Spanish views from a small town

Outside of Spain or Latin America, perhaps the singer Miguel Bosé is not that well known. He is the son of Italian actress Lucía Bosé, and Spanish bullfighter Luís Dominguín. Bosé helped define the years of the movida , the throbbing Madrid night scene of the eighties, when Spanish youth de-corseted themselves from the past forty years of greyness and imposition. To my generation he is, along with Alaska, Tino Casal, Mecano, and Los Secretos, one of the music idols that defined our youth. That was the past. In the intervening years, along with good music, also came drugs, scandals, illness, loss of voice, and now, perhaps as a result of all that, conspiracy theorizing. He was interviewed the last two weeks by Jordi Évole, a reporter that is known for flashy journalism. Last night was the second half of the interview, which I have been watching online.  Just over ten minutes into the interview, Bosé begins flying into Bill Gates, and the foundations he and Melinda set up to help fig...

We've met the Caribbean, and it's wet. Today, the rain has been with us all day, replaced by fog late this afternoon. It's a result of the jet stream bringing us an air mass straight from the Caribbean, wet and humid. All day, the southwest wind has dumped water on us. An ugly day, it is. It's a strange day, when your mind latches onto a thought, and it stays with you all day. The weather is supposed to be similar all week, with maybe a break or two in the middle days. Still, we shouldn't complain. We needed the rain, and it's just one week out of the summer. What we should complain about is how some people seem to have only one working neuron. The protest yesterday afternoon in Madrid is a taste of things to come, I fear. The far right here seems to have learned from Trump's America. Pit one Spaniard against the other. Claim your freedoms are being taken away. Call out all the conspiracies to control the population. One protestor had a sign saying, "La...

I have gotten wind of a couple of polls on Twitter asking a simple, trick question. "Should American schools teach Arabic numerals?" The answers to choose were two, "Yes, we should be tolerant," or, "No, this is America."  Can I just curl into a ball and lie forgotten in a corner? Does anybody know what sarcasm is, anymore? Does anybody have a working neuron in their brain? Because this poll was rigged to see who would succumb to xenophobia and who would succumb to general ignorance. The xenophobic ones answered "No" and the ignorant ones answered "Yes." So, a pox on all their houses. Arabic numbers are actually of Hindu origin. They were developed in India around 500 A.D., from where they were adopted by Arabs. They were further developed in Al-Khwarizmi's Bagdad, and then extended to northern Africa, where the Europeans adopted them for general use. We've been using them in Europe for about a thousand years. When I was a l...