I’ve written before about the way Africa still functions for the news media as a “dark continent” of primitive savagery. So what a sad gift this headline was the other day in the New York Times: “Warming Leads to Water Shortage and ‘Africanization’ of Spain.”

I was getting all psyched up to write about this new symbolic use of Africa — intended by the article as a metonym for desertification, but suggestive of a whole host of fears of the foreign Other, such as the dangerous continent of Africa invading the shores of Spain, the gateway to Europe and Western Civilization — when I went to reread the article and discovered…the headline had been changed!

In the space of three days, somehow the word “Africanization” was dropped from the headline, and the article title now reads: “In Spain, Water is a New Battleground.”

So here I have another gift, another example of the seeming impermanence of new media coupled with the ubiquity of saved or cached data, which allows us to reveal the revisions that the online world feels no need to mention. In this case, the original headline is saved in my TimesFile.

On the one hand, I applaud the Times for yanking a word from their headline which plays upon European fears of African invasion. On the other hand, I wish the Times had made note of the revised headline, and perhaps even explained the reasons for the revision, rather than pretending like it had never happened.

If The Newspaper of Record is so fluid about its online presence, I think we need a new definition of what counts as a “record.”

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I’ve been experimenting with a good way to incorporate a dynamic Google Map into this blog, specifically one that plots key points in our travels in Spain. Don’t ask me why. I really don’t expect anybody to ever look at this thing, but I’ve been inspired by the possibilities of geomapping memories (see the Center for History and New Media’s September 11 Digital Archive map of “Ground Zero” to see the most evocative use of the same tools I’m using).

I’ve only charted one point so far, trying to test the map while I figure out how to have the map appear “live” on my front page (in this very space). But for now, the beta version is available at Google Mapping Spain.

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The Museo Reina Sofia is Spain’s modern art museum, and my son and I went there yesterday to see one thing and one thing only: Picasso’s Guernica, depicting the brutal aerial bombardment of the Basque city Guernica by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Showing the painting to my son was an antidote to our trip to the National Air and Space Museum in D.C in October.

Of course, an eighteen-month-old can’t be expected to have a sophisticated reaction to a powerful work of art about the monstrosities of the twentieth century.

But he comes close.

My son pointed at the mutilated bodies lying fallen on the ground and he said, “Uh-oh.” And then he made the hand sign for fall down.

Uh-oh is right.

I wonder if right now, somewhere in Falluja or Najaf, an aspiring artist is painting a successor to Guernica, honoring the 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed so far in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

If so, I hope my son sees that painting and is just as aware of suffering then as he is now.

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Two Old Women Eating from a Bowl, Goya
(Larger Image)
Posted to Flickr by samplereality.

Yesterday, while my wife was digging through national archives in Spain, my son and I went to the Prado, one of the great art museums of the world.

This was my third trip to the Prado, and every time, I make sure I visit a few key paintings. The Prado has, fittingly, the greatest collection of Goya work, and I am always haunted by his “black paintings.” His Saturn is enormously evocative, and I’ve referred to it before on SampleReality to talk about The Sopranos, of all things.

As long as you don’t use a flash, you may photograph the works in the Prado. I learned this the hard way, when I was almost thrown out a few years ago for accidentally using a flash on Velazquez’s Las Meninas.

So, with my son patiently watching from the stroller, I snapped a few shots, and you can see my Prado stream on Flickr.

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Niko and Quijote (Larger Image)
Posted to Flickr by samplereality.

Don Quijote was on our street again, much to my son’s delight. I snapped this photo as my son was dropping some change into the “statue’s” chute. Moments later, Don Quijote was galloping in place and my son was in awe.

I was surprised to find on Flickr, in addition to my own photos of this particular Don Quijote, another visitor to Madrid had taken some snapshots of the very same street performer, a few weeks earlier.

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Back from Spain, where, toward the end of our trip, our son celebrated his first birthday. What a difference a year makes! On the left is a picture we took in the hospital, two days after our son was born. On the right is our son, “calling” on the in-flight phone on our transatlantic journey from Spain, one year and a day later.

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Sorry, but it’s going to be hard to blog for a while. I’m in Madrid. Plenty of internet cafes around, but it’s not so easy to bring a 1-year old toddler along with me as I spend hours composing deep, reflective posts (yeah, right, that’s what my posts are). Plus, I don’t have any easy way to upload photographs, so I don’t even have any way to share good photos of the trip.

I’ll try to comment on anything interesting that happens, but until jet lag subsides, even that’s going to be a challenge.

For now you’ll have to content yourself with the knowledge that a 1-year old can produce mucho mucho vómito when airsickness strikes in the last ten minutes of a transatlantic flight.

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