All posts by Tom

This is war! War makes madness! This is madness?

Catalonia, Photo posts, ,

This billboard is on my walk from the bus to work. It’s advertising the ‘This is war! Robert Capa at work’ photographic exhibition which has come to Barcelona after a successful stint in London. The image used is, of course, Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death – a fine photograph which most experts consider to have been posed (not that this makes any real difference: all images are created, one way or  another, and this is a particularly good image).

Attached to the billboard is an interesting statement from persons unknown, pointing out that Capa’s great work was staged, and then continuing for lines and lines and lines without really saying anything that makes sense. Is this madness?

One other thing worth noting: hampones is a synonym of ladrones, I’m told. It’s a new one on me.

capa2 capa1

Just over a year ago…

Catalonia, Home, Internet computer

…Iberian Notes stopped being updated. Just thought I’d remind you. A whole year of reduced blood pressure and increased happiness. I really never thought he’d be able to last a year.

And so it falls to me to be the moody expat loser blogger (Trev is better but he never says anything).

First topic: off to Modbury (‘el poble’) next weekend. Not much blogging will ensue. Still alive, though.

Is Barcelona inherently gay? How about ass?

Catalonia, Home, , , , , , ,

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to recently, and let’s face it: you haven’t but it works as an opening gambit; I’ve been fairly busy with a pleasantly productive period of work in the real world. My new-ish desk offers me a view over the city including the Sagrada Familia, Montjuic, the Forum, that hill where they have the Parc Güell and the Mediterranean sea (pollution permitting). Well, I’ve been doing that and tweeting.

I make no apology for using Twitter. I do apologise for dissing it in the first place, because it can at times be great. Much of my time on Twitter has been spent obsessively checking my ‘hetero rating‘ on a website affiliated to Stockholm Pride, an event that kicks off next week. This fun little toy works by analysing one’s tweets and every time I check it, I get a rating of ‘42% hetero’. Apparently, this is because I use the words ‘Barcelona’, ‘coming out’, ‘opera’, ‘available’ and ‘ass’ in my tweets. These words make me a ‘hybrid hetero’ and lend support to the argument for ‘an extra orientation’. Sounds fine to me, except for the words selected that indicate my degree of hetero-ness.

Picture 1

Barcelona has long been gay-friendly and the unofficial Gayxample district contains plenty of hotels and bars which cater mainly to the gay market. But it’s not an exclusively gay city. Indeed, I’d say it’s probably predominantly not gay. But I may be wrong about that. Opera, as well as being often incredibly camp musical theatre, is the name of a web browser. Ass? Well… I can’t really explain that. I may have been calling someone a loser ass or something. Or perhaps I was talking about ass, but that might possibly have been be hetero ass.

I shall spend the next few weeks tying to increase my hetero rating. I’ll use manly terms like ‘muscles’, ‘bear’ and ‘trade’. That should fix it.

Oh, and we also went to Cotlliure in Northern Catalonia (France as the nationalists would have it), a couple of weeks back. It’s a lovely place, but I recommend visiting out of season if possible. Photos here.

Is it the end of the world?

General, , ,

I heard a story yesterday that made me chuckle, but also left me feeling a little unsettled. A friend’s colleague quit work without warning a couple of weeks ago, effectively vanishing before he’d even explained why he was leaving. This sort of event can be pretty worrying for co-workers, particularly during a recession (was he laid off? does he know something we don’t know?). So it must have been something of a relief for his colleagues when they saw an email from him appear in their work inboxes. It turns out that he does know something that the rest of us don’t.

In his communication, he announced that he was in Brazil and that the reason he’d gone there was simple: next year there will be an apocalyptic event and he wanted to find some high ground (literally) from which to sit it out. He seems to be referring to the impending impact of the comet Sedna which a handful of Bible-code ‘scholars’ and other eschatologists believe will take place some time between 2010 and 2012. Claiming correlation with the ‘3rd prophecy of Fatima‘, the gibberish of Nostradamus and Mayan astrology (among other, even less reliable sources), the doom-sayers foresee a great cataclysm after the comet strikes the Atlantic ocean.

I’ve always been fascinated by theories that claim to know not only the cause but the date of a forthcoming apocalypse. These people are even more self-assured by holding ‘secret’ knowledge than traditional conspiracy theorists – indeed, many modern eschatologists are conspiracy theorists who have encountered apocalyptic prophecy presumably because it tells of an even bigger conspiracy, a cosmic one.

