Shocking Times, Shocking Truths

As I'm reading this book, the future is becoming more and more uncertain and scary to me. The same awakening I had during the invation of Iraq, while I was reading Orwell's 1984, I'm having it now with this book, which is blowing my mind away. One might argue that there is nothing really new in some of the facts exposed by Naomi Klein in this book, which are most of them already known to any informed reader. However, what is really interesting in this book is the point of view she takes to understand what has been happening around us for latest 30 years. We are being scared, by means of the shock therapy in her terms, and by being frightened, we accept, willingly or by force, to get rid of our rights, our wealth, and ultimately our freedom.

There is a very disturbing concept, planned misery, which captured my attention: our loss of wealth is ultimately a result of a strategy. And, at the same time, I am reading in the papers lots of articles about cutting lots of citizens' rights, rights which time ago had only been won by long and fierce struggleling, and now simply are being vanished as smoke. And it is not just in these countries often refered to as PIIGS, who are sinking amidst a devastating debt storm, it is also in other richer parts of the world, like Japan. The bottom line is that we are all being fooled on the sake of being saved from whatever nonsensical perils said to be hovering us. I know it sounds kind of paranoid, but it doesn't mean there is not any truth in it. Watch out!

Camel Balls, Liquid Filled!

These are the chewing gums I've seen in my bakery. Funny, aren't they?

Kim Jong Il's and Montilla's or the Art of Eternal Idiocy

Finally, the nullity is gone! The "Pazideng", aka Tontilla, aka Lost in Translations, aka Dumb&Dumber, aka Dude, where is my brain?, aka Vente pa' Cataluña, Pepe!, lost the elections yesterday, obtaining the worst results for the PSC-PSOE ever!

Yesterday, while I was watching a report by Jon Sistiaga on Cuatro about North Korea, one of this countries whose president has a weird hairdo and is always wearing green sport wear, like Cuba, Iran or Venezuela, I could see that misterious guy appearing as a "special representative" of the Foreign Ministry, being kind of agent assisting groups of foreign visitors in North Korea, and keeping two eyes on them so nobody could cross the dangerous line of touching the reality of this country with his/her own senses.

Who is that guy? His name is Alejandro Cao de Benós de Les i Pérez and the funny thing is that he is from Tarragona, my born city. How a guy from Tarragona ends up being an agent serving the DPRK? Who knows! But he wouldn't be the first Catalan serving a crazy tyrant who enslave his fellow citizens. Let's remind the audience that the murder of Leon Trotsky, Ramon Mercader, was also Catalan from Barcelona, whose family was originated in my father's tiny village also in Tarragona.

And where did George Orwell get the inspiration for Nineteen Eighty-Four? From the Spanish Civil War (Homage to Catalonia)? Maybe, but despite he would be most probably appalled to see an actual Asian version of his 1984 is staged everyday in North Korea, I think he wouldn't be too surprised to see a Catalan guy, like Alejandro Cao, having something to do with such Big Brother-like regime to the foreigners. Please, visit Alejandro's blog, though you won't be able to make any comment.

Unlike North Korea, in Catalonia we can get rid off most of idiots in the government, by something as old as elections. Good-bye, Montilla!

A Dream for Catalonia

We're, finally, (immaterial) World Heritage.


The nazi-Pope finally speaks Catalan at the Sagrada Familia


And, hopefully, the "Pazigeng" Tontilla will lose the elections next week


What else can a Catalan expect from the Providence?
Barça winning 5-0 to R. Madrid forever?
The Independence from Spain?
Nope.
I have a dream that my little children will one day live in a nation where they will arrive on time by train and they will be able to get to the airport by train more than two squalid times per hour


Well, maybe the Independence is a more realistic dream than a RENFE on time, unless it is burnt to the ground, I mean, re-foundated.

RENFE, Fent Llenya!
RENFE, Fem-ne Llenya!
RENFE, Fotem-li Llenya!

Tourism and Stereotypes

Stereotypes are simplifications, reductions that mind generates in order to understand the complexity of the world. Unlike many alleged intellectuals think, stereotypes are not a bad thing, existing only in the minds of less able or uninformed people. A word, for example, in itself holds a single stereotype which defines at the same time, though it helps humans to understand each other by sharing and combining them into sentences, and roughly describing ideas. "Car" is a stereotype of all possible and existing cars, and when I say "I saw a red car", most of people identify what I mean. It helps me to generalize and refer to any possible car without specifying which one I am talking about.

However, sometimes, stereotypes are wrong identifications of categories in reality. They don't correspond to anything existing in the world, or they are misleading and wrongly specified, being a bad tool to understand any given situation. The balance between the error provided by a certain generalization and its correctness should be a good measure of the utility for a given stereotype. "All French people stink" is probably a wrong stereotype, while "all pigs do stink" is certainly a helpful one.

