¡¡¡Estoé Carnavá!!! ¡¡¡Estoé Carnavá!!! ¡¡¡Estoé Carnavá!!!

Pronunciation tips for non-Spanish speakers:

The accent in the title and the capitalisation below shows where the stress falls, and the phrase should be pronounced: 

estooo-WEH carr-na-VA where the two stressed syllables should have an abrupt bite to them and a slight aspiration at the end.

"Yes, fine." you say, "But why are you telling me this?"

I shall begin. Practising Christians are now in Lent and as we all know, Lent is a time of sacrifice when people give up luxuries to mark JC's time of fasting in the desert. Before Lent in times past  people would blow out on the luxuries in the larder so as not to let them go to waste. The result of this is the English Shrove Tuesday (from the verb to shrive - to cleanse of sins) when we all enjoy pancakes while the French enjoy a bonne bouffe during Mardi Gras - or Fat Tuesday.  Whether the fat part refers to using up this cooking material or to the gargantuan meals eaten there I do not know - je ne sais pas, mes amis. And, of course, in the Mediterranean/Latino countries we have Carnival (Spanish Carnaval) where people took the chance to scarf down meat (Latin: carnis) before fasting.

Town Hall, Cadiz.

I am going to restrict myself to Spain where any excuse for a fiesta is a good excuse. Slowly this flesh-easting beano turned into a popular street festival and it was a time of licence. People released steam and it became a time of non-religious partying and parades where anything went and the de facto powers were mocked. Nowadays, the most famous Spanish carnivals are those of Cadiz, Spain's most captivating city, and in the Canaries whose festivities have more in common with those of the Americas and which rely more heavily on spectacle than on wit and inventiveness. Such was the biting wit and comment displayed in the Cadiz carnivals that they were banned during Franco's dictatorship and only began again after his death. 

Seville's Feria

Seville does not really celebrate the Carnival - it waits until April, just after Easter and then explodes into Feria. This is a Bacchanalian week of drinking, Flamenco and loud music distortedly blaring from low-quality loudspeakers while little old men stuff twists of paper napkins into their ears to protect them from the constant tiddly-tiddly-piddly-piddly-pom of sevillanas music. Sevillian women dress in trajes de gitana and add colour and loud conversation to the whole city. If you live in Seville, this is a great time to escape and visit other cities as the world and his wife seems to be gyrating in the Feria - either due to the music or a surfeit of Manzanilla, Fino, or indeed the deceptively refreshing rebujito - a bottle of sherry, plus a litre of 7-up and plenty of ice.  

Carnival, however, does exist in Seville - among the young sevillanos. It  is extremely popular in playschools, and primary and secondary schools.  The activities consist, as far as I can make out, of dressing up and enjoying Carnaval. There may be music, there may not. There may be refreshments, there may not. In Seville this particular celebration seems to celebrate nothing but the fact that it exists.

I am usually hyper-critical of the magical thinking so typical of Seville. What Sevillians perceive with their five senses often has little to do with their inner reality. Seville is a place where a strongly-held misconception is oft at odds with physical reality. The children's Carnival celebrations however are the positive side of Sevillian magical thinking. As Ford states in his excellent Gatherings from Spain (1846) "The frugal, temperate, and easily-pleased Spaniard enters with schoolboy heart and soul into the reality of any holiday, which being joy sufficient of itself lacks no artificial enhancement".

Carnival Parade à la Oliver

Once a year, when I lived near to the Oliver playschool to which all three of my offspring went, a snake of gaily-dressed children would issue forth from the school dressed up in their Carnival outfits. All would be grasping a clothesline so that they didn't wander off and, orchestrated by their teachers, would shout at the top of their little lungs  ¡¡¡Estoé Carnavá!!! ¡¡¡Estoé Carnavá!!! ¡¡¡Estoé Carnavá!!! (This is Carnival! This is Carnival &c. &c.) and parade around the neighbourhood. They would literally bring activity in the neighbourhood to a halt. The traffic would stop, customers and shopkeepers would emerge from the shops, shout to and applaud the little mites as they paraded past. Children, teachers, residents - everyone - enjoyed it hugely. 

After about ten minutes the shouting, smiling snake would return to the playschool and Carnival would be over for another year, but for those ten minutes we were all on holiday. Estoé Carnavá, at least in Seville - or at least in my memory.

      

Estoé Carnavá 2013 at High School, but still with the joy of

being sufficient of itself. 

One last comment: correctly written, the Spanish expression that I have used is Esto es Carnaval. I have written it as it is pronounced here in Seville. 

