Luis Suárez and all that

Mariana Echeverria, the cute replacement for Radamés on Guerra de Chistes (above) has established a niche for herself on the show by specialising in the telling of gags which would induce thousands of complaint calls to any UK broadcaster. She should be thankful that Mexico has no equivalent of the Broadcasting Standards Commission; or at least I am assuming it doesn't.

The other night, dressed as an angel, she recounted this little adivinanza: 'What's yellow on the outside, black on the inside, and makes you laugh out loud?' Answer...'a taxi full of 'negros' going off a cliff.'

Racial discrimination is not her only rollo however. Over the festive period she got laughs out of a boy with no hands as well as leper children.

Now, in tieing this cautionary tale back to that of Liverpool's seemingly much put-upon Uruguayan striker, let's make several observations that would seem reasonable to anyone who has spent time in a Spanish-speaking culture.

1) There is practically no sense of poltical correctness

2) There is a very high obscenity threshold

3) There's an awful lot of un-selfconscious racism around.

On the middle point, it has never ceased to amaze me how children's TV presenters in Spain feel free to use the word coño (cunt) on air.

Luis Suárez would probably regard our tendency to stigmatise those who make fun of people's colour, but not those who joke about a person's weight, lack of hair, intelligence or regional origin, as a strange form of discrimination in itself.

For if Uruguayans are anything like Central Americans, a good part of the local sense of humour is based on homing in on each other's most salient (and therefore apparently weakest) features. It rather resembles Public Schoolboy humour in its mercilessness. For that reason 'negro' is a nickname forced on many people of non-African origin who just happen to be a tad darker or sport curly hair.

Another Mexican show I watched last year had a well-known black singer as a guest and the hosts chose to welcome him with a string of gags that would leave many liberal folk in need of a jaw re-setting before they could run to their phones to complain. But I do believe that the idea was actually to make the strange dark person feel more comfortable on set! And the tactic appeared successful, because the singer chose to join in and proceeded to tell several startlingly racist jokes himself.

The 70 That Matter

Yes he's back: El Chapo is at No55 on Forbes magazine's list of The 70 That Matter.

As ever it's an idiosyncratic, Yankocentric chart. Guzmán Loera comes in seven places ahead of Japan's new PM Yoshihiko Noda. Indeed, Japan's leader is now deemed considerably less weighty in today's world than Brazil's.

Meanwhile, the ECB's 'Super Mario' Draghi matters (just) a bit more than Nicholas Sarkozy, while the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon matters a lot less (at 38) than several US corportate CEOs, though, surprisingly enough, Carlos Slim ("& family") outrank Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who clearly lacks significant relatives. Berlusconi's in, Zapatero isn't. No room either for Papandreou, who matters quite a lot right now and may still do so tomorrow.

And what's with the President of the International Fencing Assocation Alisher Usmanov, at 70?

Clarification required?

Had to tap myself on the head a few times this week listening to the hacks from up in the imperio yanqui querying the manner of Moammar Gaddafi's death.

After all, he had only just narrowly avoided America's chosen method of liquidation for what their President has described as 'Arab leaders' (and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity, and regardless of whether they carry a US passport.)...the unmanned drone attack.

Well, that and a French bomb, one or both of which may represent a fictitious attempt to share the praise/blame.

That some random Libyan should choose to put a bullet in the hated tyrant's head in the middle of a war zone after 42 years of misrule and eight months of civil strife, in which said dictator passed up on a number of clear opportunities to vacate, has somehow become the cause of a great deal of tut-tutting.

Patriot Games

Americans get to be patriotic almost every day — though days such as today afford opportunities to turbo-charge the experience.

Guatemalans get to be patriotic essentially once a year, though there's often a bit of leakage into the rest of September, and results notwithstanding, flags may also be waved enthusiastically when the national soccer team takes to the pitch.

