Dees, the McDonald brothers who, although of Irish descent, spelled their name 'Mc' and not 'Mac'.
The other example I used was 'McCain'. At any rate, this justification seems like just a silly excuse to be lazy and mis-pronounce proper names.
As far as Raimon goes ... he does seem to suck. But not more so than your average US/Brit/wherever pop band who cannot write, sing or play and have other people write and (over)produce their tunes. But at least they are usually easier on the eyes.
Bob
The thing about Raimon, though, is that he's the official singer of the Zap administration. He goes around acting like he's some kind of legend, as if he were Bob Dylan or Johnny Cash. And he gets musical-legend treatment from the Spanish official left. Four cabinet ministers went to his big show. Your typical American-British crap pop band gets no publicity from the government, nor effusive praise in the semi-official, subsidized press. And, frankly, I'd rather listen to mindless pop like--oh, hell, I don't know who's popular now, Huey Lewis or Billy Idol or Boy George or whatever--than Raimon. He hurts my ears.
Of Spanish lefty wannabe musical legends, Raimon is the most self-righteous, Llach the most pretentious, Sabina the phoniest pseudo-decadent, Serrat the dullest, and Ramoncin the most ignorant. Pi de la Serra tops all of them, but he's not nearly as famous as the others.
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