Notes On Eating Nature In The Canary Islands

The blackberries that choke the roadsides, the bountiful figs trees, even the jaramaga weeds that formed the basis of famine potaje, are aliens. As for edible natives: A few mushrooms, the tiny fruit of the strawberry tree, and faint patches of samphire clinging to the lava. Nature in the Canary Islands is barren, at least from the stomach’s point of view.

The olive and the date palm, the sustainers of life in our two parent continents, thrive here only at the expense of their tasty bits. The wild Canarian olive yields bitter, inedible fruits. The date palm morphed over millennia into a great pineapple of a tree; beautiful maybe, but Canary palm dates are so small that only the blackbirds bother with them.

Catholicism Meets the Internet

Mamá is a virgin, heaven is reserved for the pure and you must not be gay. Homosexuality and Catholicism, even of the lapsed variety, mix like oil and water.

Years of guilty masturbation while mother sleeps next door dreaming of weddings. The only logical outcome is the transvestite. A man on sale with extras! Big boobs and a pair of dangling balls, a waxed ass to be used. Catholic men wearing wedding rings ride them like ponies all over the city. Pound out the lust, thrust away the guilt. Zip it up and go home.

Carpe Diem Spain

Logic, economics and poverty be damned! In Mariano Rayoy the Spanish elected the only man in the country too stubborn to blink. What nobody knows, because he won’t speak, is whether he is a Machiavellian genius or a weakling too indecisive to act. Everyone suspects the latter. Either way, his fate is sealed now. He is either the man who faced down the Germans or the mouse that ruined Spain forever.

  Despite the headlines Spain is still standing. Bloodied and maybe with a bit more sympathy for its fighting bulls than before la crisis, but standing nonetheless. While the troika mutters away on the sidelines it knows that Spain cannot fall. It is the wonky pillar that props up the euro.