For us Brits the opportunities are generally more spaced out, though this may not be such a bad thing. Part of the 'problem' is that sporting endeavour is as much a force for division as it is for shared celebration. Guatemalans can get a periodic extra patriotism fix from an international soccer fixture, but at such times we Brits find ourselves partitioned into our composite inner nations: English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish, the latter identity inherently packaged with deeper, darker divisions.

Almost none of the sports that are followed in number in Britain provide much of an opportunity for waving the Union Flag. OK, there's tennis, but how many cathartic moments of national triumph has that delivered in living memory? Right, none.

Hence the value of last Friday's small family gathering. We can't win the World Cup together (or indeed terminate our national bogeymen with extreme prejudice) but when it comes to cavalry and choirboys, who is there to match us?

It's easy to be a cynic and a killjoy, when you're on your own. Had I watched the Royal Wedding on TV back in Guatemala, I might well have found myself blowing raspberries at the screen. But back here in Blighty amongst friends and family, the shared meanings started to actually mean something. Both my parents are in their eighties and this may well be for them their last experience of the rituals that have periodically renewed the mystical nation. In such company there's enough history in the air to prevent downer adjectives like 'outmoded' from springing so readily to mind.

And this time everyone really did want a fresh start. Maybe it's wrong to seek a deeper meaning in the absence of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown from Friday's guest list, but given that certain petty old scores were rather obviously being settled (Earl Spencer in the economy class queue outside the Abbey for instance), one might also suspect that a grander score was also being settled with the New Labour decade in which, in spite of its thrilling surge of prosperity, one also witnessed the nation losing its bearings in a number of potentially disastrous ways.

As a (former) medieval historian I can tell you that 1200 years of historical continuity isn't something to be sniffed at. Our history and our sense of it is the glue that keeps the whole thing together, but over the past couple of decades there were worrying signs that even that couldn't prevent a creeping process of un-glueing.

Guatemala has an almost disconcerting lack of national heroes in its historical narrative. There are a few big characters lurking in the chronology, but no-one who really epitomises a particular set of values.

Contrast Venezuela with its El Libertador, from whom all sense of modern political legitimacy appears to derive. Mexico on the other hand has not one, but a whole collection of symbolic personages in its past, less a pantheon than a Homeric melee of warring men and women, each of whom stands for a certain ideal of what the nation ought to be, and many of whom died in conflict with each other. There, resolution is seemingly deferred, but here in the 'United' Kingdom, the very name of the ultimate political unit suggests an end to the ruckus.

It has been fascinating to follow A History of Celtic Britain on the BBC over the past month, not least because of the way Neil Oliver has gleefully revised the pervading assumption that the only British history that really matters is English history, and that anything else is essentially an unpleasant after-effect of the Romans' failure to finish the job.

Oliver consistently refers to 'our island' (well, it's only been an island for around 5000 years) and 'the British' whilst describing events pre-dating the incursion of the Anglo-Saxons by half a millennium or more. Yet he was game enough to submit his own ancestry to the swab test (as I too have done) and discovered that whilst his mitochondrial DNA has led a relatively secluded existence since Neolithic times in the Scottish islands, his father's genetic inheritance points to a trail of men drifting across Eastern Europe. And hence the warning that there's no really such thing as a discreet identity on this sceptered isle.

Anyway, whatever anyone else thinks about the pomp and pomposity of Wills and Kate's big day, it has been a real pleasure to experience the concomitant coming together first hand in London.

Revolutions rarely do away with healthy institutions. In almost all the cases I have studied, the ancien regime had come to the end of its particular line both politically and economically before the crowds emerged to deliver the coup-de-grace. It strikes me that most modern westerners, should it fall to them to participate in one of those rare 'clean-sheet' moments of history, are unlikely to include a monarchy in their new constitution. So, on paper at least, many of us Brits are indeed republicans, and yet remain convinced that the monarchy, even when populated with oddball and even vaguely unsavory characters, is the very spine of our history and the only real excuse we have for waving the flag.

