Boy, I feel like an idiot after getting canonization and beatification mixed up. I should know better, and most of the time I do. About the only excuse I've got is that I'm not a pro journalist and so if I make a mistake, well, at least I'm not getting paid for it.

Gregg Easterbrook also put his foot in it, it seems; I read the offending statements the day they came out on his New Republic blog, before the big hoo-ha started, and I didn't think they were too offensive. I mean, if you want offensively anti-Semitic, look at what Andy Robinson wrote a few days ago in La Vanguardia--just scroll down. Or, if you want, you can go back a few months and find when Baltasar Porcel said that in the Williamsburg neighborhood of NYC was the greatest concentration of wealth in the world. Well, OK, Easterbrook apologized. That, to me, is good enough. I'm convinced he's not a bigot, since I've been reading his stuff for like fifteen years. So what do you do? Well, you give the guy a break. If he comes out standing next to Pat Buchanan at a Jew-baiting rally, then we boycott him. If, as I will bet, he never offends any ethnic group again, then we say, "OK, we questioned whether this guy was legit, he's turned out to be so. Good enough."

The dumb thing is that ESPN fired him and has pulled all his Tuesday Morning Quarterback articles off their archive. This little tempest in a teapot has nothing to do with ESPN or football or anything else, and one would think that ESPN's attitude would be, "The guy screwed up, mostly because he didn't take the time to express himself properly. He said he was sorry and means it. He's been with us a couple of years and has always been all right. What he said has nothing to do with ESPN or football. We will therefore suspend judgment and allow him to continue in his job. If he ever writes anything that seems anti-Semitic again, then we fire him."

The respective slogans the main political parties are using: PP, "Guarantee of Good Government"; Socialists, "New Solutions". Which party is on the left and which on the right? Not too difficult a question, I don't think. By the way, the Socialists' "new" slogan isn't new; it sounds eerily like Gary Hart in 1984.

Astronaut Pedro Duque got shot up in space by a Russian Soyuz, and he got out on the International Space Station. His function will consist of performing three experiments, two of which are related to observing fruit flies. The negative talk going around is that it cost Spain thirteen million euros to get Duque up on the Space Station and that it's just a prestige thing, and should we be spending money on hollow prestige? Duque went up on the Space Shuttle several years ago to become the first Spanish citizen in space; Michael Lopez-Alegria, born in Madrid of Spanish parents who emigrated to the States when he was about three, was the first person born in Spain in space sometime during the nineties. He, of course, is an American citizen.