Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight.

And, lo, has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light!

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable: Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’

Cosas de España

Current (tribal) Politics: Two very pertinent FT articles today:-

• Sanchez weighs the cost of an amnesty for Catalan separatists. Spain, says the author, is witnessing a visceral debate about competing visions of justice, morality and nationhood. Not for the first time. People went to war in its name, not so long ago.
• The EU snubs Spain on adding more official languages 

I suspect the odds on another election late this year have shortened.

Talking of co-official languages . . . Spanish seems to be disappearing as one of these here in Galicia, at least as regards those areas where the Xunta has power/influence. My car had its annual inspection yesterday and all the documentation I received was only in Gallego. I suspect it was only in Spanish 20 years ago.

This is a nice foto of Loarre castle in Aragón, which my old friend and I enjoyed visiting recently. Staggering views from it:-

Fascinating Spain says this of it: Sancho the Great (1020-1030) ordered the building of the biggest castle in Aragón. It is one of the best examples of Romanesque art in Spain. The excellent condition of this historical monument makes it a worthy candidate to be declared a World Heritage Site. Considered the oldest fortification in Europe, this distinction fits Loarre castle like a glove.

The same article also contains this foto of and text about Galicia’s beautiful Ribeira Sacra:-

The Ribeira Sacra is a magical place that holds Pre-Romanesque, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque monuments such as the monastery of San Esteban de Ribas de Sil. The humidity and leafiness of this environment – located between Lugo and Ourense, with Monforte de Lemos as ts capital – provide a special environment, with incalculable monumental value that deserves to become a World Heritage Site.

Warning: If you’re coming to Pv city today or over the weekend, be aware that an event in ‘The world capital of triathlon’ means road closures and diversions. it will be even more difficult than ever to find your way around the city. Much the the mayor’s delight, I suspect.

Italy/France/The EU

“I will not allow Italy to become the refugee camp of Europe,” the Italian PM Giorgia Meloni said in yesterday, amid a deepening row with France about who will house new arrivals. “We need to declare war against people traffickers,” she said. This came after France had sent soldiers, helicopters and drones to man its border with Italy, amid a surge in migrants.

(A)GW/Energy/Net Zero

Richard North says here what you’d expect him to say about the UK government’s retardation of its NZ target dates . . . Opening the gates to Hell.

Quotes of the Day/The Way of the World/Social Media

• Thanks to social media, anybody can have a go at establishing themselves as a serious thinker.
• Social media privileges personality over complex thought.
• Down in the most squalid depths of the intellectual food chain, the appeal of crass pundits stems precisely from their ignorance.
• To some 21st-century audiences, being instructed in a complex issue by an expert is a patronisingly hierarchical experience.
• A certain kind of viewer feels most comfortable when the commentator is just as badly informed as they are.

The doleful consequence, it’s claimed, is an absence of young public intellectuals like those of only 20 years ago. At least in the UK. And possibly in the rest of the troubled Anglosphere.

AI

Nice to know . . .

• Stung by criticism that its chat GPT AI was a cheat’s dream, earlier this year OpenAI launched its AI Classifier, a tool designed to detect AI-written text. While conceding that Classifier was not “fully reliable”, the company said it hoped to improve it but, 6 months on, OpenAI has now scrapped the tool, as it’s very unreliable on short texts, is poor at non-English languages and has a tendency to label human-created content as AI-generated. ‘It is also’, said the firm, ‘sometimes extremely confident in a wrong prediction’.
• How easy is it to bypass the controls in AIs put in place by the tech giants to prevent them creating harmful content? Not so hard, it seems . The “grandma technique” – asking an AI for a bedtime story about, say, how to make napalm – is one loophole that has been plugged. But, it’s still possible to create an infinite number of such ‘jailbreaks’ by adding certain characters at the end of the queries. Using this technique, researchers were able to persuade leading AIs to provide advice on creating bombs and bio-weapons, manipulating elections, committing tax fraud and disposing of a dead body. Worryingly, the researchers say it’s unclear whether these exploits could ever be fully blocked.

Did you know? . . .

These are reckoned to be the worst films of all times . . Well, since 1963:-

• Cleopatra (1963
• Heaven’s Gate (1980)
• Revolution (1985)
• The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
• Cutthroat Island (1995)
• The Postman (1997)
• Battlefield Earth (2000)
• Town & Country (2001)
• Mars Needs Moms (2011)
• John Carter (2012)
• A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Finally . . .

I could just knock out a Picasso, says ‘the world’s finest art forger’. Is that really much of a surprise?

Correos has (belatedly) delivered the latest edition of Prospect magazine. So, I now have 4 in my backlog pile. Maybe for a 4-5 hour train journey to Madrid. When I can offload some to my daughter. For her to promptly throw away.

For new readers:– If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there – updated a bit in early July 2023.

For those thinking of moving to Spain:- This is an extremely comprehensive and accurate guide to the challenge, written by a Brit who lives in both the North and the South and who’s very involved in helping Camino walkers. Which is possibly why – I’ve just belatedly realised – his nom-de-plume is Johnnie Walker . . . And I’d thought he was a big whisky fan.

Which, it turns out, he really is . . .