Traveling is a good way to break a priori stereotypes about places and people or, at least, it used to be. Nowadays, due to tourism, I guess the omelette has flipped around and most people just travel to confirmed a priori real or invented stereotypes. They travel to Kyoto to see geishas in the same way they travelled to Spain to meet bullfighters, and they basically don't care or don't know whether there is almost no geisha left or that bullfighting has been banned in some areas of Spain.

Each language and nationality has their own "lonely planet" kind of books, and it seems that all of them have read the same, over and over, repeating ad nauseam the same common places, stereotypes, misunderstandings and, sometimes, lies. After a couple of decades trying to teach German, French and English lumpen tourists that most of Spanish were not whole-day flamenco-dancing paella-eating sangria-drinking bullfighters -at least, not in Catalonia, the area surrounding Barcelona-, now it seems that the tale has started all over again with other kinds of tourists, like asian ones.

However, after so many years of uninformed visitors asking to attend to a "tablao flamenco", and to eat tapas and paella, we have finally made up places where they can find such things, as they had imagined, such in Les Rambles; not as they really are. I am not saying that there was no flamenco in Barcelona before the tourists came. Yeah, there was, in gypsy camps on the beach, an awful place called Somorrostro. Tapas? Yeah, though never heard of them before the Spanish immigration in the 60's and always associated with Andalusian-style bars on the periphery of Barcelona. And paella? Well, strictly, a paella is a frying pan, and also the way Valencian people call a type of rice-based dish. We call it "arros a la paella" to distinguish it from other kinds of dishes such "arros a la cassola", for example. When talking in general, we just say "arros" (rice).

So what do tourists get when they visit Barcelona? Fake flamenco, with Argentinian dancers (true!), bad and pricy tapas (they should taste those in Madrid, Andalusia and/or the Basque Country!), and awfully yellow and oily paellas. Have these things anything to do with Barcelona? Nope, just about the character of Catalan people, who would try to cheat even Christ telling him they are jews to book him a room.

However, we have a new breed of connoisseurs, these tourists who think they know something about us because they have been informed by Argentinean bartenders. Those guys know (or think at least they know) about Catalan things such as "pa amb tomaquet" or "all-i-oli", but they can't see the difference between dry bread soaked in grated tomato or garlic-fied plain mayonnaise and the true dishes, which in Barcelona are almost impossible to find. But we shouldn't blame them! We should blame us, who allow to sell in souvenir shops Mexican hats and let ignorant bartenders to give advise about our local cuisine.

So, for the sake of truth, I suggest to anyone really interested in knowing anything about Barcelona, just burn immediately all tourist guides and books about the city, and when coming here, avoid anywhere with a density of non-locals higher than 5%, if you really can tell the difference. Nevertheless, if what you want to find is just a bunch of wrong stereotypes like in an attraction park, then Barcelona is your place. Welcome onboard!

The Best Shop in the World?

Though Barcelona is my mother's city, it keeps being a bitch, a dirty bitch. In some areas, it is becoming a gutter, specially in the older part of the city. I totally agree with that sign. The problem is that the owners of the city use her as their private business, exploiting her as they like, and tourisms seems it is the oldest and simplest way. Poor thing, Barcelona!

Dokyo or a Tofu Ensaimada

Look what I've just seen on Spanish TV, a dorayaki made out of chocolate



The problem with the original, the Japanese one, is its filling, azuki (小豆), a red bean paste, allegedly sweet.



The funny thing is its name, Dokyo, that sounds like Tokyo. But what is glorious is its slogan: "mola asako". It means "it kicks ass", where "mola" digs in the stereotype that asian people pronounce "R" as "L" (it is the opposite!!), and "asako" stands for "a saco", i.e., a cool way to say "a lot", with a more Japanese writting.

Anyway, the ad is as ridiculous as if a Japanese counterpart, let's say, a tofu ensaimada, would be anounced with something like this

My Teeny-Weeny City

My teeny-weeny city, by the sea, being bombed by an Italian squadron during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939)

Marcello, Marcello...Come Here...Hurry Up!

Botticelli's Birth of Venus in a shell

Fellini's Dolce Vitta's Venus in a fountain



I've found always them pretty similar. A Baptism.

Foreigners Working in BCN

I'm happy to have helped somehow to my beloved Ch. to find a job in Barcelona, specially in such difficult times. For a foreigner it is not that difficult to find a job here provided that he/she is European and his/her level of Spanish is enough so as to deal with a normal day's life. Since I came back, I've astonishingly discovered how many foreigners are in fact living in Barcelona.

Without trying to be derogatory, I'm not referring to those commonly identified as immigrants, which were already numerous before I left 5 years ago, but a sort of different kind of new dwellers of the city which would be better named as working tourists. If you speak any European language, plus Spanish, then it will be easy for you to find a job in some of the various contact or call centers which are outsourcing this service to important European companies and banks. I had never imagined so many Polish and Hungarian girls living in Barcelona.

