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

Developments in Cataluña are costing the region investment, it’s claimed here.

Talking of that region . . . In Barcelona, you can now – under the aegis of the Catalan Naturism Club – visit the Museum of Archaeology as naked as the day you were born. Albeit with more hair and teeth. Probably.

The Instituto Cervantes says that Spanish comprises less than 8% of internet traffic, dwarfed* as it is by English and Chinese. But what needs to be stressed it that this is more than French and German.

* Can I still say that?

Want to see bits of Rome in Spain? Then this is for you.

HT to Lenox Napier of Business Over Tapas for this amusing article on how to manage one’s way around Spain’s leading property site. Writes Lenox: It begins, ‘Idealista is the go-to property website in Spain (it also holds the same status in Italy and Portugal)’. It’s the perfect place to fritter away an hour of your life imagining a fresh start in Zaragoza, Valencia or a leafy suburb of Madrid (or to simply see how much your neighbours are selling their home for). Though it takes some getting used to, there’s a little tool that enables you to draw a search box on a map with the accuracy of a military drone operator. You can, for instance, pull up homes on a single street and then add numerous search filters. Nowhere can escape.

Galician Politics, ahead of regional elections: The VdG this morning: Fishing for scattered votes: The Galician elections have arrived and the strategies are beginning to become clearer. The d’Hondt law greatly conditions the results, due to the dispersion of votes among parties that, in the end, won’t have seats in the new Parliament. That’s why strategists on both the Left and the Right are looking for ways to avoid the loss of precious ballots that will be useless if they go to minority parties. The PP has asked Vox not to run, so as not to throw them away, and the BNG has been asking the electorate for weeks to concentrate on voting.

The UK

A negative observation on the the government’s Stop the Small Boats strategy . . . Sunak and his diminishing band of close supporters must be the only people in the nation – if not the world – who actually believe the Rwanda policy will work. Cynics might suggest that the primary aim of the policy is to give the prime minister a number of publicity shots of illegal immigrants being deported (and arriving in Rwanda), for him to support his tarnished claim that he is stopping the boats.

The EU seems to be doing rather better with its Bribe the Africans strategy. For now.

I wonder how many other economies are on the same brink of disaster. Or is the UK unique? Answers on a postcard, please. For those who remember what these are.

The USA

Some of us realised the validity of the claims made here many decades ago. En passant, the UK made the final repayment of its WW2 loans to the USA in, I think, 2005. With friends like that . . .

AI

The satirical magazine Private Eyes tells us that: Those who are bullish about the potential impact of AI on society often refer to the jobs that are set to be created by these new technologies, and some of these previously unimagined roles are already starting to appear. Popular AI platform Civitai, where users post their own specially trained AI models, now offers a ‘bounties’ function in which cash payments are offered in exchange for the creation of bespoke models. The vast majority of requests are for models that can produce on-demand pornographic content featuring the likeness of celebrities, influencers and streamers – along with at least one found by 4O4 Media for a model to create porn featuring a likeness of a private person who has no significant public online presence.

Adds PE: Welcome to the future, where you can make up for income lost to AI by training another AI to make porn out of anyone in the world, regardless of their consent

The Way of the World

I dictated that PE paragraph using voice-to-text technology. The word ‘porn’ came up each time as ****. And the same 4 asterisks came up for ‘pornography’. Why?

Did you know? . . .

The Nazis didn’t do what they did simply because they were incomparably evil but because they were acting on an ideology which they believed was ‘based on science’. You can find out what this was in this podcast. Which will have a few shocks for you.

Finally . . .

Well, the highs of 70 visitors/215 views was followed just one day later by the 12-month lows of 30 and 75. Fortunately, I took on board years ago something Rudyard Kipling said to me in the Atheneum Club in London :-

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same,

You’ll be a man, my son.

He was a very boring man to dine with.

The Usual Links . . .

You can get my posts by email as soon as they’re published. With the added bonus that they’ll contain the typos I’ll discover later. I believe there’s a box for this at the bottom of each post. I guess it’s logical that this doesn’t appear on the version given to me . . .

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.