Hey, I need to send a shout-out to my buddy Scoretiz, who is currently stuck down in Arkansas. I should be back in the States between about mid-March and mid-April, and I'll drive down there and look you up. The Score and I go back to high school together; one year when I was in grad school and he was in law school in the early '90s we roomed together with the Jedman and Brad the Eggroll King. That was ugly. Actually, that year we were all surprisingly responsible.

I've put up a link to Robert Duncan over there on the blogroll, so go check out his site. Some of it's about Catholicism, which is cool with me, of course, though I don't share Robert's faith. A lot of the Catholic stuff is very informative historically. The rest of it's about Spain and stuff like that. Highly recommended, as of course are Barcepundit, BarcaBlog, Kaleboel (I need to fix my link), Nihil Obstat, Europundits, Eursoc, HispaLibertas, Buscaraons, and 1972. Follow other links from those blogs and you'll find tons of good stuff out there.

I regret to say that I've been falling behind on expanding my vision of the blogosphere/magosphere. I find myself reading the abovementioned blogs, James Taranto, Glenn Reynolds, National Review, FrontPage, Mickey Kaus, PowerLine, Command Post, Mark Steyn, and not much else. I check Arts and Letters Daily every two or three days. I'm boycotting Andrew Sullivan and I find I don't miss him at all. But I'm kind of in a rut, and one of the things I've noticed is that I find myself being able to predict what each of these outfits is going to say before they say it. Reynolds is probably the least predictable, except on guns. (I hate guns and I'd like to keep the damned things under pretty tight control, not so tight as in England, but one thing I like about Spain is that you don't have to worry about guns. They certainly may rob you with a knife or using plain brute force, but they don't have guns.) Kaus would be second. Either I'm developing mental telepathic powers, an ability to predict the future, or I spend entirely too much time reading stuff on the Internet as it is.

I suppose here are my ideal gun laws, by the way. It ought to be just like cars. You have the theoretical right to own a gun, just as you have a theoretical right to own a car. They're both damned dangerous things, not to be toyed with. But you need a license to drive a car, and each car has to be registered with the state. You normally need a training course in order to get a license. All purchases and sales of cars must be registered as well. You must be 16 years old to drive a car. Your car must be insured. All cars that are not legally registered are considered to be stolen and can be seized by the government. If you're drunk and operating a car, you get arrested and maybe go to jail. If you use a car to commit a crime, the cops can seize the car. There is a set of strict rules about how you are permitted to handle your car in public. If you break those rules, you may lose your right to drive a car, and if somebody gets killed because of your carelessness or stupidity when driving, you are in serious trouble. Socially, misusing your car is considered very irresponsible; it's rather shameful to get busted for drunk driving or reckless speeding, for example. That all seems fair enough to me.