For Asian people, apart from Chinese, which are another case, it is far complicated. For instance, Japan, which is the case, on the one hand, their companies land here with the whole staff in a parcel. On the other hand, very few local companies actually have contact with them in Japan and, therefore, they don't require the service of native Japanese to intercede for them from here. This awkward situation would improve if Japanese companies were more flexible with their staff and there were also more Catalan companies exporting or trading with Japan, which is difficult due to the customary Japanese rigidity.

In brief, one only needs to get a working permit to stay and work in Spain, which is only valid to stay in any other Schengen countries but not to work in there, and some hints of Spanish. I guess the three only legal ways to get that permit are by getting a contract before coming, a student visa (which might allow you only to work in part-time jobs) or by marrying a UE citizen. The rest, just tenacity and good luck.

American Dad!

That show is simply great! If something similar would be ever tried in Spain, I foretold no more than a couple of episodes on the air: one can't make fun of fundamental idiotic symbols of the State in Spain, as the king for example, as it is done here with the CIA.
That's my favorite character. His verbiage (swish) is just as peculiarly funny as it is his obsession with role-playing and wigs. Being an amoral drunker, in a kind of Bender-like way, also helps in becoming my favorite one.
And there she is, Haley, the slut of the family. Not that her mom wasn't a total bitch too when she was young, but Haley is it in a totally new different way: bossy, crazy, stoned and a political wannabe, like most of twentiagers. However, the most contemptible of the show, even more than she and Roger, is her dad Stan, a massively-jawed retarded republican bigot. Funny, isn't it?

What's New, Pussycat?

That's my pussy cat, Miu-ko chan, sleeping, as usual.

ちょっとポンポコリンくなってると思うんだよね



And that's a funny song from a crazy movie!

Once Upon a Time, a Barbie Girl

I spent Saturday afternoon at my friends' place signing with PSP's SignStar Karaoke. Was kind of funny. Giving I didn't go to karaoke since August last year in Japan, I've got to say that I missed signing for a while. Unhopefully, I discovered the songs which I could remember some part of were anchored back in the 80's at most. By the way, I laughed a lot signing that song,



Lyrics are hilarious: "...you can brush my hair, undress me everywhere..." or "...I can act like a start, I can bend on my knees...". So true in a plastic world!!!!
--Oh, I've having so much fun!!!
--Well, Barbie, we'll just getting started!!!

Ecce Homo, Eixe Home

I fell against the pool border when trying to get out. Thanks to my aracnid sense, I was fast enough to avoid kissing the pool wall at a too high and deadly speed. I trade my blood for my teeth. That was the minor price I've got to pay in my first vacation day.

Festes de Gracia 2010

Goog God, Good Bye

I'm reading a book a friend recommended me long time ago. For him, it seems like it was kind of a revelation, though I had read some of the previous books by the same writer during a period of my life, a decade ago, where I used to be extremely interested in science books.

The guy is Richard Dawkins and the book, The God Delusion, which I bought at Stansted Airport at 4 for 3. I haven't finished all of 420 pages of that log yet, but I'm right in the middle. I had previously read The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. These are books about how evolution works, which is the only plausible explanation so far grounded on facts that explains what he calls the climbing of mount improbable, that is, the diversity and adaptability of the existing species.

The God Delusion is a book against religion, hilarious in some chapters, which aim is deconstructing point after point a great deal of arguments for the existence of personal god(s), as he says, or any kind of super-natural being used to explain the existence and functioning of reality. It is very directed towards fighting views such as creationism and intelligent design as an answer, I guess, to their belligerence with respect to science in the educational arena in the US.

The book is well written (as anyone would expect of a Cambridge scholar), full of facts and scientifically well based. For me, it is a bit reiterative and extensive, and I think he could have explained the same in a more succinct way without losing any important argument. Sometimes he drifts too much from the central point of chapters and he tends to sprinkle the text too much with his own interpretation of other's words and personal anecdotes, which are of difficult rebuttal, but I guess this is the price to pay in science best-sellers.

I, personally, am also an atheist, of the hardest dyed-wool type, as he calls himself. I think I was born without the lobule in the brain that make people "gullible" to religions. As far as I remember, I have never believed in anything, not even Santa Claus. Why? When I was a child, I felt it was a waste of time to pray to a cross with a wooden guy hanging on the wall. Never understood the causal relation between praying and reality.

Later, for a while, I was amused by the Biblical stories the priest in my church (where I was baptized) explained using slides. They were really formidable, kind of unbelievable, like the one of Abraham said to kill his own son and told not to do so on the last moment. "What would it happen if the guy had been deaf?", I asked to myself, would he had been guilty of son-cide or would it have been god himself guilty of homicide? What a dilemma. And then, my big question: why those extraordinary things were never on the news nowadays? Why only happened in a desert 3.000 years ago? Was god now taking a rest?

