Cheers!

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

So I'm not complaining. ;-)

However, the flip side of the "we love our local saints-'n-madonnas" thingy is when the people who live in the Immaculate-Madonna parish say

a) that their madonna is better at healing the sick, consoling the lovesick and fixing family financial problems than the next parish's Sorrowful-Madonna (figures?)... which proves they-the-immaculate-madonnites are generally better-in-every-way than the nextdoor sorrowful-madonnites;

or worse still,

b) that the dastardly bastardy lying thieving people in the next town took advantage of an earthquake/local war/barbarian invasion (choose 1) back in 11-hundred-and-something to steal their "real" miraculous madonna/saint's relics and have ever since refused to give it/them back... so their current madonna/saint-icon is a mere ineffective substitute grr grr grr ... which of course proves the guys 'n gals in the next town are still the same totally dastardly thieving lying cheating bastards they've consistently proved themselves to be for the last 1000 years or so ... so after the guys complaining about these millennial injustices have finished off their current litre of local wine in the local osteria they'll.. darn well go and "tell" 'em so - yet again... physically. :roll:

"Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami

GHGHGHHGHHG pleasure ghghghhghghghghggh

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Small personal anecdote:
Some years ago such a bridge ocurred on a thursday and most people didn't work friday. Not me because there was work to be done. Now i open the Friday paper, and read an opinion column written by none other than one of my bosses at the time, a man with "political" ambitions. In line with many others like him he ranted about the loss of productivity and the hit on GDP because of "pontes" etc etc.., a theme that is very frequent on papers on those weekends.

Now, this story is interesting to me because i was working, reading his column, and this guy was spending a long weekend in Morocco... That i knew for a fact. Can i spell hypocrit? I guess i can...

He eventually became elected along with Barroso, back then, but left his seat on the parlament to become part  of the national TV board, RTP.

This would lead me to a portuguese institution called "Tacho". But that's for another diary.

In Japan, holidays are pretty civil, no saints.

Today I caught two articles on Spain. They are not related to the holiday's theme, but generated a deal of curiosity nevertheless.

Spanish children among the most obese

One in three Spanish children is overweight, one of the worst records in Europe, a conference in Madrid was told on Tuesday.

Spain was one of nine countries to take part in a European Commission-funded study into ways to tackle obesity and emerged with more fat youngsters than any other country in the group.

Only England came anywhere near Spain in the sample with about a quarter of youngsters overweight.

"The amount of obese children in Spain is high and rising rapidly," said professor Erik Millstone of the University of Sussex, who co-ordinated the survey across the countries.

Back in the 1980s, only around 15 percent of Spanish children were overweight.

Is this what many holidays does to you?

The other article is from the right-wing blogosphere. It is a piece of usual scare for immigrants, but I wonder how this is viewed in Spain itself.

Europe's Future

[Thus] far in 2006, 30,000 "boat people" have landed on Canary Island beaches--already six times last year's tally. The great majority come from Senegal. There are also Malians and Mauritanians, Gambians and Guineans, Congolese and Cameroonians, and others whom Spaniards don't usually think of as their neighbors, but who now consider Europe just a hop, skip, and a jump away. There are occasional boats full of Chinese and Bangladeshis, too. Spain isn't the only destination for boats pouring out of other continents. The Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria have received well over 10,000 boat people this year. Migrants from East Africa, Pakistan, and India are beaching boats launched in Libya on the shores of Malta and Greece. And boats are not the only way to bust into the E.U. - there are also land routes through Eastern Europe, and the majority of immigrants to Europe still get there by flying in as tourists or students and then overstaying their visas.

But Spaniards have started to note that, in contrast to previous waves, these migrants seem to be coming to, not through, their country. Spain, which a decade ago thought it had an emigration problem, now finds itself the top immigrant destination on the entire continent. Its population has jumped to 44 million people, thanks to almost 4 million new immigrants. Slowly, over decades, a lot of European countries have reached the point where about 10 percent of their population is of immigrant background. Spain is now about 10 percent first-generation immigrant, and this has happened overnight. Much of the present migration is to cities. Foreigners make up 19 percent of the population (and 28 percent of the workforce) in Madrid. The Valencia region is 14 percent foreign-born. The Raval area of central Barcelona, where immigrants were exotic up until the early 1990s, is now a "majority minority" neighborhood.