Well, again, I haven't had all that much to write about. My friend Richard, whom I've known since I was 16, was here in town earlier this week, and so we spent some time running around town. It was a good excuse for me to revisit some places I hadn't been for a while; it had been months since I'd walked up to the Parque Guell, and it's only half a mile up the hill from our house. Not much in the Spain Herald, either, which of course you should be reading every day. The biggest alleged news around here is that there might be a deal coming between the Socialists and the Basque Nationalists to form a government in the Basque Country. Part of the problem is that hopes of a truce and then negotiations with ETA have been raised, and I think they're unrealistic. Optimists point out that ETA hasn't killed anybody for two years now. Leftists don't mention that ETA actually is very close to collapse and the hard-line policies the Aznar government followed deserve most of the credit for bringing them there. There has been a lot less general bogosity on international affairs in the press, indicating that the anti-gringo faction around here has had to admit that improvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, even Saudi Arabia is real. There are occasional rather snobby sniffs at your basic American foibles, like those dopes in the Texas legislature who passed a bill against sexy cheerleaders. As if other countries didn't have their own dumb foibles. Eusebio Val in the Vangua has decided that's just one more step in the power of the Puritan theocracy that rules the United States.