Says Enric Juliana in these excerpts from this article in La Vanguardia (his text is in italics, our comments in regular type)

The presumption that a Europe open to Turkey and other Islamic countries (Morocco) is an idea that is at heart progressive, and that a non-expansionist EU that is sincere about the role of Christianity in its genesis is a right-wing reactionary attitude, is an excessively Manichean position. It just doesn't fit.

Wait a minute. I think this guy is saying that if you want to join the EU, you have to be a Christian country. Then what does he want to do about Muslim Albania, Kosovo, and Bosnia when their turn comes up? Is he going to say to the people of Sarajevo, Tirana, and Pristina or to the survivors of Srbrenica that they're just not good enough to get in? And what would the officially secular, non-Christian French state, with its 10% Muslim population, have to say about the idea of a Christian EU? And where do the Jews fit in here? And, when you get right down to it, keeping the Turks out just because they're not Christians is politely called racism, at least where I come from.

The proof is named Bush. The United States is the largest source of pressure for Turkey to be admitted to the Union. The imperial optics are diaphanous on this issue. Not only do they want to nail down a key piece of the puzzle that is the Western defensive system, the safest access route to the energy resources of the Caucasus, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. but they want to water down the strength of Brussels. The bigger Europe is, the better for Washington. The more it looks like Mercosur or NAFTA, the farther we are from the old ideal of the nation of nations, from the new political body that has never quite been born and which we will perhaps never see.

Good God, where do we start? First, check out his logic. Admitting Turkey to the EU can't be "progressive" because Bush is for it, and anything that reactionary Bush is for must automatically be bad. Second, note the bad geography. Oil from Mesopotamia and Arabia will continue to be shipped by tanker because that's the most convenient method. True, stability in Turkey and the Caucasus is necessary for the explotation of Caspian Sea oil and its transport by pipeline, but there's not much oil in the Caucasus. The oil's in the Caspian, down around Baku, and this is not a new find; it's always been known that the Caspian basin is rich in oil. Hitler was trying to grab it in late 1942 in his drive toward the Caucasus; the Wehrmacht's target was Baku. Third, the Americans, let me repeat again, occasionally have foreign policy objectives that have nothing to do with oil, and methinks this is one of them. America simply figures that after 50 years of alliance, the Europeans really owe it to Turkey to set reasonable conditions (e.g., say, the legalization of education in Kurdish) and a deadline that the Turks would have to meet to get in. If the European Union is going to expand to Romania and Bulgaria, and they've set a tentative date for admission of those countries for 2007, then they should also expand to Turkey, much more deserving than either of these two. It's that simple. Washington is lobbying on behalf of its good friend Turkey, which ought to be a good friend of Europe, too; at least that's what Turkey would like. And this guy Juliana is again suffering from typical Spanish conspiracy-theory-itis regarding America and everything else. Since the Spaniards don't trust anybody, much less themselves, they are always prone to believe that a sinister ulterior motivation, in this case the destabilization of the European Union, is hiding behind the most innocent-seeming American initiative.

Spanish Soccer Update: This is already a regular blog feature. Last weekend Barcelona squeaked out another cheap win, 1-0, over Villarreal, not an especially good team--their only real star is Martín Palermo, who once missed three penalty kicks in one game. Riquelme scored the only goal, a penalty kick awarded for no particularly good reason. Luis Enrique is out, injured, and will probably miss next weekend's Big Four match in La Coruña against Deportivo. (The Big Four are Barcelona, Real Madrid, Valencia, and Deportivo de la Coruña, the four Spanish teams that have qualified for the Champions' League during the last three or four years and have won the last several league championships. Any one of them can win the League this year and all of them have a shot at the Champions' League title as well. The two teams closest to the Big Four in talent are Betis and Atlético de Madrid. While Real Sociedad, Mallorca, Celta, and Málaga are currently high in the standings, they'll drop down eventually.) I would favor using Luis Enrique, when he finally comes back, in a limited role. He's a fine player, a real gutsy guy, like Pete Rose, Cal Ripken, or George Brett in baseball, a guy with merely good natural skills who is nonetheless a top star because of his intelligence, hustle, and effort. He is tied with Patrick Kluivert for the team lead in goals scored this League with five. He once played a few minutes at the end of a World Cup match against Italy with a broken nose. His nickname is "Lucho", which directly translated is "I fight". He's 32, though, and he's starting to be nagged by injuries. I would either start him and pull him out after 30-60 minutes, replacing him with an offensive or defensive midfielder depending on whether you needed to score or defend, or start Riquelme in his position and bring on Luis Enrique in the second half if you needed him. Whatever, he can't play the full 6 to 8 games that Barça plays a month. He wants to, but the coach, unfriendly Dutchman Louis Van Gaal, shouldn't let him. He has to realize that he is now a relief pitcher or a sixth man but that relief pitchers and sixth men are important players, too. Also in Barça news, young goalie Victor Valdés got mad and threw a temper tantrum when Van Gaal sent him back to the youth team, which is like being sent down to the minors. He refused to report for practice and everybody got extremely mad at him for being a rookie punk. He has been thoroughly chastised and is repentant. Madrid lucked out and beat Rayo Vallecano 2-3. Valencia tied Betis 1-1. Real Sociedad tied Deportivo 1-1. The game of the week was the two Atletis, Atlético Madrid and Athletic Bilbao, who tied 3-3 with a double hat trick; Urzaiz scored three for At. Bilbao and Jose Mari, formerly of AC Milan, scored three for At. Madrid. The League standings after nine games, almost one-fourth of the season, are Real Sociedad 21 points, Valencia and Mallorca 18, Celta with 17, R. Madrid with 16, Málaga and Barcelona with 15, Betis and Deportivo 14. Español, Osasuna, and Recreativo are clearly the three worst teams so far; each has lost six games and has given up twice as many goals as it has scored. I would bet money now they're the three to go down to Second this year. Villarreal has had poor results but has more talent than these three; they've only lost four games and their goals scored-goals allowed difference is only -2, not -11 as in the case of Recreativo. Villarreal has also had a much tougher schedule; they've played Madrid, Barça, Real Sociedad, and Deportivo, all of which are good teams, and they beat Depor, tied Madrid, and lost 1-0 to Barça and Real Sociedad. That's really pretty good. Recreativo is getting beaten by bad teams; the only Big Four team they've played is Valencia, which stomped them 3-0. They also got stomped 3-0 by Celta, admittedly a good team. Wait till Recreativo plays some of the other good teams; we'll see a few 5-0 or 6-1 games.

I mentioned this several months ago, but thought I'd recap it. Soccer clubs in Spain often represent a political or nationalistic current. FC Barcelona, for example, is the representative of Catalan nationalism. It's always been a symbol of the left, especially during the Franco period. Real Madrid is its opposite, the representative of Spanish centralism. It was the team favored by the Franco regime during those dark days, or so at least say the Barça supporters. Real Madrid is often called unfairly a "Fascist team", and it's true that they have a big group of skinhead supporters called the Ultra Sur. They're also considered the right-wing team in Madrid, as opposed to Atlético de Madrid, which is the anti-establishment team. Barcelona's right-wing team, also unfairly called "Fascist", has always been RCD Español. Español has about one-fifth the number of fans as Barça and is usually thought of as anti-Catalanist and pro-Spain. They have a bunch of Fascist skinhead supporters called the Brigadas Blanquiazules. Ironically, though, the last deaths in hooligan violence in Spain were the murder by an At. Madrid hooligan of a Real Sociedad fan about four years ago and the murder by a gang of Barça hooligans of an Español fan about ten years ago. Both of these were unprovoked attacks on innocent, non-violent fans, and both were committed by hooligans loyal to "left-wing" clubs against fans of "right-wing" clubs. Both Valencia and Mallorca are also considered conservative, anti-Catalanist teams. In Valencia there's a second-division team, Levante, which wears the same colors as Barça and is the left-wing opposition to mighty Valencia CF. In the Basque Country Athletic Bilbao is the rad team and Real Sociedad is the conservative team. In Sevilla, historically, Sevilla CF was the conservative bourgeois team and Real Betis was the left-wing working-class team. Those roles have switched over the last few years, and now Betis is conservative and Sevilla has attracted the most hardcore left-wing supporters in Spain. Whether or not this is a coincidence, Sevilla is known as the team with the most violent, dirtiest players. At. Madrid has always had that reputation, too, as has At. Bilbao. I wonder if the fact that all these clubs are considered to be left-wing has to do with the stigma of being clubs that play dirty. In Asturias Sporting Gijón is the working-class team while Real Oviedo is the bourgeois team. In Galicia Celta de Vigo is the left-wing, Galician-nationalist team, and Deportivo de la Coruña is the conservatrive, pro Spain team. Teams that wear white--Real Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Oviedo--have historically always been considered conservative, though Sevilla has now gone over to the left.

Bad news, guys. The Vangua's headline is "Digital editions of Spanish newspapers to cease to be free." El Mundo, the Madrid right-wing rag, is now charging €50 per year for those who wish to consult it online. El País, the Madrid Socialist rag, will follow suit before the end of November. And notice that the fine folks from the Vangua didn't say anything about their own plans, but that headline looks to me like it means Spanish papers in general.