The world gone bananas...again

The quake and tsunami in Japan last week left me shocked and saddened, but the subsequent focus by the western media on the nuclear incident to the exclusion of almost all other stories has made me properly angry. How much easier it was for them to film foreigners queueing up to leave the country at Narita International, than tackle the issues facing the locals who have no choice but to remain: such as humanitarian aid and social reconstruction?

It's clear that in today's world, there are few institutions that anyone is willing to trust and that right at the bottom of the trust pile sit politicians and scientists. (Ok, maybe bankers and oil company executives are in the mix too.) You might think there's good reason for this, but consider also that they have less of an clear-cut commercial incentive to manipulate us than the 24-hour media outlets.

We may not trust them all that much either, but they have enough of a trust advantage over officialdom to make it worth exploiting — for in spite of the fact that we keep on falling for their scare stories (Mexican flu...), it's still so much easier for us to believe that experts, elected officials and corporate spokesmen are deliberately keeping us in the dark, than it is to wise up to the fact that the global media have been conspiring to keep us all shit scared.

In this case the scientists were out there with real information from quite early on, but the news channels chose to ask oncologists in a different part of the world — or even their weather man — how the 'fall-out' from the Fukushima plant was likely to pan out.

In the west of England, where radon gas is emitted naturally, around 1000 extra cancer deaths occur as a result each year. Has the French government made plans to evacuate its citizens from Exeter? Non.

It's difficult to be sure how many people have died from radiation-related causes since the melt-down at Chernobyl in 1986; I've seen estimates ranging from 1000-9000, but whatever the actual total, it's considerably less than the 25,000 we can assume have died in the same period in Devon and Cornwall.

And if we are to trust the scientific experts just a little bit, the reactor at Fukushima simply cannot experience the same sort of catastrophic radioactive emission as that which occurred at the Soviet plant, and come what may, the particles emitted in the steam won't pose a threat to the population of Tokyo.

I'm currently getting more radiation from the 4 or 5 bananas I eat every day than anybody in the exclusion zone around Fukushima. And yet yesterday I watched a Mexican news piece on how salt was selling out across China and you just knew that a given proportion of viewers would respond immediately by rushing out to buy some salt.

You'd think that the big worry to emerge from this whole appalling disaster would not be whether nuclear fuel is safe in the long term, but what would happen if a quake of that magnitude were to take place directly in front of the bay of Tokyo where 36m people live.

Wednesday was the most irritating day to watch either CNN or BBC World. All told nothing significant happened, either in Japan or Libya, and so the 'Breaking News' mood became rather strained and the speculations rather flimsy. Highly paid reporters who must have been starting to feel a bit like the cast of Two and a Half Men over in North Africa, were briefly allowed back on our screens to report on the slow advance of Gaddafi's forces on Benghazi.

But back in Japan Emperor Akihito showed up on TV, an event that we were duly informed was 'rare', which apparently meant that we were to draw the direst conclusions from it. The New York Times led the way that day in imputing the whole mess to something endemic in the Japanese/Asian way of political leadership; warnings unheeded, information distorted, actions delayed — clearly expecting us to have forgotten both Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon blow-out.

One also has to suspect that organisations like the Guardian and the BBC are to a significant extent staffed by people who like to revel in stoking up emotive narratives which cause massive commercial damage to everyone except themselves.

Now, forget everything I just said and answer me this: why are the senior members of the Japanese government all starting to dress in ugly blue boiler suits? Could it be that they're just about to take refuge in their secret underground bunker? Either that or the tsunami washed up a paca-style container full of old M&S clothes which had been floating around the Pacific for ages like all those rubber ducks .

Hysteria alert

"2.51pm (11.51pm JST): The main focus on this new blog so far has been on the nuclear situation, which is in some ways understandable as it's the most fast-moving and unpredictable element of the story, four days after the main quake and tsunami. But it's worth reiterating – as I tried to in this morning's blog – that a far greater humanitarian crisis remains."

Perhaps surprisingly, of the western media sources I have been following, the Guardian has been the most irresponsible in stoking up anxieties surrounding the Japanese nuclear incident with repeated use of emotive terms like meltdown and catastrophe. If this was all going on across the channel in France I suspect they would tone down the red alert hysteria and take a bit more time to present real, qualified information.

