The much-ballyhooed Forum of Cultures started on Saturday. This is going to be a major disaster of Millenium Dome proportions.

The original idea, see, several years ago, was that Barcelona had made a major jump in 1992; the Olympic Games provided the impetus (and government funding) for major improvements; among other things, they fixed some of the sewers, built a loop around the city, fixed up Montjuic, built the Villa Olimpica, thousands of slapped-together jerry-rigged apartment buildings that are falling apart, and a good few other things. In addition, Barcelona, a heretofore distinctly minor-league city, became fairly well-known around the world; it began to impinge upon people's consciousness.

So what the city fathers decided to do was have another one. The problem was that there wasn't any other major event they could get. So they decided to make up their own, and since they're a bunch of crypto-leftists, it had to have something to do with sustainableness and participitorihood and multiculturalistaism and that kind of thing. However, since most of them are more crypto- than -leftists, they got corporate sponsorship from several dumb companies. Embarrassingly, one of them is an arms manufacturer, giving some real hardcore non-crypto-leftists an excuse to boycott the Forum. And, don't forget, the real motivation behind the whole thing is to give a shot in the arm to urban development, building several major structures as part of the fiesta.

But absolutely nobody gives a crap. In yesterday's Vanguardia, the headline is "The Forum kicks off without agglomerations". 16,000 went to the Forum on Opening Day, Saturday, when, like, the King was there and all. (This gave the Cataloonies an excuse to start an argument over whether the Spanish flag should fly and the Spanish anthem be played. The Solomonic decision was to fly the flag and skip the anthem.) That same day 40,000 people went to the stadium on Montjuic to see Espanyol play Deportivo de la Coruña. 108,000 went to the racetrack at Montmeló to see the Formula One race. Probably at least 50,000 people went to the Feria de Abril, a horrible rednecky imitation of the real Feria de Abril in Sevilla.

On Sunday, when it rained, only 6000 people showed up.

Problems: They didn't successfully fix the sewers down in the rather run-down part of town where they built all the Forum buildings, so it smells.

They won't let you bring in your own food and drinks, and everything's expensive and the service is lousy.

If you leave, they won't let you back in the same day.

There's not enough information about what's happening.

To meet their expectations--the goal is five million people--, an average of 35,000 people will have to visit every day.

Oh, by the way, in case you're wondering, the total budget for this thingie is 2.8 billion euros, of which 736 million come from the city and provincial governments, 232,000,000 from the Generalitat, the regional government, 139,000,000 from the Spanish government and the EU, 82,000,000 from the local universities, and a whopping 1.671 billion from private companies.

Look. Here's why nobody wants to come. Tickets are like twenty bucks a day and you have to pay their prices for food and drinks. And here's the offer:

The French group Les Grooms dress up and play orchestral music on popular street instruments.

Oulad Sidi Hmad ou Moussa Acrobats from Morocco.

"The French group Cavaluna combine theater and flamenco in a reacreation on stilts of "Bodas de Sangre" by Federico Garcia Lorca in which the audience becomes the author."

The Indian group Apostrophe 99 presents a small repertoire of the extraordinary diversity of Indian arts and cultures.

Storytelling with Tim Bowley from Great Britain and Casilda Reguiero from Galicia.

"Frozen Tongues: An Andalusian dance company made up of dancers with mental discapacities."

Orquesta Baobab: A Senegalese music group with influences from Cuba and Puerto Rico.

Voices: "...diversity...celebrate...human communication...linguistic and cultural diversity...individual and collective freedom...necessary dialogue between diverse cultures...commitment...equality...plurality."

The Memory Tree: "...living manifesto...by the group Comediants (right there is all you need to know to make you flee screaming in terror, shock, and awe toward the exits)...sustainability...defense of the environment...the discovery of a tree, a universal symbol that represents life and fertility...the tree becomes a structure full of magic...at the end, a member of an entity of citizens will plant a tree typical of the Mediterranean and expresses a wish which will be hung on the Memory Tree."

The Giant of the Seven Seas: "...so that we will reflect on the degradation of the sea..."

Higroma: "with the objective of reflecting on our environment...the aggressive effects of human development on the natural environment...relativising the supremacy of the human species in the natural balance in favor of peace and cooperation."

Warriors from Xian: Somehow they got some of the terracotta soldiers from the Emperor's tomb at Xian.

Now, I am willing to pay money to see the Chinese terracotta soldiers. That should be really interesting, and I'll bet they've got a good, informative setup explaining their history and all. And the Baobab Orquesta sounds like it plays some pretty funky rhythms; that's the kind of group I'd pay five or ten bucks to see at a club one night.

But that's it. I can't imagine anybody else being interested in the rest of this crap at all. Therefore, it will fail. Disastrously. That's almost three billion euros. Probably the money invested by corporations won't be too badly wasted, since they're the ones who will wind up owning the buildings, but the rest of it is being thrown away.