Online Classes - a U-turn. Mr. Ranty Stirs, Grunts, Farts and Scratches Himself before Resuming His Slumbers

Up to a couple of months ago and until a great friend of mine pointed it out, I was in danger of becoming far too ranty concerning the stroke of genius dealt us by the Vice-Rector of the university where I work.

If you wish to follow the whole rant, here are the posts:

Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Pigs, Pokes, Lambs and Slaughter

It Falls to Me The Face of Shame

Anyhow, given the low enrolment figures, scant attendance and poor task completion of the online component, our Vice-Rector, in all his enlightened wisdom, has decided to scrap the system and go back to what we had always advocated - traditional presential classes. Let's hope that this is my last post on the matter.

If this debate is of more than a passing interest to you, I'd recommend that you have a look at the New York Times article on the failure of such schemes in US universities - and thanks to eagle-eyed Esther in Washington DC for sending it to me in the first place.

Top Gear: Running on Empty?

"Tonight, James May examines a truly interesting car in an informative item that is much too short; Hammond does media pennance in a Mexican sports car and Jeremy does a tired car review and rehashes something that wasn't even funny the first time round." In other words, more of the same TG (Typical Guff).

Not long ago I complained about the Top Gear barrel-bottom scraping in Low Revs on Top Gear. My fundamental argument was that the format was getting a little jaded and tended to repeat its former glories. I had hoped that once the series got into its stride we would be rewarded with more original tomfoolery - and the occasional interesting report on the latest supercar.

The world's most beautiful car. Image courtesy of 

fordmustag.in

I have been sorely disappointed. Programme 3 rehashed the old dash across Europe format, which I did indeed watch due to the car - a beautiful Ford Mustang Shelby, but even that particular symphony of lines and V8 engine tones was not enough to lift the piece from the merely banal.

Episode 4 got off to a less-than-good start when the new Vauxhall Astra VXR was tested against the Renault Mégane RS  and the Ford Focus ST. But wasn't that last season too? And the season before that? And the one before that?

The unspeakbaly mundane Mastretta.

Image courtesy of autocars 4x4.com

Richard Hammond's eminently forgettable portion of the show was a fence-mending exercise, the result of unfortunate comments he made in the previous series. Probably to avoid legal action or revenue loss of some sort, Hammond road-tested the Mexican Mastretta MXT sports car. The road test involved Hammond driving rather woodenly along a Mexican road making rather neutral comments about a car that was positively screaming out to be called ugly. Where was the famous TG outspokenness and independence when it was needed?

And if that wasn't bad enough, it would seem that episode 4 was sponsored by the KIA cee'd which was road tested by Jeremy Clarkson and found to be better than an exploding superannuated Vauxhall Vectra.  To me this farrago of supposedly comically bizarre tests spoke of a lack of real creativity. Yes, I know that the show is deliberately infantile and that juxtaposing seemingly unrelated ideas can indeed be a basis for enlightening or comic moments both in life and on TV, but anyone with children knows that what is charmingly endearing the first few times can become unbearably tiresome if repeated ad nauseam.

Another picture of the world's most beautiful car, courtesy

of Wikipedia

Then we had the KIA rugby match at Twickenham, which was nothing more than a rehash of a previous series' Toyota Aygo vs VW Fox car football match. As a rugbyphobe, the churning up of the "hallowed" turf of Twickenham did not shock me - neither did the bumps and bashes received by the cars as I suspect that KIA was more than willing to supply their wares free in exchange for so much exposure on a single programme. But... wait a minute. Didn't we see Twickenham the previous week too? Wasn't it the starting point of the Mustang vs. train dash? Are the production team at Top Gear really getting so lazy, so complacent  and so condescendingly dismissive of the audience that they use the same location for two different items in two consecutive weeks? Was I the only one to notice?

The indestructible, but unroadworthy, Hilux; its

chassis is held together by the panels - an allegory 

of the present series?
Image courtesy of t3gstatic.com

Furthermore, was I the only one to notice the canned laughter that greeted the comments of the team at the very end of the show as they summed up the match? We could all see that the audience behind was smiling, not laughing - I don't even think it deserved a smile, but most definitely no-one was laughing.

Top Gear is in decline. It is like the Toyota Hilux from the programme's famous attempt at killing one. There is a dearth of real creativity. The programme's chassis is broken and is only just holding together thanks to some rather rusty panels. Perhaps it needs to be put into storage - for a couple of years at least. In a way the canned laughter is symptomatic of the situation. The production team cannot depend on the live audience to appreciate the programme as much as they used to. In the past it was obvious to one and all that the laughter was genuine. Now, however, post-production resorts to artifice.

