Year: 2023

A reflection, a Latin Mass, and a dream A reflection Today is Easter. I am here in Barcelona, or rather in a smaller place in the coast near Barcelona. It is sunny and warm enough, around 20 degrees Celsius. In fact, too sunny. It seems it hasn’t rained in Catalonia for several weeks or perhaps…

A tale of contrasting stereotypes There are at least two Europes: Northern Europe, and Southern Europe. (Maybe three, counting Eastern Europe, which is also a different universe altogether, but not one that I am very familiar with.) So, here, I will talk only about the North and the South. I’m fascinated by the Northern European…

And now for something completely different I don’t like so much to write about politics. It feels a bit dirty, and it gets old very fast. In the long run, it is not so important as it seems at first. In general, I prefer to discuss deeper cultural, historical and social issues, or really, just…

Finland joins the new Cold War The good news is that prime minister Sanna Marin was voted out. The bad news is that it doesn’t matter, because, after decades of neutrality even during the Cold War, Finland has joined NATO.  I don’t even know who’s the new Finnish prime minister, but I’m glad that Sanna…

Trying to understand what is going on It seems that just the other day it was the “Transgender Day of Visibility”. Honestly, I wish there was a “Transgender Day of Invisibility” instead, because it seems it’s the only thing we hear about these days. It has become a weird obsession, and something that I must…

Censorship in the age of media unreality Last week, former U.S. president Donald Trump was indicted and may be arrested for a crime, but the curious thing is that it is a crime that no one seems to be able to understand or explain. The media keeps saying it is related to “hush money” paid…

As I start writing this, I am in a high-speed train crossing Europe at 238 km/h. I love trains. Why? I don’t really know. Going up the clouds is nice too, but in general planes are too cramped and give me a sense of claustrophobia, plus there’s the whole security at the airport thing and…

Another chapter in a depressing saga Murder, she wrote — and they rewrote it. “Sensitivity readers” strike again. This time the victim was Agatha Christie. It appears that they removed all mentions to skin colour, race and other physical characteristics from her novels, published by Harper Collins, one of the “Big Five” who, as I…

How would a world ruled by China be? Winston Churchill once famously said that the intentions of (then Soviet) Russia were “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”. Nowadays their intentions are not so mysterious. You may agree or disagree with them, and I suspect most people in the West today will disagree,…

The tough life behind the screen, from directors to child actors The other time I wrote about indie film director Hal Hartley, who was a rising star in the 1990s. So I did a research on his current thereabouts. His apogee seems to have been winning the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes with “Henry Fool”…