dust up

There’s nothing funny about a story of Turkish workers dying from silicosis after working in factories where sand is used to pre-age jeans. Nor is there anything funny about the Night Stalker who allegedly attacked 108 old people in the Croydon area over a period of 17 years.

Sadly, the juxtaposition of two reports in a newspaper can add an inappropriately humorous twist. Which is what happened in Sunday’s El Mundo, Crónica section, where, in the printed edition, the two stories occupied full pages opposite each other:

It’s not the double page spread that’s the problem, it’s the photo captions:

alien affairs

In today’s El Mundo there’s a report entitled Los borrosos rostros de la nueva Unión – “the vague faces of the new Union”. (It’s in the print edition, but it seems you need a subscription to read the article online.) In it, they talk about the new president of the European Union and the “superministra”, Catherine Ashton.

Oops. I nearly typed Catherine Tate.

There are two possible reasons for that slip, I think: one, going back to the Eighties when I first learned about databases with dBase II, an Ashton-Tate product; and two, the fact that the article is accompanied by a photo of a dalek.

the fat of the land

A strange story from the BBC today, with the headline Peru arrests ‘human fat killers’. According to the report,

Four people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing dozens of people in order to sell their fat and tissue for cosmetic uses in Europe.

I wonder what use the fat is put to. Particularly as, according to the Health First Europe website: “Europe has the highest number of overweight and obese people in the world.”

tall tales

Esperanza Aguirre, the presidenta of the comunidad de Madrid who described herself as “el verso suelto dentro del poema” has come up with another quotable phrase: “Yo no hablo cuando llevo zapatos planos.” – “I won’t make a statement when I’m wearing flat shoes.”

Most women are familiar with the concept of getting dressed and putting our make-up on before making an important phone call, and I guess this is much the same thing. The problem is the psychological reasoning behind it.

a number of questions

Or, perhaps, a question of numbers.

A headline in today’s El Mundo says that 4,158 million euros has been lost in the last ten years due to political corruption. Except, it being Spanish, it doesn’t say it quite like that:

The Spanish use “million” in the plural after a number, giving phrases like seis millones rather than “six million”. They also use a full stop as the thousands separator and a comma where we use a decimal point.