When introducing the Stig for this edition, Jeremy Clarkson's introduction began "Some say he's 49% horse..." I'd say that Top Gear at the moment is at least 49% old ideas and about 46% desperation. What will we see this Sunday: a car vs. the British Army, a rocket-powered car stunt, an aquatic car or another Reliant Robin gag?

Worryingly, I have just found out that the last two shows are a special: the "boys" strike out in search of the source of the Nile - a nice paid holiday if you can get it. Yet again, we see that there is a creativity deficit. A two-show extravaganza in what are usually stand-alone TV shows of whatever type is usually the first tentative tug on the bell-rope of  their death knell. When the credits start to roll on such a programme and we see the (in)famous words "To be continued", we should always add the mental caveat: "but not for much longer".

Two Middle Aged Ladies in Andalusia

In the post, What I Learnt This Summer (1) I mentioned en passant the book "Driving Over Lemons". In fact I called it "drivel" - and I see no need to change my mind.

There are too many of the starry-eyed romantic books about Spain written by (upper) middle-class types who come to experience the "real" Spain and end up patronising the local characters whose goodwill they abuse and who they treat condescendingly as charming oafs.

As I said in the first discussion on the theme, Spain is a modern country like the rest of Europe. We can find the same oafs in England, France, or wherever. Indeed, Eric Newby wrote a similar sort of book about his villa in Italy - with similar tooth-gritting smugness. The worst offender of this genre, however has to be Laurie Lee's "As I walked out..." which is in parts nothing more than the tales of what we would term in modern parlance as a sexual tourist who sleeps with his hosts' daughters and pays a few pennies for the service, salving his conscience with the knowledge that he has alleviated their grinding poverty with a bit of grinding of his own. In my opinion this is a scandalous book and does not deserve the reputation it seems to enjoy among the trendy left.

It was a delight, therefore, when a good friend lent me a book  called "Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia" written by Penelope Chetwode, John Betjeman's wife. The second middle-aged lady is her mare, La Marquesa, borrowed from the Duke of Wellington. The book is Chetwode's account of her travels on horseback around the provinces of Granada and Jaén in 1961 This is a truly charming book, with none of the wide-eyed faux innocence of the Romantic traveller. My only gripe is Chetwode's frequent mentions of her religiosity.

The author has a light, humorous style and portrays the villages of  eastern Andalusia in the early 1960's without the mawkish condescension that is so annoying in many other British travellers in Spain, whatever the period. She describes things as they were then, no romanticism and no (excessive) politicking. Here is a beautiful description of village kids in  Don Diego:

The... children are clean and well-dressed in brightly coloured jerseys and home-made skirts or trousers. They cannot afford the luxury of expensive shoes but wear rope-soled canvas ones or sandals. I  saw no sign of rickety legs and they have lovely skins and beautiful teeth... no ice cream van drives past... No cake shop tempts them with cardboard éclairs stuffed with mock cream and they have no pocket money... to buy sweets. But theirs is not the the starvation-level poverty of the east; their daily diet is of [broths] and [stews]and excellent bread and fresh fruit, and occasional eggs and fish, [which] together with nine months' sunshine in every year turns them into beautiful specimens of humanity and they doubtless have tougher bodies and better teeth than a lot of over-indulged children in our welfare state."

In this extract, as in most of the book, here is no mention of politics, apart from  some rather embarrassing praise of Franco as Saviour of Spain and Catholicism but even so she only dedicates a couple of paragraphs to the old gentleman. There is definitely no breast-beating, no romanticism - just a straightforward description of happy, able-bodied children whose lifestyle and diet were probably a lot better than their British counterparts of the same period, something which, I would venture to opine, still holds true today.

The book is a delight and I am recommending it to students, friends and family alike.

Something to Be

A recent retweet from my youngest daughter reminded me of John Lennon's magnificent, autobiographical, vicious and oh-so true song "Working Class Hero" the lines:

"Keep you doped on religion and sex and TV,

And you think you're so clever and classless and free,

But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

Have never been so true.

Yes, but does it make bingly bongly

noises?

 Every time I hear the song, it reminds me of the trendy "alternative" people I know who still go to "challenging" theatre and art shows and who do indeed believe themselves to be clever, classless and free. Such  "events" usually have dissonant music, disembodied screams and howls, the occasional stilt walker,  galvanised steel buckets, some painted, some not, arranged promiscuously about the "space" in various thought-provoking attitudes. There will also be bicycle wheels (preferably painted white) spinning on axles with spoons welded onto the rims to catch blasts of compressed air that are triggered by a movement sensor hidden meaningfully somewhere in the room. 

And, of course, there have to be loudpeakers lurking beneath chemical-orange coloured plastic chairs with flaking chrome legs placed  in dimly-lit corners and producing  some sort of bingly-bongly chimes. Is the newspaper on one of the chairs a comment on the fact that all news is propaganda? And is all propaganda unwittingly Art? Or was it left by someone's granny? 