Transport news: La Vanguardia has updated its information on Spain's high-speed train network. Currently there is a high-speed line running from Madrid to Seville and a semi-high-speed line from the French frontier through Barcelona and Valencia to Alicante. Some portions of this line are normal speed and the rest of it allows trains to go 220 kph; the trains on the true high-speed Madrid-Sevilla line can do 350 kph. Under construction are the Madrid-Barcelona-French frontier line, which will be a truly high-speed job; an extension on the Mediterranean line from Alicante and Valencia to Albacete, which will eventually be connected to Madrid through Cuenca; a spur off the Madrid-Seville line from Córdoba to Málaga; and the Madrid-Valladolid-Burgos line, which will eventually run through Bilbao and San Sebastián to the French frontier at Irún.

In a similar vein, just in case you were interested, the ten most expensive streets on which to rent a commercial space in Spain are Preciados and Serrano in Madrid and Portal de l'Ángel and Paseo de Gràcia in Barcelona, all well over 1000 euros / sq. meter / year; and Rambla de Catalunya and Avenida Diagonal in Barcelona, the Gran Vía in Bilbao, Colón in Valencia, Tetuán in Sevilla, and Jaume III in Palma de Mallorca, at 600-800 euros / square meter / year. The most expensive commercial space in the world is now at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan, at 7600 euros / sq. meter / year.

Tomorrow night Barcelona's Palau Sant Jordi, the basketball arena built for the Olympic Games, will host the MTV Europe Music Awards. You may not care, but they're making a big deal out of it. The 13,000 tickets have been sold out for weeks. Christina Aguilera, Bon Jovi, Coldplay, Eminem, Enrique Iglesias, Foo Fighters, Moby, Pink, Robbie Williams, Whitney Houston, and Wyclef Jean will perform. Most of these really are top-name acts, in case you're one of those people like me who likes Van Morrison, the Stones, James Brown, the Blasters, and Dwight Yoakam and doesn't really keep up with what's on MTV. Bon Jovi played a free acoustic show last night up in the park on Montjuic before some 10-20,000 people, among whom I, of course, was not. The guy from La Vanguardia's back page who does the featured interview every day did Bon Jovi yesterday and baited him unmercifully about plastic surgery and hair implants. Bon Jovi kicked the guy out when he asked if he had ever met Pamela Anderson. This whole thing just shows that while a few self-proclaimed intellectuals bash American popular culture in the media, the Spanish people are very interested in Anglo-American pop culture and the Spanish media is more than happy to bow down to its big stars, despite their constant protestations. There's no way they'd bait, say, Eminem in the way they did to Bon Jovi, very much a second-rate star these days. Anyway, rather than kicking rude reporters out, Eminem would just kick their asses. I wish some real obnoxious redneck asshole like Hank Williams Jr. would come over here and put on a show that included the consumption of an entire fifth of Jim Beam and falling off the stage a couple of times. George Jones could be the special guest star, and he could drink two fifths of Jim Beam. Or Merle Haggard, who, we hope, would kick off his show with "The Fightin' Side of Me" and play it again as the encore. Or imagine what David Allan Coe, who really has been in prison, would do with an uppity Spanish reporter. I should become a concert promoter and hire all four of these guys to do a country music European tour. They'd love it; it would be just so typically American.

Spanish Slang Terms: This will become a regular section, in which we fill you in on some fun expressions to add to your Peninsular Spanish vocabulary.

pijo: 1) a snobby rich kid. Wears only expensive brand-name clothing. Drives a Volkswagen Golf. Probably studied business but is not a yuppie; yuppies work hard and strive. This guy doesn't. He works for his dad's company or one of his dad's friends' companies. Speaks, stereotypically, with an exaggerated low-high-low intonation in his sentences and slightly drawled vowels. Probably comes from Sarrià-Sant Gervasi in Barcelona or Salamanca in Madrid. Is often named something retarded like "Borja" or "Alejo". 2) one who tries but fails to emulate a real pijo. He is sometimes called a "pijo-hortera". In this case he is named something retarded like "Jonathan", pronounced "Yon-ah-tan", that his parents thought sounded classy, rather in the way some American parents name their kids inappropriate things like "Tiffany", which is a BRAND NAME, for God's sake, or "Brandy", which is an ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGE. I think I'll name my kid "K mart" or "Boilermaker". But definitely not Jonathan, Alejo, or Borja.

hortera: tacky in a cheesy sort of way. Often implies that you are trying to put on airs above your station or that you are doing something or behaving in a way exaggeratedly stereotypical of farmers in town in their Sunday best. Can, however, merely mean "in bad taste".

cursi: nerdy in sort of a teacher's pet sort of way. The kind of clothes that a teacher's pet would wear, for example, is cursi.

un empollón: a nerd. Again, usually refers to the sort of person who tries to please authority submissively.

dónde Jesucristo perdió las alpargatas (where Jesus lost his sandals): the middle of nowhere, Nowheresville. A wide place in the road. A jerkwater town. Also el quinto pino (the fifth pine tree).

el quinto coño (the fifth cunt) (vulgar): Assboink, Idaho, or Bumfuck, Egypt.

el veranillo de San Martín: Indian summer.

You are not going to believe this, but I swear it's true. This has been a weirdly porno-filled week for me. Honestly. My weeks are usually porno-empty. I once linked to a couple of funny and / or interesting sites, Tijuana Bibles, a collection of primitive '20s-40s comics circulated extensively "underground", and Retro Raunch, a collection of teens through about '50s French postcards and the like, but these two sites definitely have redeeming social importance--it's history, for Chrissakes! (Here's an article from Salon, actually the introduction to a book, by controversial cartoonist Art Speigelmann about Tijuana Bibles.) But those are the only remotely nasty sites I've ever linked to. Except for the UnaBlogger. Then, a few days ago, I find the extremely cool website True Porn Clerk Stories, which is a complete and total gas, the blog of a thirtyish woman who works in a Chicago videoclub that apparently specializes in adult videos. (How's that for a euphemism?) Then my wife gets the VCR working; we inherited the damn thing from an American woman named Jane, who went back to California a couple of years ago, and we finally found out what the correct cable we had to buy in order to make it work was. So she goes and rents a porno movie, without my knowledge, "just to see what they're like." Not that I was complaining. She decided it was pretty gross, though, when the male lead began to employ a certain non-traditional orifice belonging to the female lead. Then, today, I get this phone call from my London Irish pal Murph. He says that our American pal Mitch, who works for an Internet company here in Barcelona, has a job for us. He has a contact in London who wants us to translate some pornographic websites from English to Spanish. Of course, I said, "Sure. How much do we get paid?" So that's what we'll be occupied doing for the next few days. It'll probably be more fun than that enormous horribly dull thing we did on car painting. I think I'll get my business cards changed. Right now they describe me as "English teacher. Translator." I want them to say "English teacher. Translator. Pornographer."

While we were watching the Antena 3 news a few minutes ago, there was a human-interest story from Nowheresville, Galicia, the fifth pine tree. Some poor woman's donkey had wandered out in the road ten years ago and had gotten itself run over. The damage to the car and the fine cost more than the woman could pay, so she'll have to sell her little stone house to meet the bills, according to speedy Spanish justice. Now, of course, that the whole thing's been publicized, some magnanimous philanthropist will pay off the three hundred euros and everything will be fine. What struck me curiously, though, was that the woman was speaking Galician, a relative of Portuguese, spoken in the part of Spain that sticks out over the top of Portugal, to a reporter who was interviewing her in Spanish. I asked Remei to explain. She said something like this, paraphrased:

Everyone in Spain can understand Spanish, at least the standard dialect, which they've heard on the radio and TV all their lives. Besides, almost everyone went to school, at least for a few years, and if you're older than about 35 you were taught mostly or completely in Spanish, no matter what part of Spain you're from. In Catalonia, everyone can speak Spanish. Some may speak it so badly that they're embarrassed to do it, but if forced to, they could manage. People in small villages don't usually speak very good Spanish. In bigger towns and smaller cities in Catalonia, they use Catalan among themselves but are perfectly competent in Spanish, though they probably have an accent. Barcelona is completely bilingual, perhaps even majority Spanish-speaking. In the Basque Country and Navarra everybody who speaks Basque can speak Spanish perfectly too. In Valencia and Mallorca they speak Valencian and Mallorcan, both versions of Catalan, among themselves and perfect Spanish with outsiders. Some Valencians and Mallorcans go so far as to say that their "languages" are not related to Catalan, which is just plain ridiculous. And they claim that they don't understand Catalan, so that when dealing with people from Catalonia they will say, 'Speak Spanish, I don't understand Catalan," which is even more ridiculous. They have every right to speak whatever language they want, of course, but everyone in this damn country has some sort of silly attitude about languages and nationalism. Anyway, in Galicia, there are lower-class people in small mountain villages who are mostly elderly and illiterate and really don't know how to speak Spanish. Understand the TV and radio, yes, but they've never had to open their mouths to speak Spanish in their lives. I suppose that when these people die out, which will be within ten or fifteen years, there will be no more monolingual Galician speakers, as there are already no monolingual speakers of Catalan or Basque.