Stories in the Bible were just like those in comics for me, really unreal. Never took them seriously, specially because of the darkness and weird smell surrounding churches, a mixture of wax, smoke, closeness, and smell of old people, which by itself it is enough to prevent anyone to enter. Then, one summer, I discovered Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, and my vision of the whole world changed for ever. I have always wanted to know how things worked, but that was different: there was a way that made possible to know how the world worked, and there was no need of god, just pure thinking, mathematics, and measures. Clear, clean, open, bright. That's science.

That was all I needed. I've never been a genius, on the contrary, a pretty normal type of guy, but if only I have a quality is that of being extremely skeptic. My grandmother used to say "better believing something rather that checking it". For me, even if I see it, I might not believe it is true.

Summer Time...

Summer time is here. Augustus' month. Leisure and dolce far niente. Not for me, though; at least, not yet. Late months have been exhausting. Up and down, finishing deadlines and reports. I have earned the daily bread with my very sweat, I swear. Not an easy single cent. R&D is not a business for nitwits, specially when the UE commission and a bunch of square-headed Germans are involved. And yet, so much to do, so much to try and so much to improve. Those deaf-language signs don't translate by them selves!



If childhood is said to be the golden age for most people, I think summer is the best period among these heavenly days. It was, at least, for me. It was time of beach, sea, sand, jumping, playing outdoors, bikes, football, friends, dogs, bugs, storms, girls, naps, crackers, ice creams, coca-cola, dirt, excruciating heat, sweating, thirst, mountain, dust, walking, singing, firebones, stars, crickets, vivac, and most of all, freedom. First time I noticed I was actually growing older was when I discovered I unavoidably had to work in summer. Childhood was over, and sweet summer vacations too.

Now, I'm already accustomed to, and since I was living in Japan, having just a week long summer vacation seems fair to me. Nevertheless, last year I had a long month of vacation, and this year, adding up all my unused vacation days, I have accummulated almost five weeks, which I will distribute from now to the end of the year. I can't leave the project I'm involved in ungarded, my manager could discover I'm not that important!

What am I gonna do? Nothing: sleeping, reading, going to the beach and the pool, strolling, and maybe some short escape to the Pyrenees. I'm tired of traveling, airports, flights, connections, trains, subways, crowds. I'm starting to think that tourism is a great hoax with no interest at all. What's the point of going to Paris if you can't even order a café au lait? Culture, people say. Yeah, maybe. But I'm really surprised to verify that the only few days people is interested in culture coincide with the same period they leave their own places. Strange, isn't it?

Some also use the argument of learning different ways of living. Really? In France? Sorry, I don't think so. It might be true in the Crusade ages, but nowadays, there are not much differences within the whole Europe, apart from local languages, and some regional specialities in McDonalds.

Besides, most apparent differences come from basic unawareness. That's why some naively travel to exhotic lands to discover new frontiers. Another rip-off, but in their own delusion, they still think they have reached some revealing and unknown teaching. Bogus. They can't even tell the difference between a tourist trap and a life-losing trap. See what happened to these Catalan guys in Mexico while trying to cross an unbridled river in a precarious canoe.

This kind of travelers are the most laughable to me, and think of themselves as new editions of Pedro de Alvarado or Aguirre while buying their gear at Decathlon. In this open-to-the-world city Barcelona is there are plenty of them. Always ready to "discover the Americas". What it is funny is that in America there are some other super cool guys that envisage coming to Europe to discover our strange ways of living to re-edit the feats of Hemingway or their own grandpa in WWII.

What's the point of tourism, then? None, unless we stick to some genuine one, like having some rest and fun in our free time and, if lucky, finding whatever true treasure might still remain under the tones of vulgarity, triviality, easiness, common-places, and non-sense we are living in, which I fear is kind of difficult in places such as attraction park Barcelona. Good luck.

I saw Kenneth Branagh in Barcelona!

A couple of weeks ago, maybe three, I saw Kenneth Branagh in front of Deutsche Bank in Barcelona. I was going down from work to catch my train and he and his wife were walking along the Diagonal on the lateral sidewalk. We passed by just in front of the DB. I was quite astonished by his presence. Looked directly upon his eyes and bowed my head slightly. I didn't want to bother him.


He was probably staying at a famous hotel not quite far from the point where we met. He's been one of my favourite actors since I first saw him and his former wife, Emma Thompson, in Too Much Ado about Nothing. I've always unfruitfully tried to wear as well trimmed a beard as he in this movie. The funny things about this movie is that there is a character with my very surname, which happens to sound gross in English, played by Ben Elton, writer of The Black Adder, and that the real Don Pedro (Denzel Washington) is in fact Peter The Great, King of Aragon, burried in Santes Creus, just by my father's village. Nice coincidences!

