Jack Soifer
Congrats mayors Isilda, Rosa and Rui! In 2018 the fire in Monchique started on August 3rd, ended on August 10th. The action of firefighters was hampered by strong and changing winds, predicted by IPMA; also by difficult access by land. The fire resulted in 41 injuries, out of which 22 firefighters, and consumed 26,885 ha of forests in Silves, Odemira, Portimão and Monchique. It burned 62 homes of 1stdwelling, 49 of the 2nd, and killed 5,600 animals.
My Primary 7 schoolteacher, Miss Macduff, had a smile that could make a drowning man decide to wave. She often told her pupils that almost anything could be solved by a smile, although that didn't seem to apply to me and mathematics.
Most of us want things we know to be impossible. And yet the most common dreams allegedly involve one's teeth falling out, flying through the sky, and being chased or hunted. Were I a dream interpreter, I would say you wish you could afford a foreign holiday but are being pursued by a dentist waving an unpaid bill. He clearly wants a foreign holiday as well.
Cassandra, remember her, a soothsayer who actually told the sooth? The only trouble was, no one listened to her, because she was a Greek - no, wait till the end of the sentence - a Greek priestess cursed by Apollo the Sun-god. (Those sun gods, eh?) So nobody ever paid any attention to Cassandra's prophecies even though they all came true eventually. She was a sybil who was never faulty. 
I may be mistaken - you're nodding already - but I can't help feeling the world has taken a wrong turn at some point. We've all done it, even satnavs aren't perfect, perhaps we would be as well using tom-toms, there's a joke there if you want it. 
Since the bingo raid at Almadena when armed police burst into a bar where they were playing the game and arrested everybody, bingo has stopped. All the clientele were fined 350 euros each, which they refused to pay. The money was finally paid when the police agreed they would give it to charity.
Every age brings forth great men. Scholars, painters, literary geniuses, musical virtuosos, inventors and newspaper journalists. (Incidentally, it's rude to laugh when someone is being serious.)
If laptops had come along earlier, I would have learned to compute at school and would not now be pecking at my keyboard with only one finger. 