UPDATE: Antonio says it's important to add that Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics, Navarra, and the Basque Country have always (at least in the last few hundred years) been rich, fertile provinces agriculturally, that all these people except the Navarrese have historically had large commercial and fishing fleets and big ports, that these were the first provinces to become industrialized, and that they were the first areas to develop important financial institutions. They've always been rich, densely populated areas, and they've always been zones that received a steady in-migration that only spoke Spanish from poorer areas of Spain. The in-migration has diluted the use of the local languages in all those places. Galicia, however, has always been poor, and it's always been an overpopulated source of out-migration. Anybody from outside Galicia who in-migrated there went to one of the ports like Vigo or La Coruña, still heavily Spanish-speaking today. But rural Galicia received absolutely no in-migration from other parts of Spain because there was absolutely no reason to move there, kind of like Oklahoma in the '30s. Since Galicia was so poor, (it's gotten a lot better; it's barely distinguishable from the rest of Europe, except in very tiny isolated places) many older people never went to school, where Spanish was taught, and the only exposure they've ever had to Spanish is TV and radio. They have probably met only a few non-Gallego speakers in their lives, and they've been just fine speaking only Gallego to one another in their little villages. Antonio says that the reason that people in Argentina call all Spaniards "gallegos" in an insulting manner is because most Spanish immigrants to Argentina were Galician, and they were a bunch of oafish rednecks in sophisticated, rich pre-Perón Buenos Aires. Now the tables have been turned and the Argentinians are the poor cousins from overseas while the Spanish are the rich, sophisticated folks; it was reported in the Spanish press that there has been friction that has become problematic between Spanish and Argentinian employees who work for one of the large Spanish companies (BBVA, BSCH, Repsol-YPF, and several others) in Argentina. The Argentinians claim that the Spaniards are overbearing, rude, arrogant snobs who act superior. This is probably a little unfair. They can't be that bad, though I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few prize pijo specimens who give all Spaniards a bad rap.

We did as we always do, watched the news starting at 2:30 on TV3, Catalan government TV, because they've got good international and local coverage. By about 2:55 they've pretty much run out of news, though, and they still have to run twenty more more minutes, so you see a lot of stories about this old guy who is like ninety-three and has three teeth and can barely walk, much less talk a dialect of either Catalan or Spanish that anyone can understand, who lives up in some town in the Pyrenees, where Jesus lost his sandals, that you can only get to by mule and is still making pots on a potter's wheel just like they did twelve hundred years ago or whatever that he's selling for two hundred euros each, so steeped in the essence of Catalanism is he. When the potters come on, we check our watch and get ready to switch over to Antena 3, whose news starts at 3PM, giving us about five minutes of basketweavers, medieval-dance revivalists, and their ilk before the rather happy-talky A3 folks give us their 45 minutes of Spanish-language private-channel Madrid-based point of view. That way we sort of get both sides of the story. Anyway, counting the 30 minutes we saw on TV3 and the 45 we saw on A3, that's an hour and a quarter of hardcore news viewing we've put in today. Not once, on either channel, was it mentioned that today is the anniversary of the 1918 Armistice. Just in case you were wondering.

Check out this photo from Samizdata.net of a poster advertising fool Michael Moore's stage show in London. Some sardonic anonymous Briton has made a major improvement on it.

This book review from the Weekly Standard gives you a pretty good idea of who really writes Margaret Truman's books. I didn't know much of this stuff about ghostwriters, though of course I knew they exist, and that the guy's name who appears after the "with" on any book by a celebrity author is the guy who does the real writing.

In the year 1987, a woman named Rosario, a poor inhabitant of Santa Coloma, a Barcelona working class suburb (sort of the local equivalent of Raytown, Missouri), saw the Virgin Mary appear near a locust tree in an empty area of the neighboring suburb of Badalona. Since then, local believers, of whom there seem to be a good few, have erected an altar, built a professional-looking wooden platform around the tree, and generally cleaned up the area. However, the unused land where the sanctuary is belongs to the Badalona city government, and they've ordered the shrine to be removed, supposedly for environmental reasons. They will permit a wooden bench near the tree, where the devout sit to pray, but nothing more.

This is ridiculous. I know the piece of land they're talking about and it's just a big vacant lot, a few dozen acres or so. People dump crap there. If these people are cleaning it up and building a little shrine, it's not hurting anything; in fact, it's good, since someone is picking up the garbage, and if decent people are going there regularly to pray, it keeps the junkies and the prostitutes away, all of which does immense good for the environment. The real reason is almost certainly that Badalona and Santa Coloma have an image problem. They're generally crappy dumps, though there is a nice part of Badalona, and they're seen by the rest of the metro area as being undesirable places to live. The last thing they need is a bunch of Andalusian redneck women with no teeth and black shawls ululating deliriously at the tree where the Virgin Mary appeared.

Eight words I never thought I'd see myself write: this is a good piece by Christopher Hitchens from FrontPage magazine. I must admit the guy is a good writer though I disagreed with him about 90% of the time in the past, until Sept. 11, 2001, anyway. If you don't check out FrontPage fairly regularly, you ought to, though David Horowitz is more than capable of being shrill. He's always off on a new crusade to bring the truth about something to the nation's college campuses, whether it be on 9-11 and the War on Terrorism, the overwhelming liberal Democrat bias of college professors, Nazi holocaust deniers, Noam Chomsky, or Harry Belafonte. It's often got very good links, to Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, and other writers of interest.

With regards to our translations of the fool Baltasar Porcel's columns compared to Cinderella B.'s, one of the interesting aspects of translation is that different translators translate the same original text differently. Joan Margarit, a fine local poet and a very learned man (he gets to meet with Prime Minister Aznar every time Aznar comes to Barcelona; one of Aznar's hobbies is poetry and he is said to be quite knowledgeable about it. Note that he chooses to visit Margarit and not Porcel. Aznar is wise enough to open doors in all fields, not only politics and business. Rumor has it that he's angling for Romano Prodi's or Javier Solana's job after his second term as Prime Minister runs out in 2004. We would be much less apprehensive about the future of the EU if Aznar were in charge of something important) has come out with a translation of the poetry of Thomas Hardy in Catalan. In his introduction, he provides three different translations of one of Hardy's poems, one from a good few years ago, one done quite recently by another contemporary poet, and his own, and invites the reader to compare them. It's really quite interesting, since he gives his own analysis of the similarities and differences.

Anyway, 2002 has been declared by somebody the Verdaguer Year, and the Catalan cultural authorities seem determined, even square-headed, about making sure that everyone possible is exposed to the collected opus of Mossén Jacinto Verdaguer, usually considered Catalan literature's leading poet. Says Vanguardia cultural reporter Josep Massot, "The Verdaguer Year, far from being a failure, continues unveiling important surprises." Surprise my ass, this was funded by the Generalitat's Department of Culture, as it says clearly but very briefly near the bottom of the story, and as for important, let Bernard / Ossian let you know what he thinks, as I'm sure he will when he finds out that this whole thing was inspired by Harold Bloom, who "rediscovered" Verdaguer after having read him in French translation. One Ronald Puppo, a Californian teacher at the University of Vic, has taken it upon himself to translate Verdaguer to English for the first time ever, with the generous support of my tax money.

This particular year, 2002, was designated the Verdaguer Year because it marks the 100th anniversary of the poet's death. Jacinto Verdaguer was a priest and was also quite clearly several croquetas short of a plato combinado. While he wrote his two major works, both rabidly Catalanist (L'Atlàntida in 1878 and Canigó in 1885, extremely dull and overblown epic poems, rather comparable to "Hiawatha" or "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" in English), he was patronized by a rich family. By 1885 or so he was clearly going completely insane. As Robert Hughes says in Barcelona, "(Verdaguer) began to show embarrassing signs of zeal. As almoner, he was expected to give alms to the poor on (rich patron the Marquis of) Comillas's behalf; now his handouts af the marquis's money became so large and frequent that long lines of the poor and ragged, flocking in from the slums of the Barrio Chino, were always waiting at the back door of the Palau Mojá. Then Verdaguer developed an obsession with exorcism. Toward 1889 he fell under the influence of a Paulist priest who haunted the Barrio Gótico, Joaquim Pinyol. This charismatic quack became his confessor and spiritual adviser. He convinced the poet that the street people of lower Barcelona were infested with demons, and that it was their combined mission to exorcise them. Before long Verdaguer was spending every moment he could find reciting the orders of exorcism opver writhing epileptics and mumbling crones, with Pinyol showing him the needles and pieces of glass they had vomited up. Then Pinyol was joined by a family of morbid il·luminats called Durna, whose daughter, Deseada, appears to have convinced poor Verdaguer that the Virgin Mary's voice spoke through her." The poor bastard only got worse until he died in 1902.

Verdaguer is best known for composing the quatrain "L'Emigrant", "Dolça Catalunya / patria del meu cor / quan de tu s'allunya / d'enyorança es mor." Hughes's translation is "Sweet Catalonia / homeland of my heart / to be far from you / is to die of longing." It was rather common at this time of rapid urbanization to write sentimentally about one's far-away homeland or country house or hometown and the old folks back home and all that; hell, Eric Hobsbawm, the Marxist historian, asserts that modern nationalism springs from this Victorian romanticism about the national essence being back home on the farm with good old Ma and Pa. In Catalan they call verse written on this theme great poetry. In America we call it country music. In Germany they called it Nazism, or didn't you notice the parallels between the Catalan excursionists and the early, 1920s Hitler Youth? Don't get angry, we're not calling the Catalan nationalist excursionists evil, they neither desire a dictatorship nor want to kill anyone, but their emphasis on youth and healthy living and idealization of nature and going back to the land and homage-like visits to nationalist-tradition-rich places (in Catalonia almost always sites related to Catalan national Catholicism like Montserrat, Poblet, Sant Miquel del Faí, and Núria) and possession of a naive redistributive Marxist ideology (in Catalonia the nebulous "solidarity" inspired by liberation theology, influential in Spain) participation in nationalist ceremonies and exaltation of everything Catalan sure is reminiscent of the Hitler Youth. We must admit that the Boy Scouts remind us a good bit of the '20s Hitler Youth as well, though to a lesser degree as American nationalism is more implicit than explicit in the American Scouts.