By the way, his hair is a little longer now than in the picture.

Porn Happens in Malta Sometimes

Maybe I'm getting older too fast, but traveling for me is becoming each time less exciting to me. I don't know what's the reason, but I guess the fact that anywhere in Europe is converging towards the same kind of thing is helping quite a big deal. One might expect that places so marooned such as Malta would still seem pretty different, but then, I discover that it is not, at least, due to the kind of landscape my eyes are used to observe.

Malta is a minuscule island in the very center of the Mediterranean, our sea, and has a pretty interesting history, which in many aspects quite defines the nature of Europe, but in a far smaller scale. It is a fortress on the sea which once was ruled by knights of seven nations who control the marine paths of trade and peoples crossing the sea, restricting the incursions of infidels into the heart of European Christendom.

What is it now, Malta? To me, it is just a rock, almost half of it totally urbanized in the most bizarre way. The word I'd would use to define Malta is small, too small. It can be completely seen in a couple of days; and then, the only thing that one can do is just sitting in a terrace and drinking its mild beer Cisk. I bet that my opinion of Malta would be better if I owned one of the yachts moored at the harbor, and had spent my days partying on board with half a dozen of Easter European beauties, as Berlusconi, but unhopefully that was not the case.

However, what started in the dullest way, that of treating the most unfriendly people on Earth, Maltese, turned little by little into more enjoyable days and nights, until the last one, when being all the work done, we started the afternoon by doing an improvised cruise around the creeks of Malta and continued the evening and night feasting the unexpected victory of the Maltese football league by La Valletta F.C. At that point things became more and more surreal.

From a square where supporters were celebrating the victory, we went to the football team's bar, where horrendous music of football anthems were played once and again while drunken supporters jumped like loonies. That was hotter than hell, and we kept drinking water-down beer to maintain our liquid balance stable. And when the party here was over, we followed a very peculiar character resembling Sandokan to a club in the docks, from where we left with time to sleep a couple of hours before catching our flight back, through Munich, to Barcelona.

That was the story of my trip to assist to a meeting and workshop in Malta dealing with automatic sign language recognition and translation, the project I'm currently involved in, that end up dancing in La Valletta docks with a pretty and clever English girl, a funny German from Oxford, a Cameroonian from Aachen, my boring co-worker, and a Belgian guy with a T-shirt saying that "Porn Happens". Yeah, it probably does!

Conference Trip to Malta

Bones or Teeth!

Personally, I think most of these crime series are on the verge of absolute nonsense. A doctor that solves crimes? a mathematician? Why not a violoncellist? or maybe a noodle cook working in a fast-food court? Anyway. One of the most nonsensical one is CSI: why all laboratories are in complete darkness? Are they expecting to find anything there? I heard once that they looked more like a disco rather than a lab, with all such glooing lights and big boobed girls.

Bones is a classic one, and the creepiest one to my taste. It is a classic one because all its characters are so archetypical that turns out to be as childish as A-Team or the Kight Rider. All espisodes follow the same structure, and the different set of couples are as shallow as the encephalogram of one the corpses laying on their lab. A FBI agent and a brainy antropologist doctor? a couple of geeks, a rat of lab and a kind of compter genious? So clichee! It is so foreseenable that it makes me laugh.

What it is worst, though, in that series, which makes me laugh even louder is the size of the teeth of most of the actors there! In most of the series, the people who appear are so fake: guys tend to be over-sized in gym, while girls' nose-jobs and boob-jobs are terribly apparent. But in this one, it seems like if all of them had had dental implants for free, but dentists run out of teeth of their own size and they had to use teeth which were too big. Completely hilarious!

Chernobil or Facebook

There's nothing on TV, just idiots and a re-run of Bond's Moonraker. I've just watched again another IT Crowd episode, after a documentary on Chernobil disaster, which amazingly seems to have happened a day like today back in 1986, 24 years ago! Wooow, tempus fugit! I was 12 y.o. going on 13. That was my last year in elementary school -- or maybe was it the next one?

Many things happened on these years: my family moved from a tiny apartment to a bigger flat, where I got my own room. We bought, finally, a color TV set, and I won a computer with an essay I wrote about the Roman monuments in my city. It was my first PC, and it was kind of a pain in the arse. I couldn't play at all, since there were no games for such machines. And above all, I couldn't read the instructions, which were in English, nor understand the OS guide book. I was 13, I wanted to have fun playing, and all I had was a log talking about assembler's hexadecimal code. I felt frustrated. Now, things are completely different. Computers are for fun and everyone can use them.

Tonight I was watching IT Crowd's episode about Friendface, something similar to Facebook. It is defined as "basically a disease based on friendship". Roy is re-meeting an old girlfriend (the Joker) with whom he had already split up, and Moss is accompanying Jen to her reunion party where they unrealistically show off in front of her old school girlfriends. It is a bloody mess and turns out to be a total disaster.

