We Are The Robots

The Calle Bot in Puerto Pollensa. So bad they named it after someone's arse. But that was then. Back then when a local road was still an ankle- and axel-breaking adventure, when it was pitted and potted, cratered and crumbling, not so much a road as the aftermath of a cluster-bomb attack, a lunar landscape to be tackled preferably by amphibious landing craft, especially when it had rained and the craters would become sealets of untranquillity dived into by several tons of truck and engulfing the unwary passer-by in a tsunami of water, sand and shit. Oh my Bot of long ago.

Here was the finest example of non-road, a thorough thoroughfare misrepresentation, a whole collection of holes. Magnificently decrepit, it was perfect in its symbolism of an imperfectly functioning system that was once what we knew to be Mallorca. Not anymore. Firstly they tarmacked it over, took away the traps, the obstacles, made it smooth, a soulless short cut-through past the Pollensa Park where previously had been the joy ride of joyous swerving past collapsed whatever passed for the surface. Yet they still maintained a two-way street where barely one street could be accommodated. All those failed manoeuvres past the parked delivery lorries in the hope of a pull-in point, only to find none and to be confronted by the leviathan of a coach and a terminally impatient driver waving with the back of his hand as though he was swatting away a fly. And to your rear an hombre de furgoneta blanca, himself backed up by a growing jam of vehicles. Oh my Bot of less long ago, a van driver hooting up the backside.

But now they have made it one way. The bottom has fallen out of Calle Bot. When two-way at least it was still a case of number two's. Now but one in Bot. They should re-name it.


Nadal's chest
The muscle is back, and is displaying more muscle than normal. Rafael Nadal is to appear in a new promotional campaign aboard a yacht, the wind blowing his hair and his "torso desnudo", it says provocatively in a "Diario" report. That doesn't mean he's got his kit off, but has forgotten to button up his shirt. To coincide with the World Travel Market in November, the new, windswept Rafa will further be the face and now also the chest of Balearics promotion. By the time they get to the third promotional campaign (this new one will be the second), perhaps he'll be in speedos. Something for somebody to enjoy no doubt. What effect all this Nadal-ing has on the masses coming to the islands one doesn't really know. It would still surely make more sense to have promotions for the individual islands. The Balearics just do not hack it as a "brand". Any brand should be supported by the right advertising. Get him to advertise Mallorca and leave it at that, kit diminuto or otherwise.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Barbra Streisand, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-KPGh3wysw. Today's title - well a bot is also of course short for robot, and as I couldn't think of something to do with ...

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