But then perhaps I ought not to be that surprised, because they do seem to revel in the chaos such reportage appears to cause in the world's financial markets.

There's something almost apologetic in the (above) post made earlier this morning, as a rather belated attempt is made to redirect at least part of our attention back to the humanitarian issues.

With the western news media in a flurry of nervous energy, which might in part be attributable to the sense that their two month-long breaking news stint might be about to flag a little, and the Japanese media inherently more vague and reluctant to either inflame or attribute blame, it's hardly surprising how many confused and worried people there are right now in Japan and beyond.

The Live Blog format for online news has many positives. Whereas CNN or Fox can only present highly edited versions of amateur video clips, a journalist presenting footage garnered from various social media sources can leave it to the reader to decide whether to 'invest' in the full version.

The best of the live-blogging hacks have access via their own contacts and networks to so much more (and more varied) information than the rather paltry collection of 'experts' that a 24-news channel appears able to rustle up at short notice. The BBC were relying yesterday on the suspect testimony of meteorologists for example in order to get a sense of how far and in which direction the 'fall-out' (again, not an ideal term) was likely to travel. The trouble is that the Japanese crisis live-blogger isn't watching a finite football match where the action is fairly continuous, and in many cases the inevitable lulls are being filled with either undigested rumour or fairly wild speculation.

Dude, my $800 tracksuit...

FOX News has been showing plenty of images of Japanese people behaving in a 'dignified' and 'civilised' manner in the face of almost unimaginably catastrophic conditions and in so many cases, personal tragedy. What you don't see so much of is raw footage like this, of spoiled Americans acting like complete dicks.

This lot obviously hadn't been in Japan long enough either to know that the first instinct of the locals in a disaster scenario is not in fact to steal one's shit, or to know what a tsunami warning siren sounds like. (I don't think it means leave your rooftop position and head down to street level immediately!)

"Cloverfield all over" it might have been, in which case capturing the moment so that future generations can enjoy the clips saved on the mobile phone retrieved out of one's cold, dead, hands, was a potentially selfless act...but it's probably a better idea to conserve battery power. One kid did however seem to think the situation through and judiciously held on to his banana throughout.

Finishing the job Reagan started...

David Cameron today became the first western leader to head out to Egypt in the hope of discovering who's actually in charge.

My father was based in Cairo back in 1946 and was following the coverage of the recent uprising somewhat avidly. He told me how he dated an A.T.S. girl stationed at a large British army barracks beside the Nile, which appears to have since been demolished to make way for the Nile Hilton.

The British were deeply unpopular in Egypt at the time and the atmosphere was, he reports, "always unpleasant" except when you were in a shop trying to buy something. Just about all the soldiers and soldier-ettes posted out there had heard one possibly apocryphal story relating to that particular barracks: one night two squadies were attempting to return to base quite late in a taxi and had the misfortune to show up outside the gates just as a fairly ugly political demonstration was passing. The Egyptians turned on the British soldiers and began to assault their vehicle in an attempt to extract them. The sentries behind the gates stood and watched, because they had no authority on the other side and no instructions to intervene in such circumstances. Suddenly a young A.T.S. girl emerged from the barracks, picked up a sten gun and fired indiscriminately into the crowd. The two soldiers were saved, several Egyptians died...and there is no word in this tale on the fate of the taxi driver.

Meanwhile, it looks like Gaddafi is bombing his own capital, Pinochet-style. Let's hope this doesn't work out for him. (Some of his pilots are rumoured to be defecting to Malta...)

I remember once having to refuse to work on a brief from an organisation operating within the Libyan government aparatus. I called up the colleague who had emailed it me and explained my reasons — partially rehabilitated or not, Gaddafi is an odious turd and I missed the Lockerbie bombing by 24 hours. In fact the plane I was on had the other half of the ill-fated group of students from Syracuse, who were flying home a day earlier.