I personally don't see much the use of Facebook, besides fucking around or wasting time sneaking around friend's friend's friend's photo albums. Apart from the fact that some people seem not to understand the basic principles of privacy, my main curiosity is to figure out what is the point of having 1500 friends, way beyond human capacity to remember names or faces. What kind of friendship is this? Does it generates any real activity?

I've made some tests and it seems that most people don't even enter into their accounts for months, or they lose their interest soon after the first exchanges of posts. If FB's fiendship is not backed with a previous real and close friendship, it soon disappears. So, what's the point of it on the first place?

Sant Jordi, Amor, Roses i Llibres

Dóna'm la mà que anirem per la riba,
ben a la vora del mar bategant,
tindrem la mida de totes les coses
només en dir-nos que ens seguim amant.

Hold my hand and we will walk along the shore
very close to the sea which is beating,
we will have the measure of all things
just by telling us that we keep on loving to each other.

At least once in a year, something different from drugs and beer is sold in les Rambles de les Flors.

Elkano in Passeig de Gracia

I said once that in this blog I would be talking about Barcelona. I admit that this hasn't happened as often as I promised, since I tend to talk about what happens to me and my circumstances. But today, for a change, I will talk about something about my mother's city.

I was waiting at the station surroundings, wasting some minutes until the moment came to go to the dungeons where this station is located, an infernal and ghastly place, where I try to stay the shortest time possible. Outside the evening was wonderful, inviting me to stay for longer, sitting at some terrace having a drink and, perphas, a talk with one of the many visitor that like swallows in Spring appear in the streets of Barcelona.

I looked up, while standing in front of the mouth of the station, and I saw an unexpected statue. Who was that guy? On its base it is written "Elkano". Elkano? Juan Sebastian Elcano? What is he doing up there? And a little to the right, over the threshold of the main entrance to the building, the answer. Two marble engraved stones, with the same text, in Catalan and in Basque.

Etxe honetan egon zen 1936-tik 1939-arteko gerrate bitartean euzkadiko ordezkaritza katalunian bi herrien arteko anaitasunezko eta adiskidetasunezko harremanak bultzatu eta giza-aldezko ekintza eskergarri bat burutu zuena.

Something like that during the Spanish Civil war, a delegation of the Basque Government was housed here, which closely and fraternally collaborated with the Catalan Government in humaniratian tasks. I imagine those humanitarian tasks had to do with the help to all the people who had to flee from the fascist army from the Basque Country to Republican zone caused by the breaking of the front war line into two pieces and the fall of San Sebastian and Bilbao very early in the war.

At the end of the war, though, the Catalan President was shot dead by the fascists and all our laws, government and language, banned. However, by selling their soul to the devil, they managed to keep theirs, along with their sovereignty and taxes. Even now, April 2010, the flimsy statute that should be ruling the Autonomy -- this humbug that was invented in the 70's to shut up our demands -- is stuck in the Constitutional Court just because it says that Catalan people exist and, maybe, we should be managing our own taxes.

And where is the fraternal and friendly help of the Basques now? Lost, as usual, and minding their own business. So, mutatis mutandis, I'm sorry to say that your people and you, Elkano, can go and get a little lost fishing some bacalao!

A Lousy Chiringuito Called Endesa

There are monkies in the deepest and unknown areas of the Amazon rainforest which would be more precise in giving an estimation of my electric consumption than Endesa. I don't believe in hell out of this world, but there should be one for the delinquents who manage this unefficient and monopolistic chiringuito.

The Shame in Spain is Mainly on Telecinco Frames

Television in Spain is deadly rotten, and the stinkiest channel of all is Telecinco, the sewage of these dregs. Take all it is dead, all it is dreadful, all it is vile and vulgar, low and denigrating, putrefied and narrow-minding, and put it in a garbage bag, let it decompose for some weeks under a tropical sun, and then, maybe, then, you will have a glimpse of the size of the stench such channel spreads over the Hertzian waves. If the whole channel would disappear all of a sudden, the IQ of Spain, as incurable as it may appear to any objective observer, would recover immediately from the present lobotomized brain-mangled retard level to the able-to-breath-without-explicit-assistance coma level.

What does this shit look like? Basically, it is Berlusconi's Italian Tele 5 alla espagnola, which means less bellinas and more Belenes. Belen Esteban is the personification of this channel, or at least of the kind of people who find it amusing, the standard garru-guarras, aka Yolis, Vanes and Veros, and their male counterparts, the garrulators, Yonatans, Frans and Cristians. This TV channel provides them with all they need to be nourished, apart from bread and narcotics, and I'm not sure about the latter.