So back to poor old Verdaguer and comparative translation, which is what I think I started off talking about. Here is a famous section of the Verdaguer epic Canigó in the original Catalan:

Un cedre és lo Pirene de portentosa alçada;
com los ocells, los pobles fan niu en sa brancada,
d'on cap voltor de races desallotjar pot;
quiscuna d'eixes serres, d'a on la vida arranca
son vol, d'aqueix superbo colós és una branca,
ell és lo cap de brot.

This is Ronald Puppo's translation:

The Pyrenees are a cedar flung high;
Peoplse nest, like birds, among its branches,
Whence no race-feeding vulture can remove them;
Each and every range where life takes hold
Forms a branch of this mighty colossus,
This superb trunk of life.

And this is Sir Mix-a-Lot's translation:

I like big butts and I can not lie
You other brothers can't deny
That when a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung
Wanna pull up front
Cuz you notice that butt was stuffed
Deep in the jeans she's wearing
I'm hooked and I can't stop staring
Oh, baby I wanna get with ya
And take your picture
My homeboys tried to warn me
But with that butt you got
Me so horny
Ooh, rub all of that smooth skin
You say you wanna get in my Benz
Well use me, use me cuz you ain't that average groupy

For Class Discussion: How would you compare and contrast these two versions of Verdaguer's Canigó?

Jessica from The Blog of Chloe and Pete, which is well worth a read--go on over and check it out--has been kind enough to link to us. Even better, she's baptized us "The Sexy Scourgers of Spanish Socialism". We love it. Patrick, if you're reading this, can you find some way to work it into the template? Thanks in advance.

Check out Cinderella Bloggerfeller, an excellent website whose focus is Europe. They've been following the Baltasar Porcel saga, too, and have translations that are better than ours. A couple more notes about Porcel: 1) He's really ugly. 2) He's a Mallorcan. The stereotypical Mallorcan first name is Tomeu. Since most Mallorcans identify with Mallorca first and Spain and Madrid second, not Catalonia and Barcelona second, you could say that Mr. Porcel has sold out to the Catalans by taking their money and is thus a traitor to his people. You could even call him an "Uncle Tomeu".

Well, it looks like all concerned got what they wanted out of the UN resolution. France and Russia got to feel important and respected, America and Britain will have their war against Saddam (no one seriously thinks Saddam is going to comply), and China and all the other countries that voted yes mark up one in the Favor Book. In other European news, a bunch of antiglobalization wackos marched this afternoon in Florence. It looks like they got a pretty good demo together; I didn't see any figures but I'd bet at least 10,000. What cheesed me off was that the Spanish TV reporters kept referring to these people as "peace marchers" and "hunger activists" and "solidarity groups". All I can say is that from the brief footage of the demo on both the TV3 and then Antena 3 news, there sure looked like there were a lot of red flags. So far, at least, there hasn't been any violence, but I'm writing at six in the evening, around dusk, and that's the time that the demos get ugly in Barcelona--the local folks, union members, high school kids playing rads, and lefty-foo-foo teachers and bureaucrats have all gone back to their comfortable homes. Then the real rads, a lot of whom have come in from out of town for the occasion and now have nothing else to do, come out just around when it gets dark and start smashing shit up and attacking the cops when they arrive at the scene of the disturbance. A few local high-school kids who really shouldn't be out after dark anyway in downtown Barcelona and especially not when there are angry cops in the vicinity join in and get whacked around too and then their parents sue the cops. In case you were wondering, the three McDonald'ses in Florence have shuttered up and taken down the Golden Arches signs in order not to become mob targets, as have many of the famous Florentine luxury shops, so much fun for window-shopping. Here in Barcelona the traditional targets are first the McDonald's on the Ramblas and then bank branches in general, and if I were running a luxury shop on the day of a demo I'd close it up too. Valéry Giscard "d'Estaing", president of the Convention on the future of the European Union, whatever that is, said that the admission of Turkey to the European Union would be "the end of the EU". Well, at least he's being honest; many other European Thlaylis don't like the idea of admitting Turkey, either. Giscard said that "Turkey's capital is not in Europe and 95% of its population lives outside Europe...Turkey, with its 66 million inhabitants, would become the largest member State." To pick a few nits, Ankara is not in Europe but Turkey's largest city, Istanbul, with its 10 million people in the metro area, 10 times the population of Ankara, is famously in Europe. I would guess that 15-20% of Turks live on the European side of the Straits. Also, Germany, with its 83 million, would remain the largest member State in population, though Turkey would become the largest EU country in area. Giscard added that the next thing that would happen after Turkey's admission would be Morocco's pressure to get in too, as Morocco has also petitioned to be allowed into the EU. Well, good. Tell the king of Morocco, hey, set up a representative democratic government with an independent judiciary and the rule of law backed by an inviolate Constitution, which everyone else has to do to get into the EU, and we'd love to let you in. That would be the best thing that could possibly happen to Morocco, being forced to liberalize and getting payback by being let into the economic club when they've proven they're serious about it. If the Turks successfully continue their evolution toward meeting the above conditions--they're not there yet, but they've been making progress, and the way the new "Islamic Democrat" Turkish government behaves and how the army reacts will let us know how close they are to getting there very soon--they damn well deserve to be let into the economic club as soon as they meet those criteria, since they've stood by the European NATO countries for more than 50 years in the military club, including when the going was tough. M. Giscard, by the way, is extremely well known to be a snooty bastard in general. Apparently everyone who has ever known him hates him except maybe for Chirac. He picked up the noble-sounding "d'Estaing" as part of his endless quest for public homage; his uncle, René Giscard, a social climber, had sought to add luster to his surname by adding the appendage d'Estaing, which was in disuse as its last holder got shaved by the rasoir national in 1794, a very bad year in general anywhere near France. This appendage-adopting is permissible in France, and Uncle René was confirmed as the rightful possessor of the appendage in 1923. Valéry Giscard, as Uncle's nephew, saw fit to add said appendage to his own name. Giscard, get this, claimed that he was descended from Louis XV through an illegitimate connection; one of his female ancestors had been one of Louis's chambermaids. He also tried to get into the Society of the Cincinnati, a very exclusive club that is restricted to the descendants of French officers who fought in the American Revolution, on the grounds that the last d'Estaing (who was an admiral) was his ancestor. Didn't work. (Source: Fragile Glory by Richard Bernstein, an excellent overview of French society, now just a little out of date as it's from 1990.)

Awful joke.

What's on the menu at the next European Union summit?

Turkey and Giblets.

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Here's our take on Gibraltar, which hasn't changed because of the recent non-binding and unofficial referendum. The referendum did show that the Gibraltarians (we'll call them the Giblets) overwhelmingly want to keep their current status. Well, public opinion in the UK, notwithstanding British behavior regarding Hong Kong, has a thing about giving loyal subjects away to some other country against the will of said subjects. Remember, for example, the Falklands War. Tony Blair's hands are tied. Relinquishing British sovereignty, or even part of it, over Gibraltar, would be a very serious political negative for Blair, and we all know that Tony Blair is notorious for tailoring his words and deeds to fit public opinion, rather like a somewhat more ethical Bill Clinton. (This is why we have been gratifyingly surprised at Blair's backbone during the entire War on Terrorism so far, since a significant proportion of Brits oppose an attack on Iraq and even opposed the Battle of Afghanistan. Perhaps we shouldn't have been so surprised, since Blair also showed backbone in the Northern Ireland negotiations, the Balkans, and in Sierra Leone. If Tony doesn't think an issue is a life-or-death matter, it seems like he's a leaf turning itself this way and that in order to get the most sunlight possible. But we'll have to give him a lot of credit for being tough and clearheaded and usually right when he has to make a decision that may affect history.)

Anyway, back to the Giblets. It's true that Gibraltar no longer has any particular strategic value, not with the US naval base at Rota only a hundred kilometers away. It's also true that Gibraltar is a haven for smuggling into Spain, but this is a problem that can be stopped with some decent police work; you don't have to change sovereignty to solve this one. If the Spaniards would agree to let a few Royal Navy speedboats patrol the coasts, smuggling would, I'm sure, be greatly reduced. There really is no particular reason Gibraltar can't keep the status it has. Nothing would much change if sovereignty of this tiny peninsula with some 20,000 inhabitants were transferred from Britain to Spain in the long run, and nothing would much change if it weren't, either. Nothing's broke. There's no reason to try to fix it. There's nothing for anyone to get his undies all worked up over. There's no crisis. So, since we all agree that democracy is a good thing, let's be democratic. Let the Giblets have a binding referendum on what they want to do, become independent, go over to Spain, or stay with Britain. Co-sovereignty is a dumb idea that will never work, so don't even include it as a choice. The Giblets will vote nearly unanimously to stay with Britain, and their wishes should be honored.

Comparisons with the Basque Country are silly. Perhaps 30% of the Basques want independence, whereas 99% of the Giblets want to stay with Britain. I actually wouldn't mind amending the Spanish constitution to give the Basques a referendum on independence (under the Spanish constitution Spain is indivisible) provided it was stipulated that it would be 50 years before another such referendum could be held. Or 100. I don't normally like the idea of amending constitutions, figuring that as few changes in the basic law of a country should be made as possible as long as said constitution is generally fair and decent. In the Basque case, though, a clear defeat for the independentistas might do a lot to remove anything left of ETA's legitimacy. Hell, let the Catalans have a referendum, too, under the same conditions. The independentistas would lose and lose badly. Then they might shut up for a while.