Enigmatic. The artist's objective is, in all probability, the highly original one of raising awareness of the disorienting, depersonalising nature of today's capitalist society and of the individual's unceasing struggle to steer a course through it. The secondary objective is most likely that of getting as much (taxpayer's) cash as possible in order to join the hierarchy s/he most vehemently denounces.

Hmmmm

The correct pose to adopt as we view this difficult, transgressively original thought-poem that so effectively makes us question our attitudes to the modern world and social indifference is to caress one's chin with the thumb and forefinger while thoughtfully muttering "Hmmmm!" and wishing one's beard would fucking grow back pronto.

Awarenesses duly raised, our trendies still endeavour to climb the greasy pole of advancement in order to gain some piddling achievement and "be like the folks on the hill" while retaining their ideological, and personal purity. They will become a kind of "folks on the hill" but with BO,  washed-out scruffy clothes and an "appreciate me for what I am" type of mentality that is common to us all in adolescence. By our mid-20s most of us have discarded these narcissistic postures - unless of course you are from a comfortably-off background which is almost invariably the case of these 40-something "innocents". Probably once on the top of the hill, they will try to "educate" their neighbours in their own values by a mixture of example and tut-tutting disapproval, setting a shining template for us all. As the saying goes: "Shit flows downhill". 

Neanderthal man - probably the last time anyone was so
clever and classless and free -except for German Seifefrei
flute-playing hippies. The Neanderthal probably washed 
more often, though.

These free spirits tend to believe that they are indeed above the rest of us poor ignorants who have bought into the consumer society and spend money on soap, toothpaste, deodorants and other such fripperies. What they don't seem to understand is that they are as unfree as the people in front of them in the IKEA checkout - or almost. The poor deluded wage slaves in front probably don't smell of ripe sweat and so do not subject anyone's olfactory glands to an unwarranted sensorial invasion. Perhaps the people in front of our naturally-perfumed innocent aren't shopping "ironically", but so what? They are trying to improve their home to the best of their ability and make it more comfortable, decent and welcoming for their family.  

Such flower fascists who are so convinced of their liberal open-mindedness tend to be the most narrow-minded people you are ever likely to meet. They tend to be so obsessed with their own worldview that any other is  obviously mistaken and is almost beneath their sneering contempt.

Unfortunately we are all serfs in this new digito-feudal society, as I have already discussed here in depth and here and here in passing. This is also true for  my "alternative" acquaintances; it's also true for the flute-playing German hippie in the local square (with his VISA gold card in his pocket charged to daddy's account in case things get too tough) living the romantic vagabond dream; it's true for me and it's true for you. Just like our forebears, there is nothing we can do about it. Except of course be aware of the fact and live as decently as possible.

That - and shower daily  .

New Boots and Panties

Bad joke: We all know that we're supposed to give something up for Lent, but didn't Ratzinger take it a teeny bit too far?.

Except for the Valencia Science Museum, my last few posts seem to have been news-

driven,as the bad joke above only goes to show. Today, therefore, I want to talk about getting booted and suited up for Spring.

Like most men, I try to avoid shopping for clothes, but it was becoming an imperious necessity as the public at large was beginning to get too unwillingly familiar with the colour of my underwear. Enlisting the enthusiastic aid of my daughter, off we went to the shops...

The result? two pairs of jeans, a pair of cargo trousers, some stripey socks and a goodly pile of T-shirts. It was only as the clothes were being bagged at the cash desk that I realised that everything (except the socks and one Tshirt) was dark blue!

I had forgotten the sensual pleasure of the contact of new, unknown,fabrics against my skin, so what matter if they are blue? It feels good to be in new clothes. 

My almost exclusively monochromatic colour choice probably speaks volumes about me, but at least all the jeans go well with my large collection of white shirts. Ho hum.

Resignations in High Places - Holy Spirit To Lose (Temporarily) Job

The Mater Ecclesiae convent in the Vatican

Gardens, Ratzinger's putative retirement home. Photo:
Alessandra Tarantino, AP 

Yesterday I read an interesting piece in Spain's El País newspaper called  ¿Qué hacemos ahora con el Papa? or What do we do with the Pope now? This article examines the administrative and protocol problems facing the Roman sect with regard to a resigned, as opposed to a dead, Pope. At least he's got his care home sorted. As the photo shows, work is under way to make a pensioner's flat for him on the top floor of the  building nearest to the camera.
Some of the questions are avoided or left unanswered by the Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi,  because of the novelty of the situation. The answer to one question is I feel, unintentionally, amusing.