All I can see in its programming is Big Brother, talkshows about Big Brother, other side programs about people (to use a euphemism commonly accepted) in Big Brother or the like, and more talkshows featuring Belen Esteban and her infra-world. And from time to time, a movie. For example today, they took advantage of the recent release of Tim Burton's Alice and, guess what, they put a 3rd-rate Alice; more cheating the audience with rubbish. I'm waiting for a movie about volcanos, Pompey, plane crashes, or all together, according to their flee-leaped logic.

The other source of TV crap is Cuatro (5, 4, is it like a countdown to A-bomb-like blast of brain nullifying?). While Tele Cinco deals with fishy junk celebrities, Cuatro has democratized the exposure of utter vulgarity and has invented (woow, Spain finally invents something!) a whole new breed of TV programs where total scum explains its pointless life on TV. The origin is the program Callejeros, street dwellers. In their minds, they think, it is a research documentary about the tough lives of common people; in practice, it is just rambling around degraded suburbia interviewing junkies, whores, and all sorts of lumpen. And there have been a lot of spin-off programs, like Callejeros Viajeros, and the like in other channels.

I was not at all any gourmand of TV. I swear I could gobble any kind of junk; but now, after the time spent in Japan, a country with a TV as pointless as Spain (though not as filthy nor rotten) and with the aggravating that I had no clue of what they were saying, I got used to living without TV, apart from some series and movies; in original version if possible. I know, it sounds snobbish and elitist, but my stomach can't digest McTV anymore as it used to do. Am I getting old? No, just an ulcer.

Fuck Telecinco! Fuck Berlusconi!
A Duomo, a Duomo, my Kingdom for a Duomo!

Work in Spain, a Flower in a Desert

Recently, I've been involved in the selection of a candidate to cover a position in the company where I work. It is been the first time for me I chose a person for a job, I must confess; but I also must admit it has been an interesting and tiring experience.

I started working in my present company almost one year ago. I underwent two interviews by Skype, since I was not in Barcelona at that time. Somehow, I managed to convience them about my adequacy without even being personally there. Maybe that was the trick! I remember they asked me to write down a whole report about how I would focus the project they were hiring me to work for.

It took me three days to complete it and a lot of coffees at チョコクロ. I even had to turn down a promising afternoon of crazy fun with the boring and gorgeous "so+adj." girl in order to finish the bloody report on time. At the end, I got the job, though exceptionally I had to be on trial for 6 months, which is the double of what it is normally required in the company.

Now, I was on the other side of the table, and in front of me, the three guys that were selected to have an interview with out of 25 possible candidates who were turned down straightforward for not even fulfilling the most basic requirements we were asking them to get the job. And it was I who had to carry the burden of interviewing them, since I am the only expert in Computer Vision in the company. So, there I was, peppering them with all sort of questions about their knowledge, background, and future prospectives.

First, a Colombian guy with an interesting CV, perfect for what we were looking for. PhD in Computer Vision, international experience in research, command in English, good aptitude and attitude. He is the one who got the position, by the way. It seems kind of an interesting and optimistic guy, runs Marathons and speaks a perfect Catalan with a sweet accent inherited from his particular Colombian Spanish.

The two other guys clearly show how bad the situation in the working market is nowadays in Spain. Both came from the UAB (Autonomous University of Barcelona). I had references of the first guy because he worked by the first Computer Vision spin-off company created within this University. They dealt with the automatic quality control for corks in the bottles of cava. I even use some of his code for analysing blobs in binarized images. That's why I was astonished when I saw his resume applying for the position. It turned out that the recession had bring the company to bankruptcy and he had not being paid for the last couple of months. Shameful.

The other guy was a part-time assistant professor of Computer Science at the same University. He was the least fit for the position. He lacked the basic background, poor reseach experience, almost no real-world struggle, no international exposure, poor English, and what was the worst, a completely misguided attitude towards solving problems. He would probably be a good elementary school teacher, but by no means a cutting-edge professional. The worst for me was the wrong scale he used at grasping the world's measure, the money. He asked a ridiculously low salary. The salary is the measure of your work and it is something that it has to be negotiated. If it is too high, you won't probably get the job, but if you put it so low, it means you don't value your own work. So, I won't buy it.

In conclusion, what is the working market situation in Spain? The traditional sectors, i.e., construction and turism, are nearly dead and, in the case of construction, on its way to the cementery. They must be obliterated from any further serious analysis of a future economic growth in Spain for some decades, if ever. What about technology and science? They would be a possible solutions for the current situation if there were, on the one side, a clear and fair interest on them from the Spanish political and financial world, which has never existed nor will, and a pool of good professionals, on the other side, which pathetically doesn't exist.

As a result, only small private companies, national or foreigner, are able to appear in those areas offering work to highly skilled professionals, national or foreigner. Science will keep being monopolized by the burocratic and intranscendent declining public research institutes and universities, and technology, by huge conglomerates which only provide with monopolized facilities and services at high costs, but with no real innovation. So, I guess I will keep being a traveling engineer for long time, playing my music to those who can pay me, here and there.