Had I read the brief, she asked, because this development body was not in fact part of the regime. I had read it, I replied, and had understood that the general gyst of it was to convince people around the world that said organisation had nothing to do with Gaddafi — a notion which had clearly already taken hold spontaneously in the mind of my colleague without much in the way of budget being spent on it.

*That said, I remain convinced that it was more probably the Iranians and Syrians who brought down the Pan-Am 747 and that the blame was shifted to Megrahi for rather cynical 'diplomatic' reasons. I also believe that Amanda Knox is innocent (of knifing her friend at least), but do not generally subscribe to conspiracy theories!

Dudes get nailed in Brooklyn

'I'm so outta here'

Taiwan TV has animated the story (standard version at least).

Ultimo Encierro

The World Cup went and left a hole in the daily routine that neither the cycling nor the golf was ever going to fill.

We stuck with the latter until it came a bit processional on the final day. D couldn't believe the size of the bunkers at St Andrews. My father has played the old course on a few occasions and swears that at times he doubted he'd get out the sand traps himself, let alone the ball!

For a couple of days after the final whistle in Johannesburg however, we still had those bizarre goings on over in Pamplona, televised by TVe, a 'sporting' event with some semblance to a public catastrophe. In the US they call out the National Guard for less, though thanks to Hemingway Los Sanfermines remain resiliently popular with American travellers, many of whom fork out over one hundred Euros for a balcony package including a share of a view of the mayhem and assorted Navarrense snacks.

The last of the encierros (see clip above) was expected to provide an appropriately danger-laden send off for the festival. And sure enough, the final tally was five hospitalisations, three from gorings. The caramel-coloured bull in the video brought up the rear and for a while refused to follow his mates (and most of the mozos) into the arena before adding to the injury tally. The back-up plan of the organisers seems to be to send in some chaps with rolled up newspaper to whack the bull on the backside in the hope that it will thus recover its forward momentum. For a while we had our doubts that this would work...

Volcano exiles

The volcano whose name* no news anchor from Shepherd's Bush to Bogotá dares to pronounce, has been causing levels of disruption previously only seen in the wettest dreams of Osama Bin Laden.

The airlines' loss is surely the environment's gain. Hoteliers and car rental firms across Eurasia have also been rubbing their hands in glee. But how long before the wider British public start to rebel because they can't find any bananas at Tesco?

Today the Royal Navy rescued 500 troops and 200 civilians from Santander. Not exactly Dunkirk, but that hasn't stopped the media making the comparison.

Scientists have rushed - some might say precipitously - to blame the persistence of this Icelandic ash cloud on global warming. The trouble, they insist, is a 'blocking event' whereby the westerly jet stream is forced to slow down by a high pressure system. Once this most important of Atlantic wind systems has started to 'meander', north easterlies rush in to fill the gap. It also doesn't help that solar activity is also 'ramping down' after 300 years at the max.

Anyway, as we approach a seventh day of closed airspaces, dissident voices from within the pool of experts would also appear to be ramping up — voices whose informed opinion more closely equates the wishful thinking of airlines losing £25m every 24 hours.

So far this highly unusual phenomenon has had the equally abnormal distinguishing feature of being nobody's fault, but that may soon change because the UK's (one can hope) outgoing administration's response to airline demands for 9-11-style compensation has been along the lines of 'ok then, fly at your own risk.'

'Volcano Exile' is a new moniker being bandied about on the airwaves, though we're as yet uncertain whether it refers to stranded passengers or to all those news reporters forced to stand pointlessly outside Europe's airports.

The BBC's Mishal Husain appears to have copped the worst deal in this respect, as her posting doesn't appear to be anywhere near an actual terminal. (In fact it looks a bit like a car park beside the A4 with a rather distant view of BA wide-bodied jets poking out of their hangars.)

She may not be anywhere near a Starbucks, but the experience does however seem to be curing her of that incessantly sleepy-eyed look of hers — back in the days when she co-fronted Breakfast she made me want to go straight back to bed.