The trouble is, it’s hard to know who to trust. There are reports of comet strike in 2010, geomagnetic storms in 2011, and the famous Mayan doomsday ‘predicted’ for December 22nd 2012, to name but a few. And what happens when these events fail to occur (as I’m certain will happen)? Then the eschatologists will ‘reinterpret’ their texts and come up with another date.

I suppose that in the end, I’d rather not be in the same office as someone who seriously believes that they have secret knowledge relating to the end of the world. They’re probably best off sitting on a mountain in Brazil, waiting for the rapture that will never come.

Here’s a representative apocalyptic website, picked at random. Note the numerous factual discrepancies when trying to link cosmic events with Earth events (something you’ll also see on conspiracy theory websites).

Dr. Coldlove, or: Why I learned to stop worrying and love the aircon

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This post is related to my last, partly because it deals with my unpopular suggestions for dealing with common problems and partly because it involves mosquitoes (‘the devil’s moths’ as I call them*).

Last night, with an indoors temperature of 30º and level of humidity that a fan would not shift, only direct, we elected to put the air conditioning on all night. It was a simple enough decision. Gemma turned to me and said “I think we should put the a…” but by then, I’d already closed all the windows and found the remote control for our air-con unit. We continued to watch Star Trek: First Contact with the pleasant, and pleasantly guilty, feeling of cool air caressing our youthful skins. (Well, Gemma has a youthful skin; despite being YEARS younger than her, mine has developed the reddish hue and blood-vesseled texture of a Plymouthian living in Spain**).

We slept right through the night with barely a stir, except for when it got too cold. One of the many advantages of sleeping with the air conditioning on is the fact that it’s cooler when you want to sleep. Another advantage is that while you have the windows closed, all but the most ingenious mosquitoes are barred from entry to your boudoir. A disadvantage is that any cigarette smoke from the sitting room that wasn’t expelled before the airlock was sealed becomes your ‘smoke buddy’ for the night (though this probably helps some people maintain a minimal nicotine blood level and for that reason it should probably be counted as another advantage). There are no other real disadvantages… unless everyone does the same. Because that would cause massive amounts of carbon to be released into the atmosphere, by way of electricity generation.

So I ask you, people of Barcelona, Toulouse, Marrakesh, Los Angeles, Singapore, Perth (Australia, obviously) and Mumbai: tonight, switch your air conditioning off. I won’t, because I need it. But if you took some time to think about the future of the planet, you would.

__

* I refer to moths as ‘the devil’s butterflies’ and mosquitoes as ‘the devil’s moths’.

** I was born in Freedom Fields

*** Obviously the title could have been “Dr. Coldlove, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the aircon” but I decided against it

Updated: Reports of electoral fraud in Spain

Catalonia, Politics, Spain, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

As mentioned in comments on my last post, there are reports today of numerous discrepancies in vote counting across Spain. Many of these incidents involve relatively small numbers of votes. But taken together, there are enough examples to plausibly suggest a widespread campaign against parties of the left, and those supporting independence for some of the ‘autonomous regions’ in Spain.

The story is being widely reported in the Catalan and Basque pro-independence media but has had few mentions in the mainstream Spanish press. The main party apparently affected by these discrepancies is Iniciativa Internacionalista (II-SP), which the Spanish government failed to have banned shortly before the elections. Zapatero’s government accused II-SP of being a front organisation for ETA but failed to present evidence supporting this claim to the courts. II-SP received a vote of support from Arnaldo Otegi, spokesman for the outlawed Basque party Batasuna days before the elections. PP leader, Mariano Rajoy named them “the ETA list”, while UPyD leader Rosa Díez declared that II-SP “is ETA”. Apparently taking the lead from the USA’s former right-wing government, neither party leader deigned to share their evidence with the voters they were appealing to.

The allegations fall into three groups: (a) the general feeling that the huge increase in blank and spoiled votes coincides a little too smoothly with II-SP and other parties faring more poorly than expected; (b) specific examples of localities reporting examples of discrepancies between town-hall and Spanish Ministry of Interior official figures; and (c) inexplicable displays of support for far-right parties in areas where they have never previously shown any support (normally at the expense of another party which did worse than expected).

It’s too late for me to scurry around collecting examples of the three groups now, but the comments pages of this Avui story list several (at least one of which, the Vilafranca del Penedès one, seems to have been ‘corrected’, though by which side, I can’t tell). Rab is sure that the way that these discrepancies affect specific parties suggests a fraud. I’ll wait and see what appears tomorrow before I make the same judgement.

UPDATE

OK this is getting silly.

María Teresa Fernández de la Vega (Spanish VP)’s constituency recorded no votes for the PSOE

Europe of the Peoples-Greens have denounced irregularities

II-SP officials removed from recounts

Numerous towns appear to have returned erroneous numbers, major Spanish press outlets stay silent

EU parliament election results in Catalonia

Catalonia, Politics, , , ,

For coverage of Spain as a whole, take a look at Graeme’s posts here and here.

The results in Catalonia were a mixture of ‘more of the same’ and a disappointingly low turn out. The PSOE-PSC won again, albeit with a share of the vote that dropped from 42% to 35%. CiU were next, their share increasing 5 points to 22%. In fact, CiU were the only major party to see their actual number of votes rise in a worryingly low turnout of 37%. The PP gained a 1 point increase in their share of the vote, while ERC came fourth with a small drop in their share.

Interestingly, there were 72,681 spoiled or blank votes, which taken together constitute the 6th biggest constituency in the election, after IU-ICV who got 6% of the total vote. I’m told by a friend that there were also 6 times as many of these spoiled or blank votes than there were in the last EU parliament election.

Among the newer parties running this year, Iniciativa Internacionalista gained more votes than Rosa Diez’s UPyD – but both failed to get 1% of the vote here. Veritas and Esquerra Anticapitalista received 0.36% and 0.26% respectively.

The older style fascist parties look to have made some gains but their numbers are still so low that it’s hard to be too worried. The Falange Española de las JONS nearly tripled their number of votes… to a total of 1,575. The Falange Auténtica and Democracia Nacional also increased their number of votes, but the total number of people voting for far-right parties in Catalonia (no, I’m not including the PP), remains very low.

Table of results:

moz-screenshot-10

Full table available at El País.

BNP party political broadcast utterly ridiculous

Politics, UK,

If you haven’t seen it, this is the ad that Charlie Brooker wrote about in his column on Monday. It has to be the worst conceived, most amateurish political ad I’ve ever seen done in earnest. Oh, and “Don’t turn it off!” is such a David Brent way of starting it (not that he’d have ever voted for them, seeing as he wanted the world to be ‘colour blind’). The comments on the YouTube page are also well worth a look – they’re mostly mocking. Sadly, we can no longer leave comments… funny, that.

Anyway, here’s the ad:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2bIFXb3LyM[/youtube]

Contrast that rubbish with the SWP’s latest poster campaign and we see that the left are still far better at humour, taste and design.

Closing In

Franco / Has only got one ball

Spain,

…or apparently he did, anyway.

Yes, it seems that Spain’s fascist dictator lost a testicle when he was injured during a battle in 1916. Which was, curiously, the same year that Hitler is alleged to have lost one of his.

Could it be that the loss of a testicle in 1916 made an under-skilled military man predestined to become a vile monster?

Perhaps they should dig him out of his slave-built mausoleum in the Valle de los Caídos to check. They could knock that awful place down while they’re at it.

Another political party banned in Spain

'Terror', Politics, Spain, , , , , , , ,

Iniciativa Internacionalista, a new party formed for the EU elections, has been banned by the Spanish supreme court. The court judged that it is a reformed edition of Acción Nationalista Vasca and Batasuna. and therefore represents the political wing of separatist group ETA.

The party, which seems to have been standing accross Spain, describes itself as supporting ‘state socialism’, the protection of rights, an end to capitalism in Europe, independence for the Basque and Catalan countries, and has links with some internationalist/Trotskyite groups in Spain. The Spanish government, which retains the right to ban any political party it alleges is working to represent ETA at the ballot box, stated that it had received information from state security forces that various members of II have differing levels of contact with multiple far-let, violent and ‘terrorist’ groups in the Basque Country. Among those accused are the party’s leader, writer Alfonso Sastre [ES].

It should be clear to anyone that banning political parties is not the way to deal with problems in a democracy. Whether or not Spain is still deemed to be ’emergent’, it strikes me that this is not the measured action of a mature government. And now, the illegalisation of parties is beginning to affect polls in the other regions of Spain.