London, Under the Volcano

These are just a few of the lot of pictures I took last weekend in London. Every time I go there, it seems I bring the sun with me since the skies are always fulgently blue. Nevertheless, like a spell cast by an envious old witch, just after I left the Isles, this monumental eruption in Iceland, recently renamed as Dustland, appeared and all flights from UK were cancelled. I was lucky, again: last time I travelled to London, the mother of all snow storms stroke the northen part of Catalonia, bringing it back to the stone ages; no electricity for a week.

Portobello Rd. in Notting Hill, with lots of antiques shops and street markets. Lovely and charming, as they like to say in London. Somewhere down this street, I ate some Jolof food, from Gambia. I cried, so hot it was! First time I eat some African food from beneath the Sahara.

I know it is a very silly picture, just like these Japanese tourists routinely take in front of the signs and the billboards showing the name of the places they are visiting. What can I do? Too long living in Japan!

Oxford! Finally, I could see with my own eyes what it was all about. I shared for 6 months the room at work while I was in Sweden with two former Oxford students, a mathematician Irish girl and an electrical engineer, just like Rowan Atkinson. Most of the English I know I got it from them. Today, however, I was just a mere tourist taking pictures in an extraordiary stage and marveling at these phenomenal buildings, the wrapping of Oxford.

I found signs like this in the frontispiece of a number of doors around the central yard of this Oxfordian College utterly intriguing. "Beware, you will learn about Natural Philosophy on the other side!", like a warning before a tunnel advertising you of what you are going to find on the other end side of the hole. "Don't blame us if you learnt anything. We warned you!"

This magnificient ceiling is just in front of the Christ Church College's dinning hall, the one that appears in Harry Potter's movies, though the real one is not as big, but more grounded on the reality and far less sillily magical. What is magical to me is this achitecture. They could manage to build an almost flat ceiling with very few archs using tangencial circles instead. Notice there is no diagonal arch sustaining the squared parts of the roof flanked by groups of four columns. Magic!

This old chap in a bonnet hat was one of the friendly guardians of Christ Church College in Oxford. People were so excited about being in this cloister, also appearing in Harry Potter's first two movies, that he had to tell them repeatedly not to go onto the lawn. I could enter by paying just half of the ticket fare after convincing the funny head of guardians at the entrance I was a student.

This ceiling is just glorious! It spans like a fan from a virtual column which literally hangs on the sky. Amazing!

The symmetry is so perfect here, excluding the clouds, that it seems there is only one side facing a mirror. Lewis Carroll, Charles Dodgson, used to teach logic around here and, as I read, used to look through the glasses of the windows in the library building that stands behind where I took the picture, maybe looking for a smiling pussy cat from Cheshire.

Trafalgar Sq. from the National Gallery's staircase. First on the foreground, Lord Nelson's commemorative column. On the far background, Big Ben and the Parliament. I tried to emulate Turner's stormy skies I had just observed in the museum.

The National Gallery from outside, since I could not take any interesting picture inside. I was warned twice by a Japanese-looking guardian, so I desisted. Later I could see how an Italian girl with a better technique was taking a smuggled picture of Van Gogh's Sunflowers in the museum. These cunning Italian girls!

Lord Nelson, the admiral who defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar. He lost one eye and one hand, as it is very amusingly pictured in Blackadder when saying something like "this is the worst idea since Lord Nelson bet his hand on the virtue of Lady Hamilton", who is well-known to have been his famous mistress, or showing him awaking from drunkenness and desperately shouting "I'm blind, I'm blind!", not noticing his eye patch was covering the wrong eye.

London Eye from St. Jame's Park at dusk. The sun was bathing the buildings of the Ministries, but the ducks on the lake were just unaware of it.

And Big Ben, again and again, from near the War Rooms, where Churchill directed the WWII.

パパヤ鈴木〜〜〜大好き！！！

Sometimes, when I get up in the morning I really look like パパヤ鈴木, a guy I really don't dislike. He is so funny! I used to watch him on TV while in Japan, in a program where the goal was to go to some remote restaurant and order the biggest meal they had, and eat it to the last drop.

Belive it or not, he is a dancer, who, I imagine, unhopefully underwent through the same metamorphosis as John Travolta. However, he still dances and sings with his old chaps, the オヤジ. That's a funny song!



Today it was the case. Even after a shower, my hair is so crazy and curly, I got a hairdo!
Papaya's power has come to me!
So, I'll try to dance before going to sleep
今なん時？

Sugar, the Sweetest Thing on Earth

My sweet Aya has sent me this song...



She's the sweetest thing on Earth, isn't she?

I Threw My Sad Nets to Your Oceanic Eyes...

...and almost got drown!

Images of a Great City, The City

The Sun Sets and the London Eye Wheels