Comparisons with Ceuta and Melilla, however, are appropriate. Ceuta and Melilla are small Spanish cities on the north coast of Morocco which form an integral part of Spain; they do not have colonial status (neither do the Canary Islands, which are also an integral part of Spain). Morocco claims them, and Spain quite justifiably refuses to hand them over to Morocco. The Ceutans and Melillans, of course, want to remain part of Spain, as do the Canarians. Massive hypocrisy here on the part of the Spaniards, right? We want to keep our enclaves in Morocco, but we want you to give up your enclave on our shores. The tortuous explanation that Spanish diplomats will give you is that Ceuta and Melilla have been Spanish since the Spaniards themselves founded them in the 1500s and the modern country of Morocco did not exist at that time, while Gibraltar became British under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht when Spain was recognizably the same entity as it is now (for example, it's still ruled today by the same royal family, the Bourbons, that acceded to the Spanish throne precisely according to the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht), and Gibraltar was definitely Spanish territory before it was ceded to Britain. The Spaniards therefore, they say, have the right to demand that their land, Gibraltar, be given back to them, while the Moroccans do not have the right to do so because Ceuta and Melilla were never their land. I don't buy it, of course.

During the Franco days, the Spaniards used to argue that Britain had to give up Gibraltar because the Brits had violated one of the clauses of the Treaty of Utrecht by allowing Jews to settle in Gibraltar; the treaty had specified that no Jews were to be allowed to get so close to Judeophobe Spain. This claim is, of course, no longer made. Also, the majority of the Giblets are some kind of mix of Maltese, seafaring Italian (e.g. Genoese, Pisans, and Venetians, not, say, Calabrian peasants), Spanish, and British, with probably a good dash of North African. Atlético Rules has a very different take on this subject..

No luck. Paul Zimmerman from CNN-SI didn't answer my NFL rules proposals in his mailbag, although mine weren't nearly as silly as the proposal he liked best (which was, actually, pretty funny), nor as stupid as his own assertion that you just can't expect players not to commit violent infractions like helmet hits when they're trained to do that.

We're going to try again, with this missive to Jack McCallum, their pro basketball guy:

People here are big fans of their hometown hero, Memphis's Pau Gasol. How's he doing this year? Looks like he's been scoring and getting some rebounds, and playing a lot of minutes. But his team loses game after game. Is Pau at all to blame for his team's poor record? What do you think of his defensive game? Do you think he needs to put on more muscle? How good do you see him getting in a few years--do you think he'll be a regular player, an above-average player, a minor star? Major star? Or out of the league?

Best,
John Chappell

Oh, yeah, feel free to e-mail me at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com. Sorry I haven't got a permanent link for it yet.

Here's an interesting colloquium on anti-Americanism from FrontPage magazine. Since we're on the subject, I thought a link here would be appropriate. Paul Hollander, in particular, is someone whose work I am familiar with and whom I greatly respect, and I tend to agree with him more than I do with the other three. Victor Davis Hanson is definitely my second favorite of the bunch. This guy Flynn, we're willing to admit, is a tad bumptious. This discussion might be something interesting for non-Americans--how a group of conservative American intellectuals react to what they consider to be anti-Americanism. One might also compare the quality of discourse in the colloquium and the quality of discourse in Mr. Porcel's columns.

Here's the link to Porcel's Thursday column in the original Spanish.

I found the link to the original Spanish version of Porcel's column today. It's here.

Baltasar Porcel doesn't know when to shut up. Here he goes again, from Friday, November 8's La Vanguardia. Remember, this guy is considered one of Catalonia's leading intellectuals. The following article, titled "Futurism and reaction", is quite obviously the work of a drooling imbecile. Porcel is not even as smart as Noam Chomsky. We're going to leave it up to you, dear readers, to discover the blatant lies, obvious logical fallacies, complete non sequiturs, and just plain moronic crap in Porcel's text, in italics below. Post your faves up on the Comments section.

I attended a screening of "Minority Report", a typical American movie, skilfully made, from the agile rhythm and suggestive camerawork to effects like the spectacular mechanical spiders. The director is a virtuoso of the industry, Spielberg. Although the movie turns out to be disgustingly morbid. A professor used to say that the Americans confuse tragedy with brutality, poetry with sentimentality. As if their official idealism were hiding a sensory dirtiness. Which the film also reveals: we're dealing with science fiction, crime prevention in the middle of the 21st century, which is also portrayed in the manner of the futurism that is so abundant in the English-speaking novel and cinematography and which is based on terror, dehumanization, catastrophism, oppression.

Why do these people who claim to be the paladins of freedom and human welfare fear tomorrow so much? Because the historical process shows that such prophecies have turned out to be false, whether they be the War of the Worlds, "Blade Runner" or the Orwellian Big Brother that haunts us so. When humanity is progressing in all aspects, although it be among scares and imperfections: we are more cultured, healthier, and freer than half a century or half a millenium ago.

Such a futurism does not really foresee tomorrow, but rather is based on the past as destiny, as if humanity were only old and malignant. It is prophecy: you will only be admitted to the Truth of the Lord it you annul yourself and become the servant of a new master. Repugnant. But true. Like Bush, who preaches freedom versus terrorism, which we must obey forgetting the slightest criticism and viewing as the only enemy the second producer of petroleum, Iraq, when those who have economically supported the Bushes are the oilmen of Texas, the state of the Union with most environmental pollution, and who additionally fear finding themselves without oil now that it looks like the reserves will run out in 20 years, and which will additionally be replaced by another completely different source of energy, like hydrogen. The demon Saddam would be acceptable, then, if he were an ally like Saudi Arabia is or like Pinochet was. Bush's and fatalistic futurism's reactionary nature: we're losing ground. Like Bin Laden's ideology: the human being must be mummified in a piece of metaphysical ignorance from a thousand years ago or be killed. Like Holy Mother Russia: after decades of trying to finish off Chechenia, if Chechenia attacks in order to defend itself, then it's terrorism, and justice is found in Putin's gases and bombs.

Is Blogger still not working? I had the same post get eaten THREE TIMES today.

I sent this to CNNSI's Paul Zimmermann's mailbag, since he'd brought up possible modifications for the extra-point rule in American football. He'll probably think I'm a nut. Maybe he'd be right. Let's see if he answers.

Two rules change ideas:

1) Two points for a run, one for a kick. You can either line up at the 25 and either kick for one or fake kick and then run or pass for two, or line up at the 5 and run or pass for two. Kicking for one would be illegal if you lined up at the 5. The ball would remain in play, no matter what, until whistled dead, so a blocked kick, fumble, or interception could be returned for a TD. These changes would make extra points something reasonably difficult to get and even slightly risky, not just something automatic like a kick from the 9-yard line. A 42-yarder would be a bit of a challenge but usually doable by most kickers. But if your kicker is hobbling and it's ten below in Green Bay with the winds swirling and blowing snow around, then what do you do? You might just fake that kick. And choosing to go for two from the five means that they'll have to run wide, pass, or use play-action or some other deceptive play, not just slam it into the line--unless the defense gets too worried about all the wideouts you flood the end zone with. You then give the ball to your big back to take right up the middle for two--unless the defense doesn't bite... Stopping the extra point/s might actually shift momentum in favor of the team about to receive the kickoff. Whatever, I think adopting this solution would make the extra point/s much more interesting for the fans without corrupting the essence of the game. I would indeed argue that since the essence of the game is running plays and defending against them in clutch situations, this rule change would dramatically improve the game by creating many more clutch situations.

2) Borrow this one from soccer. Give a yellow card to any player guilty of a personal foul or unsportsmanlike conduct foul, in addition to the 15-yard penalty. If a player accumulates two yellow cards in a game, he gets a red card and is ejected for the rest of that game and the team's next one too. A direct red card can be given by the ref in case of a truly flagrant foul. The player is then directly ejected and also misses the next game. If a player accumulates five yellow cards over the course of the season, he is also ejected from the match and suspended for the next game. This would nip things like the Derrick Thomas Monday night meltdown in the bud, and provide some real punishment to those players who frequently break the rules. If you're suspended for a game, you don't get paid for it; the paycheck worth 1/16 of your net yearly NFL salary goes to some league charity. And would you sign a guy who you knew would miss two games and parts of two others if you were a GM? What if you had another guy who was almost as good in the same position, but never gets called for flagrant fouls? Who would you trade? This would cut down massively on violent play.

Sorry for being so long-winded; I tried to respond to all possible objections and add a few details. So what do you think?

Best,
John Chappell

This article, to which I found the link on Andrew Sullivan.com, is an excellent recap of why the Democrats lost the midterm elections. It's so sensible, logical, and reasonable that I can't believe it's from the Nation, a notoriously left-wing rag with some pretentions at being the voice of the Oakland-and-Berkeley wing of the Democratic Party.