This is a part of the el País article and my translation of it:

...El día 28, a las cinco de la tarde, se montará en un helicóptero que lo llevará a la residencia de Castel Gandolfo. Tres horas después, según su propia voluntad, dejará de ser Papa.

...La siguiente cuestión es si Joseph Ratzinger, una vez que deje el Anillo del Pescador para que sea destruido, conservará en cambio la infalibilidad, esa cualidad que según un dogma de la Iglesia tienen los Papas para no cometer errores en cuestiones de fe o moral. Eso sí se lo sabeLombardi. La infalibilidad dejará de funcionar automáticamente el día 28 a las ocho de la tarde. El Espíritu Santo dejará de guiar el pulso de Ratzinger para pasar a prestar sus servicios con el nuevo Papa...

...on the 28th at five o'clock in the afternoon, he [Ratzinger] will get into a helicopter that will take him to his Castel Gandolfo Residence. Three hours later, according to his own wishes, he will cease to be Pope.

...The next question is whether Joseph Ratzinger, after handing over the Papal Ring which will then be destroyed, will retain his infallibility, that quality which, according to the Church's dogma, Popes possess so that they cannot make mistakes in matters of faith or moral questions. Lombardi does know the answer to that question. [Ratzinger's] Infallibility will automatically cease at eight o'clock on the 28th. The Holy Spirit will cease to guide Ratzinger's hand and move on to serve the new Pope.

What??? If, for a moment, we subscribe to the idea that there is, contrary to all logic, an all-powerful god and a holy spirit, would such a being really be at the beck and call of an octogenarian ex-Nazi, a crowd of corrupt power brokers and an organisation that actively protected (protects?) paedophiles?

I think not.

If god were to exist, I think that such a divinity would move according to its own rules and values. It is quite ridiculous, nay arrogant, to assume that it would fall in line with a human timetable. If it took Mussolini to make Italian trains run on time, what would it take to make a member of the trinity do the same?

Christ in Limbo by a follower of Hieronymous Bosch

As well as sex, money, power and guilt, the Roman sect is also obsessed with bureaucracy, as the above example illustrates. Another great example of this love of rubber-stamping was the document, "The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die without being baptised, published April 22 2007 by the International Theological Commission which opined that the souls of children may not necessarily be condemned to Limbo:  

"Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered above give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that unbaptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatific vision. We emphasize that these are reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge. There is much that simply has not been revealed to us. We live by faith and hope in the God of mercy and love who has been revealed to us in Christ, and the Spirit moves us to pray in constant thankfulness and joy.

What has been revealed to us is that the ordinary way of salvation is by the sacrament of baptism. None of the above considerations should be taken as qualifying the necessity of baptism or justifying delay in administering the sacrament. Rather, as we want to reaffirm in conclusion, they provide strong grounds for hope that God will save infants when we have not been able to do for them what we would have wished to do, namely, to baptize them into the faith and life of the Church. "

Did god, his son and the heavenly steering committee have a say in this?  How would they cope with this sudden influx of souls? By employing more celestial passport stampers and immigration officials? By widening the Pearly Gates? By building many more mansions? Let's hope for the sake of these spiritual travellers that the queues are smaller than those to be found at earthly airports. But then again, as some have been waiting for a couple of thousand years, hey, what's a few more hours? I hope they stock up on duty free. 

A personal example: None of my children are baptised, yet a (Catholic) member of our extended family once commented that if they were to die as babies, their innocent little spirits would not get to heaven, but languish in the Limbo of Infants. What utter rot! Surely, if such a place as heaven were to exist, it would not have been them who were denied entry but me. 

The Umpire Strikes Back?

Holy spirits that sign on the celestial dole to claim jobseeker's allowance until a new pope is elected; babies denied entry into heaven because they don't have the right bit of paper - or until Limbo signs up to a heavenly Schengen agreement. Come on, please! How can such beliefs be taken seriously?

One of the end-of-the world predictions that has been knocking around for quite a while is that the present chief medicine man will be the last. Well, I suppose then that while the misguided finger their crosses, we should keep our fingers crossed and hope that this is one prophecy that does indeed come true.

Resignations in High Places

Amid all of the furore surrounding the resignation of the Head of the Catholic Church, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, I am sure that I am not alone in musing upon the following:

Young Ratzinger -in both his guises.

Ratzinger was a member of the SS

Ratzinger was head of the sucessor organisation to the Inquisition

Ratzinger still is, at the time of writing, head of one of the most, if not the most, arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, murderous and opaque religious sects known in the history of mankind.

Ratzinger's predecessor arrives at the Pearly 

Gates.