Meanwhile, the ever irrational Fox News has been struggling to make this story relevant to their regular viewers.

Here in Guatemala we have anything up to 36 volcanoes (the Internet isn't very clear on the matter), many of them active, and indeed one of the grumpiest of all positioned directly over the southern approach to Aurora International airport.

Less disruptive perhaps, but certainly more deadly, this week our very own Pacaya claimed the lives of two members of one of those astoundingly stupid tourist groups that regularly ascend its slopes in order to brave both landslides and molten rock showers.

*All together now.... Eyjafjallajokull.

(The media seem strangely reluctant to even PRINT the name of the volcano as if the difficulty that journalists have with it has extened to their fingers.)

UPDATE: This morning the BBC's Nick Gowing was seen standing inside a jet engine (in front of the main fan)....perhaps an improvement on the rest of Frankfurt airport, but somewhat hazardous nonetheless.

Suffer little children to come unto me

Pope Benedict XVI has been getting the full Bill Clinton treatment this week, following the Vatican's failure to ring-fence (as my former colleagues in the PR industry like to say) the sordid revelations emanating from the Irish branch of the universal church. 

Actually, one could say that the former Archbishop Ratzinger's level of personal guilt here amounts to even less of a clear-cut sackable offence than Ronald's Reagan's definitive deniability in the Iran-Contra scandal. God knows I never read every memo I was CC'd in on! 

But this hasn't stopped regular cassock-baiter Christopher Hitchens from going on the Bill Maher show in order to call for the Pontiff's arrest under US law. (26 States currently include members of the clergy among those professionals specifically mandated by law to report known or suspected instances of child abuse or neglect.)

Perhaps the only man in the whole world who would dare to indict the Pope, has himself been suffering some serious reputation damage this week, with a real possibility of career-threatening legal consequences.

Spain's super-juez Baltasar Garzón has been accused of wantonly acting outside his jurisdiction. When I heard this my first thought was, why has it taken the Spanish authorities so long to react to something that us anglophones cottoned onto the moment Garzón started issuing arrest warrants for the likes of Osama Bin Laden and a large part of Latin America's class of retired dictators.? (Starting most notoriously of course, with Pinochet.)
 

The irony here is that the judge has been pulled over now for abusing his authority in the one area you'd think could actually be said to fall within his remit: a probe into atrocities carried out during Spain's own civil war. 

In other news, the government of El Salvador officially apologised to the rest of the world this week for murdering their own Archbishop back in 1980, and I spotted a big poster for Gerardi, La Película on the way into the capital. Does any one know which version of the events surrounding the bishop's bludgeoning (if any) this new film alludes to? (i.e. Goldman's or  Vargas Llosa's.) 

You heard it here first

Last Wednesday I submitted a contribution to the Commetric blog referring to the still simmering story of Jim Sikes and his runaway Prius, which hinted at my fears that there might be something a bit Jimmy Hill about this incident...if you get the drift of my hot air balloon.

Now it seems that Federal investigators are concerned about "a particular pattern of wear on the car's brakes that raises questions about the driver's version of the event."

Scam or not, at least they should book him for using a mobile phone while driving on the freeway. But maybe that's not illegal in California?

A report from forensics

While I was in the UK in January I had lunch with a geologist who did his best to persuade me that the notion that the dinosaurs were seriously compromised by a meteor strike is one of those paradigms which emerges and quickly ossifies into an orthodoxy which nobody (but him apparently) is willing to challenge. He'd been to the Yucatán on a field trip and reported finding no conclusive evidence of a large crater there either.

Well this week the consensus against his renegade opinion took a firmer hold on the subject when, at 41st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in the US, a panel of 41 international experts reviewed 20 years' worth of research to determine the cause of the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, and concluded that the prime suspect has to remain a massive asteroid or comet smashing into Earth at Chicxulub on the Yucatán peninsula 65m years ago. You can read the BBC's report here...

