Eurovision: Big Brother envy

My wife likes to watch Spain's version of "Big Brother," "Gran Hermano." I don't care for it. Maybe it's because I don't understand it. Put maybe a dozen overly-handsome and beautiful people -- with a pair of ugly ducklings for fairness -- in a house, isolated from the exterior world, and hope for public television porn... or at least some good cat fights. Isn't there something better to do than watch twenty-somethings lounge on bean-bag cushions, bored and with nothing better to do than gripe about what one house mate did or did not do, say or did not say?

The "Big Brother" experience should be chalked up as cruel and inhuman according to the Geneva Convention. There is one thing I envy about the program: for so many weeks, a contestant has no idea what's happening in the world.

Here's a recap: the president of Iran spoke in New York and according to which side you are on he came out of it as a lunatic or a hero. This much came out of it: he has no desire to build nuclear weapons and there are no homosexuals in Iran. Excuse me as I try to hide the string of obscenities behind this exaggerated fake cough.

In Myanmar, thousands of Buddhist monks are protesting the military regime that has dominated the country since the 1960s. Police and the military have fired on the peaceful masses. Myanmar is one of those places most people never heard of until something big happens. In about a week the reporters will have left to chase the next big story, and it will return to being a place we've never heard of. There's the real tragedy.

Closer to home -- for me, anyway -- the Spanish royal family is under siege, and the integrity of the Spanish state is under threat of secession. That's what the media has led us to believe. It's good to criticize government institutions, especially ones that have little purpose and receive a good-sized chuck of social security as income. Catalonia separatists burned photos of the monarch. After police arrested the culprits, separatists burned more photos. Spain's monarch said the burnings are not against him, but against the nation's unity. He's on to something. Catalonia's leadership hope to make independence a referendum issue at the end of this year. I can already hear the propaganda -- and the terrorist group ETA -- clamoring in the Basque region.

Scarier still is the pending release of Julian Mu±oz from a prison in Jaen. Mu±oz was mayor of the luxurious retreat Marbella and faces more than 100 charges of corruption, money laundering and zoning violations. He is more famous for being romantically linked to singer Isabel Pantoja, who has also been brought up on money laundering charges. Mu±oz is currently serving a lengthy sentence. His jail stint has been marred -- and ridiculed -- by health problems, several stays in the hospital and a self-imposed, unexplained hunger strike that lasted all of four days. Mu±oz, though, won't breathe free air anytime soon. He still faces 99 more trials and the judge has not granted bail for any of the other charges.

Even scarier still, the village of Iznalloz and the Barcelona community of Vall d'Hebron are living in a state of fear thanks to the joke that is the Spanish judicial system. Jose Rodr?guez Salvador, better known as the Rapist of Vall d'Hebron, benefited from an early jail release. He served 16 of a 311-year prison sentence for the rape of 40 women in Barcelona between the summer of 1990 and the spring of 1991. The courts will go after magazines for printing satirical cartoons of members of the royal family having sex, but they will let the true terrorists go free.

I wonder if the "Big Brother" people can have a bean-bag chair ready for me.