The following is a well-deserved Fisking of this article from today's La Vanguardia. (We can't find the article in today's online edition. It's in the Thursday, Nov. 7's issue of the print version.) It's by Baltasar Porcel, a big man in Catalan lit, which tells you something about the pathetic state of Catalan lit. Mr. Porcel is a native of Mallorca but lives in Barcelona, where he is much made over by the Catalanist government in power because he is a Mallorcan who believes in Catalonia Irridenta. He is the president of some government thing called something like the Mediterranean Institute, a body paid for with my tax money that does God knows what; he is a classic case of an artist who has been bought and paid for by the government, co-opted, if you will. He is also a very boring novelist who writes books that people praise and don't read. Furthermore, he writes a daily column in La Vangua. It is sometimes quite dull and sometimes frothing at the mouth; you never know what you're going to get. The following is quite frothy. Porcel's piece is in italics. Ours is in standard type.

One surprise--for me--from All Souls Day (Nov. 1, when the dead are traditionally honored in Catholic countries) was that the American party (juerga) called Halloween is imposing itself strongly upon us. Above all, among the children, often in the schools. Another example that Anglo-Saxon culture has begotten horrendous vastages, from the repulsive Dracula to that frenzied Freddy Krueger, including the repugnant Frankenstein, the idiotic Mummy, and whatever. The cinema is committing atrocities here. It appears that for the Anglo-Saxons death consists, boiled down to it, in a maniacal succession of horrors between grotesque and sadistic, totally opposed to the dignified behavior and "cult of the dead" of the Greco-Latin or Chinese cultures, those which have survived longest on this planet. (Liberal translation of near-indescipherable last sentence. Antonio questions: typo in original? missing words?)


Good God, where do we start? First, Porcel must be a complete imbecile if he hadn't noticed that Halloween has become a popular celebration, especially among kids, in the last ten years in Spain. (Interestingly enough, Spain gets many of its American trends through France, of all places. Four of them are Halloween, country music, blue jeans--in again--and fast food. The French sort of filter and vet American trends, and the ones that catch on there make it to Spain in a year or so.) Second, most Americans are about as "Anglo-Saxon" as Porcel himself. Les anglosaxons is slightly snooty French for anyone who speaks English; they need a term to lump us Brits and Yanks and Aussies all together with. Francophile / Anglophobe Spaniards like to show how sophisticated they are by adopting the term. Third, who is Porcel to dis Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker? Or the brilliant filmmakers behind the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies? Would he do the same to Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote in a similar vein? Or Victor Hugo? Or even Stephen King, of whom I am no huge fan, but who is a thousand times the writer that Porcel is? Or the guys who make those silly Freddy and Jason horror movies? Sure, they're silly, they're supposed to be silly, for Chrissakes, just bits of fluff entertainment. The people who make those movies aren't morons and the teenagers who like those movies aren't morons. It's all just for fun. The only morons around here are the people like Porcel who take seriously a silly but fun bunch of crap like children's dressing up as monsters for Halloween. Trust us. Halloween is meaningless for us Americans. It won't contaminate Catalan culture. Look, Halloween is the American equivalent of Spanish / Catalan Carnival. People get to dress up in costumes and go to parties. That's all it is; like New Year's Eve, it's just an excuse to have a good time. You already have Carnival. Why not two dressing-up holidays?


They say that Halloween comes from the Celts. I don't know. But the Celts had a concept of the immortal soul, their celestial pots full of delicious wild boar, the venerated priest, the druid, who even constitutes an antecedent of the Christian soul. Meanwhile, Halloween is a disrespectful, tacky (hortera) masquerade which instantly plants two disquieting questions: would you like to be thought of like that, on the part of the living, once you've died? Do you contemplate the memories of your parents and grandparents as cheesy (chabacano) and repulsive? That's not the point, those who are always up-to-date rush to say, Halloween is just for fun, though macabre fun. OK, fine. But the real problem stands: the child will not be taken to the cemetery, true to that cult of the dead that creates deep family and territorial, even patriotic, traditions, understood like the land where you grow with your roots, and which gives to the human being a historic heritage and transcendence, a metaphysical mystery. No, the child will be induced to dance around foolishly, strictly within himself, as if the Beyond were reduced to a silly game.


Good God, where do we start? It's clear that Porcel just doesn't get that, while Catholics are the largest religious group in the US, America's Ur-culture is Protestant. That is, we don't generally do Catholic holidays like the Immaculate Conception or Lent or the Assumption of the Virgin or All Saints' Day, or any saint's day at all. Because we don't observe All Saints' Day, does that mean we don't honor our dead? No, we honor our dead so much that we have both Memorial Day, the holiday to honor the dead in general, and Veterans' Day, the holiday to honor war veterans, both living and dead. In addition, anyone is free to honor the dead whenever he or she pleases, and perhaps there is more virtue in doing so on a day which is NOT scheduled for such observances. I also remember a year or so ago that some Spaniards criticized the American homage to the dead of the Sept. 11 attacks, calling it maudlin, exaggerated, and chauvinistically patriotic. Well, which is it? Maudlin and exaggerated, or superficial and disrespectful? Please choose one at the sound of the buzzer. Slander America one way or the other, but please be consistent. And there's no reason why the kid can't both dress up as a monster for the class Halloween party in the morning and then go with his folks to lay flowers at the cemetery in the afternoon, anyway. Notice, though, that Cataloonies like Porcel (along with many other Europeans, especially the butts of this ten-year-old Francophobe Spanish joke: "You know, the Gulf War was so short that the French didn't even have time to change sides.") are prepared to read something sinister into the most innocent manifestation of American culture. Why must Porcel not only criticize, but even ridicule and insult something that he obviously does not understand at all? Where does he get this knee-jerk anti-Americanism? Orwell would have said that the answer is that he's a nationalist and so he sees everything in terms of the comparative prestige of the unit he owes allegiance to. Catalonia's comparative prestige internationally is pretty low, as it is seen in Europe by even those who are aware of its existence as a region of Spain with some local peculiarities. Outside Europe, it's virtually unknown. The Catalanists just can't stand this. If an American celebration is being adopted in Catalonia, but no Catalan celebrations are being adopted anywhere, much less in America, then this is a priori a bad thing in Catalanist eyes.


Changing the subject: we are evidently looking at a commercial operation, the most gratuitous consumerism, as we are also again obeying the command of the dominant culture, the North American, in another of its most banal manifestations. And here's where Halloween fits in: a world of immigrants who have come from everywhere, for whom roots and tombs no longer exist, only material and moral deserts in which the wolf devoured the carrion of the dead under the ululating delirium of the night wind. And I repeat my emphasis on the dimensions of Greco-Latin and Chinese culture: no other possesses their almost 3000 years of fruitful riches.


Well, at least we know where to start: great imagery, there, "ululating delirium". Translating this has been such a pain in the ass that I'm going to smoke a whole bunch of dope to escape the blubbering idiocy this guy Porcel has reduced me to. Maybe I'll even hit the state of ululating delirium, but this hash is pretty weak so I don't think I'll get that stoned. Anyway, first, what consumerism? Costumes are dirt-cheap, just paint the kid's face or put a sheet with eyeholes over his head. Candy is not precisely a hugely expensive item either. Maybe it's all a plot of the pumpkin growers, who did some tidy business during October this year. Note the sneer, by the way, in "another of its most banal manifestaciones". Note the fear of immigration. Note the fear of change. Note Porcel's very arrogant assumption that he somehow has more roots than other people, that he has more roots than 300 million Americans. All I can say about my roots are that three of my grandparents were descended from British Isles and Palatinate German ancestors who arrived in the United States before the Revolution, and that the fourth was of Austrian Empire German descent, specifically from Bukovina, who arrived in the 1880s. They'd emigrated from Württemberg to the Austrian Military Frontier out east sometime in the 1700s and from there to Kansas 150 years later. The fact that my roots are from fairly distant places doesn't mean I don't have any. This is something Mr. Porcel should know, as his roots are in Mallorca, not here in Barcelona where he lives. Also, Mr. Porcel should recognize that we Americans, as members of Western civilization, are just as much the cultural heirs of the Greco-Romans (and the Judeo-Christians, too, which Mr. Porcel failed to mention) as anyone else. Or does he think that our laws, our economic and business practices, our popular and cultural traditions, our way of doing things in general, were not inherited by the northern Europeans who founded the United States from their ancestors? And what about the cultural contributions of the descendents of the Africans who were brought to America against their will but have done so much to make America what it is? Of course, what America is today has been influenced by many other cultures as well besides the WASPs and the blacks (the later arrivals influenced America's outside appearance much more than its foundations, though), most notably the Italians, the Eastern European Jews, the Eastern European Slavs, and the Mexicans, all of whose roots are also in the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian tradition. (Right. I know, Mexico, the Aztecs, and all. But they speak Spanish and are Christians.) The only group of non-European Americans that has strongly influenced general American culture is African-Americans; the black heritage in our shared culture is what differentiates us European Americans from other Westerners. Is that what Mr. Porcel's problem really is? Of course not, but he's so anti-American that he doesn't understand that being anti-American means being anti-African-American too. And I haven't noticed Mr. Porcel leading any demonstrations to increase the number of immigrants to Catalonia from North and sub-Saharan Africa.


Oh, by the way, China's existed as a culture for considerably more than 3000 years, and should Mr. Porcel find it congenial, he is most welcome to move there. And did you notice that he didn't mention the fruitful cultural riches of the Jewish heritage, yet again, though Jewish culture is also some 3000 years old and has been as influential as any other on Western civilization except possibly the Greeks?