Meros orgullosos

Listening to the various representatives of the Chilean government speaking in the aftermath of Sunday's earthquake, you'd think it was their primary concern was to ensure that it occurs to nobody in the wider world to compare them with Haiti.

It's like watching a cyclist come of his bike in the park and land face first on the concrete. He stands up with an obviously bloodied face and when you go over and offer to help he says something like "No, I'm fine really...it's just a scratch, I've been practicing my emergency face forward dismounts. It wasn't as bad as it looked at all....not at all like that poor black guy who crashed into a tree a while ago....did you see him? Boy did he look messed up..."

Meanwhile it's only a matter of time before some desperate mother searching for nappies for her kids in Concepción gets blown away by one of those gun-toting householders local news crews have become fascinated with.

NASA has reported that the monster quake threw the Earth's rotation out by 8cm, which means that Sunday was a slightly shorter day than it had planned on being. Does this mean they'll have to reset that atomic clock in Greenwich?

The image below shows how the quake's tsunami energy dissipated across the Pacific, giving one a clear idea how both Japan and Australasia 'dodged the bullet' last weekend.

"Reina de Inglaterra, a ti te hablo"

Latin America's heads of state are meeting today - in Cancún of all places - to discuss how they can reduce the influence of the USA in the hemisphere. It seems that the basic idea is to create a new playgroup from which the Yanks and Canucks can be excluded, thereby reproducing the gratifying sensation of hurting their feelings.

Meanwhile Chávez made one of his little speeches yesterday directed at H.M. the Queen no less, tuteandola and insisting that las cosas han cambiado, such that this time Argentina won't stand alone. He was of course referring to the possibility of a retro-style war between the UK and the Argies, who might just be tempted into another ill-considered act of aggression against the English-speaking, right-hand driving Falkland islanders, now that a British firm has commenced drilling for oil in the waters around Las Malvinas.

No matter that Argentina's claim over the islands is as credible as Guatemala's over Belize.

King Juan Carlos and his missus Sofia were also treated to a bit of ad hoc disrespect this weekend just before the start of the basketball Copa del Rey when spectators in the Bizkaia Arena in Bilbao chanted 'fuera! fuera!' at them during the singing of the Spanish national anthem.

Winter Olympics

It's another lovely cloudless morning here in Antigua, but the temperature has dipped noticeably, perhaps so that we might get ourselves more in the mood for watching coverage of Vancouver 2010 this afternoon.

No Central or South American nation has ever won a medal at the Winter Games, though you'd think the Argies were overdue one. Consequently, the interest on local terrestrial TV is rather more limited than say during the Mundial. (Come June we can expect the whole country to come to a virtual standstill for a month.)

We tracked the parade of nations on Saturday, hoping (against all hope) to spot a Guatemalan delegation. "No llegaron, ni para vender granizadas," noted V acerbically once we'd hit the Hs.

Mexico has sent a lone athlete however: Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe, at 51 the oldest competitor in Vancouver. He's the son of Prince Alfonso, legendary founder of the Marbella Club, and has been known to release pop albums in Mexico under the pseudonym of Andy Himalaya.

Although here representing Mexico, the blue-blooded alpine skier resides in Liechtenstein, a tiny place that doesn't seem to need his help in winning medals at the Winter Olympics. From the stats displayed by NBC I gathered that you could fit the entire populations of Liechtenstein, Monaco and Antigua Guatemala into Wembley Stadium and still have room left over for everyone who's read the novels of last year's Nobel prize-winner Herta Müller.

Poor Georgia. They've acquired the knack of earning themselves the greatest sympathy applause the last couple of times that the Olympians have paraded.

The Innuit put in an appearance too, along with other indigenous contingents which collectively danced a joyous welcome to the world around the strangely zombie-like totems pictured above. Oddly enough, in spite of choosing to live in the frozen northern wastes, the Innuit's greatest contribution to the Olympic movement would appear to have been the kayak, more likely to be seen in competition at the Summer Games, though I imagine you could get down a mountain quite fast in one.