Today, the murder and torture of its opponents may have ceased, but what can we say about the systematic abuse of children all over the globe by its perverted priesthood, the subsequent clumsy attempts at covering it up and the sect's undignified twisting and turning as it tried to avoid paying compensation?

Why resign now? Is he getting a conscience? I think not. Or is Ratzinger fleeing office, as he deserted the SS when he realised which way the wind was blowing? 

I think he is going into a retirement of prayer and contemplation in much the same way as a discredited (or soon-to-be-discredited) politician leaves office in order to "spend more time with my family".

What the truth is we shall never know. We can, however, still speculate - in spite of the media's high praises of this ex-Nazi, this ex-Inquisitor. This ex-Bishop of Rome. 

Frozen Beef? Neigh, Lad

A Big Moke?

As we learn more and more about the processed food we have been eating and the deception - knowing or otherwise - practised upon us the consumers, the news is unremittingly bleak.

It now turns out that what we thought was horsemeat might in fact be donkey meat - a fraud within a fraud. Will this abuse of our trust never end? I fear not. Yet all is not bad news.

I am diametrically opposed to all forms of organised religion, as readers of my blog are probably aware. For me, religion is nothing more than an insidious means of controlling our thoughts and actions based on the non-existent rewards or punishments to be reaped in a completely unproven afterlife, while our spiritual "leaders" wheedle money out of our pockets. This  money would evidently be better spent on the material comforts of our present existence and, if we have money to spare, on the comfort of those around us.

Strangely, therefore, I find myself in the novel position of shopping in halal butchers' shops. At least there I know that lamb is lamb, that beef is beef, that chicken is chicken and that (were they to sell it, and please forgive my ignorance) horse is horse. This is a guarantee far greater than that of our local supermarkets because the halal butcher would not only be risking his profits but his very soul if he sold non-halal meat to his customers. In fact, as far as quality and price goes, the beef that I have bought there is better by far than anything to be found elsewhere in the city, as indeed is the service.

There are quite a few halal butchers here in Seville. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there are no kosher ones. If there were, I would probably go there too.

Second time round?

I would not, however, eat a kebab (or kybob as they called them in the 19th century) because recently I discovered that the cylinder of "meat" that we see revolving in our local kebab house has probably been imported frozen from Germany and, as a processed meat product, may not be all that it says it is. In fact, the Sevillian preference is for "beef", as lamb is not very popular here. There are obviously  proper, home-made kybobs where customers can actually see the individual stacked cuts of meat revolving, but in Seville we invariably see unprepossessing cylinders of preprocessed goo, looking for all the world as if they have already passed through the digestive tract of a giant.

On an ecological note, now that we have discovered that we have been unconsciously eating horse and donkey meat, perhaps we should now consider eating kangaroo. I am not being facetious - when I was a child in the early 1960's in Liverpool we often had tinned kangaroo stew and it was delicious - like beef but a lot cheaper. Numerous studies have shown that kangaroos do not fart methane and therefore do not contribute to the greenhouse gases in the same devastating way that beef cattle do. The meat is also a lot leaner and, as a result, healthier. If we eat unlabelled horse and donkey, then why not labelled, cheaper and environmentally-friendly kangaroo?

The only problem with halal and kosher butchers is that they obviously do not sell pork, and what non-Muslim carnivore doesn't enjoy their bacon, pork chops, sausages or cured ham? At the moment, I think that the present substitute meat scandals do not apply to pork.

Yet...

... What do cannibals call human meat?

Long Pig.

Perhaps we need to start checking up on our crematoria. I hope I am only speculating wildly.   Soylent Green, anyone?

Valencia Science Museum - within Spitting Distance of the Centre

Image courtesy of presseurop.eu

I've only been to Valencia twice - over 10 years ago. The last time I was there I visited the recently-built Science Museum, strikingly designed by architect Santiago Calatrava. At that time it seemed to be full of ... empty space, along with the obligatory jet fighter hanging from the ceiling on a piece of string. And a spit machine. 

In  the human body display section there was a spit machine. It explained what saliva was and what it did. The best was yet to come. If you put a paper cup beneath a spout, it gobbed out a dribble of (I hope) synthetic spit.  Either that or there was a salivating Valencian midget sitting in the stainless steel cabinet.  Strangely, there were no bins or instructions for the disposal of your newly-minted goblet of gob. Perhaps this was why the machine displayed liberal, bubbled, crusts of dried saliva. Whether they had been produced by the machine itself, or were the result of contributions selflessly donated by an enthusiastic public, is something upon which I'd prefer not to speculate.

Would you buy a used spit machine
from this man?