Very conveniently, our old Homestead account just got cut off for nonpayment. We don't even have to go to the trouble of cancelling, though we are going to call up the bank to make sure payments get cut off anyway. Thanks to the gallant Mr. Crozier (the next thing I'm going to try are some photos and maps), our new website was set up just in time and we didn't even know we'd need it. The old Iberian Notes webpage is still up, but we assume they'll close it down pretty soon. Our old E-mail has been closed down, though, so if you want to write please use this address. We can't access e-mail to or from our old address, so write again if you wrote us and we didn't answer.

So, you know, I was over at Fox News getting the specific results of the Senate elections and noticed that the Alaskan Independence Party had fielded a candidate. Holy shit, I said to myself, here lo these many years I've been airily brushing off Catalan-nationalistic-minded students' questions about whether there were any regional or state "nationalist" parties similar to those in the Spanish autonomous regions, saying, no, no, of course we don't have any of that in America. Well, I have been very wrong about this, everybody, and I sincerely apologize. I will still defend the thesis that there are no important "nationalist" political parties in America, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any at all.

So, I go to the AKIP website, which, by the way, I had a lot of trouble downloading. Their site boasted that they were the third largest political party in Alaska, which I don't buy because I figure the Republicans are #1, the Democrats are a very distant #2, and the Libertarians are a strong #3, leaving the AKIP #4 at best. I dunno. Maybe the Democrats are really #4. You can never figure Alaskan politics. Anyway, a quick glance through some of their screeds showed that they're in favor of "Accountability", which we suppose we are too; "End(ing) Waste in Government", which it's pretty hard not to go along with; "Equal Use of Fish and Game", where our Catalanist friends will probably jump off the AKIP bandwagon, since it's pretty clear by now that this is an Alaskan white people's party demanding equal access with the Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts to fishing and hunting stocks (the Catalanists would of course side with the nonwhite natives, not the white invaders); and "Resource Development", which will cause the lefty Catalanists to freak out, since they're often Greenies too, and Resource Development means mines and oil drilling and logging and other ways of developing, or exploiting, Alaska's natural resources. A point in their favor: though they still want to be independent after Sept. 11, they condemn the terrorist attacks and express their sympathy for the victims.

So I think, wonder if Hawaii has one? Shore nuf, they have at least two. One of them, called Hawai'i Independent and Sovereign, uses very Catalanist-style rhetoric when it says that one of its missions is to "protect our rights and way of life under the occupation system." I think that means, "We'll bitch about being oppressed but are thrilled to grab government subsidies and pork for Hawaiian-folklore projects." Not too many Catalanists would go along with one of their other planks, though, the one that wants to bring back the Hawaiian monarchy. They tend to be rather republican in sentiment, though a few of the older, more romantic, very traditional, Catholic Catalanists (like Mr. X, a well-known gentleman who we are not identifying because we're not sure he's officially out of the closet but who is known for his medievalist proclivities; he's both gay and ultra-Catholic, and is best known for his expertise in heraldry. He'd just love a restoration of the old Crown of Aragon monarchy, or even better the Counts of Barcelona. He'd get all busy drawing up new coats of arms and stuff) probably would like an independent Catalan kingdom or county or whatever.

So then I go back to the Google page and see this web page dedicated to minor American political parties. It turns out that not only do Alaska and Hawaii have pro-independence parties (along with Puerto Rico, of course) but so do Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Vermont. The Vermont guys call themselves the Green Mountain Boys, of course. We're rather afraid to check out the Alabama independence party website, as we can't help but think that very few black people are members. As for the New Jersey independence party, I say more power to them!

The Spanish take on the results of the United States midterm elections is that President Bush has received the support of the American people to continue the War on Terrorism and to attack Iraq. If the Spanish press had been paying attention to Bush's very high approval rating despite the country's economic slowdown, they'd have realized that the President is very popular and that most Americans support his tough stance on terrorism, national defense, and foreign policy. Instead, they indulged in wishful thinking--being a bunch of lefties, the Spanish press doesn't like Bush, and they exaggerated the importance of a few antiwar demonstrations in Cambridge and Berkeley and of a few antiwar statements by the like of Ramsey Clark and Jessica Lange to the point of actually predicting a "repudiation" of war-mongering Bush at the polls. TV3 ran some interviews with the "man on the street" a couple of days ago--on the streets of that typical Middle American place, Manhattan. All three or four of the people on the street who made it on the show criticized Bush and / or America, so they ran this as proof that the Americans were disenchanted with the President. Nothing, of course, was farther from the truth. One thing Spaniards have trouble realizing is that most Americans vote for the candidate and not the party, and it's very possible that someone, say, in the Kansas Third District, might vote for moderate Democrat gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Sibelius (especially since the Republican candidate was religious right, anathema to many mainstream Kansas Republicans still pissed off at what the far right did to the state school board when they got hold of it a few years ago) and for the incumbent congressman, conservative Democrat Dennis Moore, the former tough-on-crime Johnson County DA and a widely respected person who votes with Bush on foreign and defense policy, while still supporting President Bush and voting for popular longtime Republican Senator Pat Roberts, who ran without Democrat opposition anyway. (Well, that's what I did.) The second thing they forget is that Americans vote based on a lot more issues than just foreign policy, and that the Republican success is due to the fact that more Americans sympathize with their ideas and policies in general than with those of the Democrats. And what they haven't realized yet is that the change in the control of the Senate will have no effect on Bush's foreign policy anyway, since he already had majority support of the Senate on the issue of the War on Terrorism even though he didn't have party control. Anyway, we think that the very significant effects that the election results will have are those of unblocking the appropriations for almost all governmental departments except defense and of overcoming Democrat resistance to Bush's judicial appointees, an unconscionable number of whom have been held up in their confirmations by the Democrat leadership anxious to win some, any, even just tiny, political victories against the Republican juggernaut.

Barcelona is so crowded that the average speed of cars is 16 kph on vertical streets and 23 kph on horizontal crosstown streets. That's kilometers, not miles, per hour. There are 12,000 accidents reported per year in Barcelona and about 60 traffic deaths; 42% of the deaths are motorbike riders, 30% are pedestrians, and 28% are in cars. Of the dead in cars, 90% were not wearing their seatbelts. 52% of people injured in Barcelona traffic accidents are also motorbike riders. We remember that several years ago the Economist ran a story in which they ranked forms of transportation by their safety records, calculated in deaths per traveler per kilometer traveled. By ship was the safest means of transport and planes were right behind. Then came trains and buses. Then cars. Then on foot. Then by bicycle. And by far the most dangerous was by motorcycle; you're something like 200 times more likely to be killed traveling a kilometer by motorbike than by ship or airplane. Of course, in Spain they can fix it so you can even die on a ship; the court case that derived from the 1998 sinking of a pleasure boat on the lake at Banyoles, north of Barcelona near the Pyrenees, has finally come around to trial. Typical Spanish speedy justice. 21 French retirees on a group tour died when the boat, which was overloaded and which had been illegally modified, went down just a few dozen feet from the dock. The tragedy would have been much greater if a high-school class of students from Barcelona on a field trip hadn't happened to be right there. The kids thought quickly and went into the water and started pulling people out, saving many lives as these were old people, most of whom probably couldn't swim, in a panic. We would say that counts as real heroism.

Here's a comment from Francesc-Marc Álvaro in today's Vanguardia: "We must not forget that if anything remains from the Spanish tradition, it is the tendency toward all forms of the picaresque, whose vigor is based on a fundamental law: if you don't take advantage of your neighbor, you're a fool, because he will certainly do the same to you, and do a much better job of it. The modernization of Spain has placed limits on the picaresque, but has not eliminated it. The disguise of the pícaro has changed and his tools have become more sophisticated, but the basic ethic of the general populace is the same as in the Siglo de Oro." As Francis Fukuyama said, there is a fundamental lack of trust in Spanish society, one that does not exist in the States or Britain or Germany. Sure, we Americans try to be careful when we buy things or deal with other people, but we consider ourselves and one another to be basically trustworthy folk (with the conspicuous exceptions of used-car dealers and spammers). Since the Spaniards do not consider anyone outside family and friends as trustworthy, not even their neighbors, they're always ready to believe the worst of everything; this is why they're so prone to believe in conspiracy theories, as they believe that everyone is out to screw everyone else and so even the most transparent-seeming action may hide a sinister ulterior motive. The Spaniards, therefore, generally consider Americans to be innocent, naive, overtrusting, and simplistic; most Americans who have spent time in Spain think of Spaniards as cynical and corrupt. Each group considers the other to be a bunch of hypocrites. Individual Spaniards and Americans often get on very well together; hell, I'm married to one and another is my sometimes collaborator on this blog. As groups, we are not great admirers of one another's societies, though.

Says groovy Catalan economist Pedro Schwartz in today's La Vanguardia, "In Spain there reigns a great confusion about what free competetion is, how it works, and what can be expected of it, as I have seen in my years as the President of the Institute of Free Market Studies. In many universities "perfect" competition is defined with so many conditions that it becomes a model that has never existed in reality. There is only perfect competition, it is said, when individuals behave perfectly rationally, when there is an infinite number of buyers and sellers in the market, when these transactors are `perfectly informed, and when the factors of production and the intermediate and final products are perfectly divisible." No wonder most Spanish people just don't get the free-enterprise system if this is what they're teaching their economists and business leaders.