While I enjoy the Downhill (though I don't know why. I think it has to do with childhood memories of Franz Klammer's wild rides) V enjoys the skating. China's married pair Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo deservedly claimed Gold in an event where the line between mediocrity and sublimity is starker than the scoring suggests.

I'll be in Vancouver for a couple of days in May, my maiden visit to Canada, by which time it will have warmed up a bit...one hopes.

This week we've also tuned into TV Globo's extensive coverage of the Rio Carnival. How can so much fun make such tedious viewing? It would be more entertaining to spend several hours watching English people tossing pancakes (...or cross country skiing for that matter.)

Anyway, a Lenten afternoon on the sofa beckons. Speaking of which, something I read earlier reminded me of the famous put-down delivered by the late, great Alan Clark, Minister in Thatcher's last government, who dismissed her nemesis Michael Heseltine as the sort of man who "bought his own furniture".

It is true that if there is one thing that is sadly lacking in La Antigua it's an IKEA superstore. But for anyone willing to venture into the badlands of Guatemala City there's plenty of mass-produced, but 'designer' furniture to be had at the likes of Sears and Siman.

A friend bought me a copy of Stuff White People Like for Christmas, the dead tree version of the hilarious blog by Christian Landers. It's had me chuckling self-consciously on numerous occasions over the past few days, not least with No54: Kitchen Gadgets. Plenty of those at Siman too. I'm glad it's over 30 minutes away really.

El niño terrible para Presidente

One small but significant change that occurred in this household during my absence was a re-jigging of the evening TV viewing schedules around the 9pm Bayly show on NTN24.

V has always been drawn to public figures with starkly unconventional outlooks on the world. That the Hispanic media consistently refer to this bisexual, right-of-centre novelist* and political commentator as "strange" was good enough for her in this instance.

These days Bayly is using his current affairs celebrity to launch his candidature for the Presidency of Peru next year. Last night's show was dedicated to an interview he conducted with his novia, Silvia Nuñez del Arco Vidal, a would-be writer just out of college, now being offered up to the nation as their future first lady.

Golden-haired, fair skinned Silvia is "una delicia" who has cured him of his impotence, the 45-year-old Bayly admitted during their discussion. It struck me that the whole thing had been staged primarily in order to cause her father the most exquisite form of paternal pain.

When the couple recently went to Miami on holiday to catch a Ricardo Arjona concert, Bayly was briefly held by police after their hotel manager reported that he'd checked in with an under-age girl.

Silvia has a book in the oven and has therefore resisted Bayly's plea that she should have a bun in it. "Writing a novel is like giving birth..." Hers is due in April, but I suspect Vargas Loser needn't lose any sleep over the impending competition. Nor perhaps need he fret about this other upper-class hack achieving the political milestone he fell just short of, as Bayly is the sort of character who tends to get up the noses of dirt poor indios and the Miraflores set in equal measure.

He is at his funniest when he deconstructs the speeches of Hugo Chávez. The other night the arch-clown announced a series of measures to limit the use of electricity in Venezuela, which he blamed on el Niño! (...but not el niño terrible! ). These were encased in so many layers of bureaucratic conditionals that even Chávez faltered as he tried to explain them and had to keep re-reading from his notes. The people of Venezuela are going to be thrown into a permanent state of domestic paranoia over their utility bills, the Bolivarian leader's regular tormentor suggested.

Bayly is a bit like a Latin American Charlie Brooker, but he could learn a thing or two from the latter about brevity and not over-labouring his best gags. V and I have agreed you could improve his nightly show immensely simply by giving him a slot half the size at 30 minutes.

Here's Bayly on Hugo's performance in Copenhagen:



And here's Charlie Brooker on US News Networks:



* Jaime Bayly wrote La Mujer de mi Hermano and other works with homsexual/bisexual themes, such as the semi-autobiographical No Se Lo Digas a Nadie.

Tallest

Yesterday's grand opening of the hastily re-christened (re-mohammeded?) Burj Khalifa in Dubai involved a truly spectactular display of luces: