…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.
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.
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.
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
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:
Full table available at El País.
I was amused to read today that Albert Rivera, that young chap with the dead eyes, has been ousted [CAT] as leader of the Spanish nationalist party Ciudadanos. “Ciudadanos, Partido de la Ciudadanía” (catchy name, huh?), stormed onto the political scene a couple of years back, using promises of only speaking Spanish and… er… that’s about it… to attract disillusioned falangists and other Madrid-centralists to its smelly cause.
This isn’t the first time that the C’s have had major internal issues, but coupled with the fact that they’re now standing as part of far-right group Libertas in the EU elections, I think it’s time we forgot about this flash in the pan. Hopefully we’ll be able to say the same about UPyD soon!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTJRhiOaNLk[/youtube]
When the Spanish national anthem was played on Wednesday night, it was met with whistling, klaxons and a lot of other noise from the predominantly Catalan and Basque supporters present. TV España switched to its outside broadcasting units in Barcelona and Bilbao in an apparent attempt to hide this, and then played coverage of the anthem being played, with edited sound. The sport director of TVE has been sacked for this ‘human error’ which actually looks a lot more like the Spanish national broadcaster trying to hide a potentially embarrassing truth.
More coverage at Cataloniablog.
As I was walking back from the Mississippi station today, I happened to bump into a TV3 OB team and a bunch of Culés. I asked a likely young lass if, perchance, El Barça would be coming through shortly and she confirmed that they were on their way.
I stood around for about five minutes and then spotted the TV3 team moving into the middle of the road, a surefire sign that the bus was on its way. And then, there it was. Heralded by flashing blue lights, cheers and foghorns, the Barça bus made its way across Carrer Numancia towads us. The cup itself was displayed proudly at the front of the bus, and some figures could be seen behind the tinted glass, waving and cheering. I imagine Eto’o led the chants.
Behind the bus was a fleet of hundreds of motos and cars, horns sounding and flags waving.
But this was fairly subdued by Barcelona standards. Everyone knows that within a couple of weeks, we could all be celebrating a much bigger triumph. If Barça can win the Champions League and secure a historic triple (yes, that’s a big if, but it’s there to be won), Barcelona will party for days on end.
(All 9 pics here. By the way, the pics aren’t great: I was using our compact camera and I was somewhat hurried)
Saint George’s day is here again, and with it some lovely weather (it always seems to be sunny on April 23rd). As I’ve mentioned before, in Catalonia today is the ‘day of lovers’ or the ‘day of the book and the rose’. Each year, we’re encouraged to buy eachother roses and books as an expression of love and friendship. I think that, as well as giving the publishers and rose traders a bumper day, it’s a lovely tradition.
One of the funny thing about it is that there are lots of places to choose from when it comes to buying your gifts. You can go to El Corte Inglés, as did one of my colleagues, and buy two roses for €16… but it’s far more normal to purchase your flower either from a gypsy rose merchant (visible on many street corners all through the day), or a stall in your local plaça. These stalls are often (though not exclusively) operated by charities and political groups, so while buying your rose you get to choose which pressure group or political party you want to support.
This year, I bought Gemma’s rose at the Solidarity with Palestine stall. For much less than the Corte Inglés price, I got a lovely rose and a poem (apparently about Palestine). The stall was also selling wallets, tshirts and so on… but I prefer to wear my heart on my blog.
Right… off to enjoy the sunshine!
Some fucker stole my wallet on the Metro last night. Along with my money, they got my precious Tarjeta de Residencia which had expired and cannot be replaced. Words cannot express how pissed off I am right now.
Despite being generally divided on the issue of multilingualism, the parliament apparently approved a PSOE-CiU-ICV-PNV-EA amendment that removed references to parents’ rights to choose the language in which their children are taught. Protecting the range of languages in some countries (like Spain) was described as ‘essential’.
So that’s the end of that debate, I imagine.