The youngest of my children went there again last year. Before she went I told her about the spit machine that she had been too young to appreciate on her first visit. When she arrived, full of great expect(or)ations, she made a beeline for the human body exhibits. Sadly, the spit machine was gone.

Now the still-crusted exhibit is probably gathering dust in  a corner of the museum's storerooms. In the streets of Valencia wanders a jobless, anonymous, salivating midget, evacuating his underemployed excess spittle in the form of pavement oysters. Phlegmatically accepting his fate, this wizened dehydrated homunculus muses on his glory days. Was he paid by the hour or by the litre? Alas, we shall never know.

Image courtesy of cadalyst.com

Therefore, there is now no real reason to visit the museum at all. It can go back to fulfilling what seems to be its principal use: an impressive backdrop to hundreds of futuristic car adverts. 

A Horse! A Horse! My Findus Is A Horse!

Although I was barely out of nappies at the time,  I remember the phrase "Where's the beef?" (in other words: Where's the substance of your policies?) being used by Walter Mondale's campaign in the primaries  to become the Democratic candidate for the 1984 US presidential elections. As we all know, it was the more memorable Republican Ronald Reagan who won the elections for US President but it was the phrase that stuck in my memory.

The history of the phrase, part of an advertising campaign for Wendy's hamburger restaurants, can be found here.

Sadly, thirty years on this slogan has crossed the Atlantic to haunt our supermarket aisles. In so much frozen food, where indeed is the beef? The greatest quantity of beefing, in my opinion, should be among consumers concerning how horsemeat has got into so many precooked  frozen products. We have yet to see if "fresh" products such as mince (ground beef) are affected too. Have a look at this Wikipedia entry on pink slime - a rather nasty beef (horse?)-based additive.  Here is an extact from the article (my bold and underlining):

In 2001, The United States approved the product for limited human consumption and had now begun to be used as a food additive to ground beef and beef-based processed meats as a filler at a ratio of usually no more than 25 percent of any product. The production process uses heat in centrifuges to separate the fat from the meat in beef trimmings. The resulting product is exposed to ammonia gas or citric acid to kill bacteria.

The product is sold in the U.S. to food companies which use it as a filler product in ground beef production. It was reported in March 2012 that approximately 70 percent of ground beef sold in U.S. supermarkets contained the additive at that time.

For a long time now there has been a lot of breast-beating over the death of the local High Street and the rise of the out-of-town shopping parks. I know that the expense of city centre parking is a great concern, but if there ever was a time when we should be thinking about shopping locally, that time is now. At our local butcher's we can actually see the part of the animal that we are buying and our mince will be minced in front of us. Perhaps we also need not only  to watch cooking programmes, but actually get back into the kitchen and cook.   

As yet here in Spain there seems to be very little reaction to what is going on in the Pan-European frozen food industry, even though the chains probably sell the same products as in GB but with different labels and packs. Perhaps people and supermarkets here are not so concerned because pre-cooked meals here are not the norm. Everyone here cooks every day and food in the freezer  tends to be mostly home-frozen food.

Real tomatoes from Los Palacios, almost as good as
the famous Worthing tomatoes.

Then there is the vegetarian option. I am a carnivore, red in tooth and claw, but is vegetarianism is a serious option for those who really want to be sure that what they eat is really what it is supposed to be? Obviously we can debate organic and non-organic farming, the use of pesticides etc. etc. etc. until the cows (horses?) come home. I only have this to say: I once did some work for a chemicals company that produced certified organic plant foods, de-stressors and other products. Some could even guarantee a certain shape and diameter of tomato! This only goes to show that our food  can be manipulated, whatever we decide to buy and eat.

What is the solution? Be an active consumer. Pick and choose, don't just pick up the nearest shrink-wrapped tray of "fresh" food. Shop locally. Buy your meat from a local butcher. "Ugly" fruit and veg will tend to be real, taste better and be cheaper. Tomatoes grown in Los Palacios, near Seville, for example, tend to be large, irregular and sometimes scarred, but they taste delicious - real. Not like the red bags of water to be bought in the supermarkets.

Image from retronaut.com

Ever since we came down from the trees, man has always hoodwinked and abused his fellows. This is nothing new. For example, bread in 19th-century Britain was adulterated with ground bones and chalk - perhaps it still is in smaller, unscrupulous bakeries. This is the latest in a long line of deceptions and will definitely not be the last. Three months from now we will be scandalised by something else. I believe that intellectuals call this the human condition.

Why Regrowing a Beard Is a Good Idea

Not so long ago, I wrote about growing a beard. I listed 10 disadvantages and 15 advantages. I now want to add one more to each list:
Disadvantage
You don't know what has happened to your face in the intervening years.
Advantage
You don't (want to) know what has happened to your face in the intervening years.

I do. On Monday morning I had nothing to do, except lie in bed tugging at my ... beard. Stupidly, nay, very stupidly, I yielded to the temptation of shaving it off. After taking a pair of hedge clippers to my face, burning out the electric motor and resorting to scissors and razors, I finally managed to hack my way through the jungle and reach the gleaming pearly skin.

It wasn't pleasant. Looking back at me from the mirror was a moon-faced old man!!! I'd only had the beard for 2 years, but my self-image - of which I was absolutely convinced - was that underneath all that hair there lurked a rather sprightly youngster, all cheekbones and jawline and quite possibly the same as the one that glared out of photos taken of me in my Gothic phase from the 1980s, with perhaps a little (OK, a lot) less hair on top.

Nothing of the sort. I saw my father. No man wants to be like his father, so this came to me as a bit of a nasty shock. And it was a shock to my children. I sent them a photo and asked them their opinion. Suffice it to say that it frightened my youngest daughter.

I've decided to re-grow my (much-missed) beard and keep it. Permanently. When I take off my tartan slippers for the last time, curl up my toes and am cremated, the place is going to stink of burnt (facial) hair. Never again will I commit such barbaric barbery. This spell of momentary madness has set me back at least a year in my fantasy of growing a beard long enough to plait. Ho hum.

Chris Huhne and Spanish Politics - A Rant (You have been warned!)

On the face of it, there doesn't seem to be much, if any connection. However, if we examine things a bit more closely,  it is the divergences that are more interesting.

We all know the story of Mr. Huhne persuading his then wife to take his speeding points on her licence, her subsequent revelation of the fact, his outright denial and then finally on the eve of his trial for perverting the course of Justice, his admission of guilt (saving the taxpayer, as well as himself, the expense of a trial) and his resignation as an MP. It has taken him 10 years to get this far, but at least in the end he came clean and did the honourable thing. He has not been sentenced yet, but it is highly likely that he will be sent down.

Now let's jump to Spain where resignation is a word that politicians do not understand even in Spanish (dimisión). There are so many scandals in Spanish political life at a local, regional, national and now, apparently, at central government level that I cannot be bothered to describe them, but here are a few links in English for you to look at: Bárcenas, Gürtel and Urdangarín - the King's son-in-law. And here's one in Spanish about a pensions and redundancy pay scam in Andalusia Party officials accept bribes on behalf of parties of every hue and skim off a bit of  cash, be it public or private, for their trouble - we're talking about millions of euros in a country that pays its unemployed nothing after 2 years and where some pensioners struggle to survive on a €400 monthly state pension.

It is not unusual for political parties to get low-interest loans from the banks and and then have the debt miraculously waived. I wonder why. Hmmm.

For years it has been my opinion  that democracy doesn't exist in Spain - the electorate just has the right to vote once every four years. The political classes meanwhile are answerable to no-one, certainly not to the citizens who are still voting according to which side their grandparents or great grandparents were on in the Civil War about which, incidentally, they know hardly anything because History is almost as dirty a word as resignation. In the villages they may know nothing about History, but everyone remembers who shot whose relatives and this still influences voting habits.

It's incredible, but the PSOE, the ruling Socialist party in the Andalusian Regional Government has been in power since the first elections to the regional parliament shrugging off scandal after scandal and wasting taxpayers' money on luxuries and self-aggrandisement.

In its fiefdoms, the right-wing PP is just as bad, as is the communist IU in its own areas. To give an example of the level of the parties' profligacy in regional government, until recently there were more official cars at the disposal of elected politicians and their hangers-on than there were official cars in the whole of the USA!

Now it turns out that, according to some sources, under-the-table payments go right the way to the top in the national PP government. The PSOE and other opposition parties are raucously demanding resignations and elections - demands that are falling on deaf ears -ears every bit as deaf as theirs were and are to their own scandals.

In a recent article, a Spanish author pointed out that the political parties always point the finger outside their party and never turn and look at the moral decay within their own political organisation. Greed and self-interest are the name of the game.

Spanish politics has never really been democratic. The electorate don't vote for a candidate, they vote for a closed list covering an area that returns several councillors, regional or national MPs or MEPs. Even if someone were to, gulp, resign they are immediately replaced by the next candidate on the list who hadn't been elected on voting day. Voters are, therefore, denied the chance to change their opinion in by-elections  and send the government a message because by-elections quite simply don't exist.

As a non-Spanish resident, I cannot vote in general elections, even though I pay taxes in Spain, but then again, why bother? The system has been designed to serve the interests of the political classes, not the people who vote for them - including quite a few of the 6 million unemployed.