Well, there's good news and bad news on the anti-terrorism front here in Spain. First the good news. The French cops arrested two armed ETA members in the town of Agen near Toulouse. (As much as we complain about the French, we have to admit that their law enforcement and security departments are effective in the War against Terrorism.) The cops decided to check these two guys out because they looked suspicious; originally they thought that these guys, who have not been identified yet, were involved in drug trafficking. Turned out they were both armed, packing pistols. The French immediately arrested them and found that they were carrying internal ETA documents; they're being held in Toulouse and the French have sent their fingerprints to Madrid so that they can be identified. Now the bad news. Two bombs in the Vigo area of Galicia went off, killing two people and wounding two more. The police think that this is a local job, since the bombs do not carry the hallmarks of having been either the work of ETA or Spain's other terrorist group, the communist GRAPO. Early suspicions focused immediately upon GRAPO, since Vigo has served as a GRAPO home base and a center for GRAPO activity, but the cops are now convinced they weren't involved; the cops are also discounting the idea of a war between drug-trafficking and smuggling gangs, common in Galicia, because of the nature of the victims, ordinary, decent Joes. The dead couple were nice middle-class people; the husband was a middle manager at Pescanova. The injured are a man who worked in a Citibank branch and his 12-year-old son. These people are not involved in organized crime or terrorism. Could it be a Unabomber-style terrorist? We have no idea but hope the perps get busted soon. Also in France, in the Lyon banlieue, eight people have been arrested, accused of complicity in the Al Qaeda suicide bombing of a Tunisian synagogue last April which killed 18 people. Good.

Here's one for the Darwin Awards. Last Friday night in the working-class Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a group of seven Ecuadoran immigrants, at an impromptu party, drank a bottle of antifreeze thinking it was moscatel. They had found, while looking through a skip full of abandoned furniture, a bottle with a moscatel label on it that was filled with a greenish-blue liquid. (Real moscatel is golden-brown in color.) In order to celebrate their find of the furniture, they decided to have some drinks, so they put the bottle in the fridge and then drank it down. One of the seven victims said that she'd had only three glasses and that it was very good, nice and sweet. Anyway, on Saturday morning, they began to feel a lot worse than they should have, with vomiting and hallucinations. They went to a hospital where all were treated for possible liver and kidney damage; three have been released and the other four will make it. Because they all survived, we don't feel like ghouls making jokes about it, and we can tell you that the English-speaking community of Barcelona has been admonishing its members constantly, Woodstock-style, "Don't drink the blue moscatel." This is a true Darwin Award winner, as there was an eighth woman who was pregnant and so declined to drink anything; she was obviously the one who put two and two together and figured out it was the "moscatel" that had made them sick. She was the only one of the eight who demonstrated the qualities of fitness necessary to improve the species by passing on her genes. The other seven deserve to go sterile after pulling a dumb stunt like drinking a bottle of stuff they found in a garbage skip. This is not an urban legend. The hospitals involved were Esperit Sant in Santa Coloma and Sant Pau in Barcelona. The director of the Generalitat's department of Public Health, Lluís Salleras, made a public announcement that the poisoning had been accidental and that adulterated moscatel was not being sold anywhere. The author of the newspaper article, in Monday, November 4's La Vanguardia, is Luis Benvenuty.

Spanish political update: Jordi Pujol, prime minister of Catalonia, of the conservative Catalanist party Convergence and Union (CiU), has shaken up his cabinet according to the wishes of party heir apparent Artur Mas. Whoop-te-doo, you think. Yeah, it's just a shuffle of names, but it's the most power that old-time political boss Pujol has ever surrendered to any of his designated heirs, of which he has had several in his 22 years of power, all of whom he first made and then broke. The problem with CiU is that it's really a melange of people with very different political beliefs, from lefty progressives to Christian Democrats, united by their strong Catalanism and by Pujol's leadership. When Pujol goes, and he has promised to retire and let Mas be the party's leader in the next elections within a year from now, will CiU hold together? Or will the more conservative and less Catalanist CiU voters move to the conservative centralist People's Party (PP), with the more lefty and less Catalanist CiU voters moving to the Socialists and the more Catalanist and lefty CiU voters moving to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), leaving CiU with only its Catalanist conservative core? If that happens, then Pasqual Maragall, the Socialist candidate in Catalonia and former mayor of Barcelona, will be the next Catalan prime minister, defeating Mas and the other parties soundly. Probably not too much would change, though; Maragall would be less anxious to expand the role of Catalan as Catalonia's State language than CiU, but he'd spend just as much money foolishly and run up just as much debt as Pujol has. (Pujol's conservatism doesn't keep him from passing out lots of big juicy helpings of pork.) Should Maragall win the 2003 Catalan elections, he'll be beautifully placed to become the first serious Catalan candidate for Prime Minister of Spain after PP Prime Minister José María Aznar's successor (either Rodrigo Rato, Jaime Mayor Oreja, or Mariano Rajoy) stomps Socialist candidate José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the 2004 national parliamentary election. Maragall will have been in power in Catalonia for five years, assuming he gets reelected in 2007, and Prime Minister of Catalonia is a very important job in Spain, similar, say, to Governor of California in the United States. Maragall will have plenty of weight to throw around as a big vote-getter in a big, rich region, and would be the logical Socialist choice in the nationals in 2008 assuming that Zapatero gets beat in 2004, which seems a safe assumption.

Thanks very much to everyone who has made nice comments; we'll pass them on to the redoubtable Patrick Crozier of UK Transport and CrozierVision who has done yeoman work setting this up with very little help from us. "Jesús Gil" of Atlético Rules and Xavier Basora of Buscaraons, our cobloggers from here in the Blogdom of Spain, were kind enough to provide very helpful advice. Xavier has a post from several days up on the stupidity of an American petition going around calling for American divestment from Europe that is well worth a read. It's here. Thanks also to all blogmeisters for updating the links.

Any native English speaker interested in helping out some linguists should click here and take their Dialect Survey. At the end there are some groovy maps that show the regional distribution of the some 120 items you're asked to report your pronunciation and / or lexicon about. The survey's aimed at American and Canadian dialectology but they'd love to hear from you if you're a non-American native English speaker too.

James Taranto has a bit at the end of Best of the Web about a Madagascar soccer team. We saw this several days ago in La Vanguardia. What happened was that, with the score 0-0, the Stade Olympique team became enraged with the referee. In protest, they proceeded to intentionally kick the ball into their own goal, and continued to do so for the rest of the game. They lost 149-0, an apparent all-time record in an official soccer game in any league. The Madagascar Soccer Federation is very put out. We will point out that Reuters is a British news service and is thus perfectly justified in referring to the sport we Yanks call soccer as football, much as we hate to stick up for Reuters.

This article from National Review Online provides an interesting perspective on why exactly the French, both left- and right-wingers, are screaming bloody murder that the Americans want to take over Iraqi oil: because French companies control at least 23% of it and are afraid that a post-Saddam government would void said contracts. Well, that probably would be a consequence of a war against Iraq, but getting oil drilling or exploring contracts for American companies is not the business of the United States government, strange as that may sound to French (or Spanish) ears. America doesn't care whose company drills or refines or does whatever to the oil as long as it makes it to the world market. Hell, our boycott of Iraq shows that we can live just fine without Iraqi oil. And if what we wanted to do was grab said oil, wouldn't we logically already have done it many years ago?

What the French are doing when they ascribe base motives to the Americans is simply projecting what they would do in such a situation. They would do what they thought was in the interests of France, whether that was moral or right or not. They would go to war for 23% of Iraqi oil, so they think we would, too. The abovementioned article points that France sold some $20 billion worth of jet fighters and the like to Saddam's Iraq, and the French government is a part-owner of the French aerospace industry. This means that Mitterand and Chirac and Jospin and Juppé thought the profit they could make off selling arms to one of the world's nastiest dictators was in the interest of France. They all probably figured that it wasn't too likely that a Frenchman would get within target range of any of these weapons anyway.

But, cry the French and their Spanish acolytes like La Vanguardia's José Martí Gómez, the Americans are the ones who armed Iraq! Well, first, if that was true, then why wasn't Iraq using American arms against us in the Gulf War? Second, it's true that America, figuring that what we were really rooting for in the Iraq-Iran War was for both sides to lose, "tilted" toward whichever side we thought was behind. Remember the Iran-Contra scandal? What that was all about was selling arms to the Ayatollah, if we remember correctly mostly Soviet-made formerly Arab equipment captured by the Israelis in one of their many wars, with which to fight Iraq, and sending the money to fund the contras in Nicaragua. We were arming the Iranians as well as the Iraqis, mostly at different times and in smallish quantities.

There are a couple of France-based conspiracy theories going on in Continental Europe. One involves a supposed spy satellite operation called Echelon run by the CIA and MI5 or 6 or whichever it is and, like, Australia and Canada and New Zealand are involved. The English-speaking conspirators spy on France and steal French industrial secrets, with which they perfidiously make more money than the Jacques Brel-listening surrender monkeys. We have no idea whether there is any truth at all in this story. We doubt it. Another one is Operation Condor, which was supposedly a plot through which the United States organized the military juntas that ran much of South America in the late 1970s. Again, we doubt it. Another is a supposed smear job on "Latin" ex-Francoist Juan Antonio Samaranch by the "Anglo-Saxon" press; the French and Spanish and Italians are convinced that Samaranch is their man and all the corruption talk is just the jealous Anglos trying to get the Latin guy. A very common theory with no basis at all is that the Americans set the prices for such goods as coffee, forcing the Latin American peasantry into poverty by holding down prices. This one quite obviously orignated in Latin America and spread from there into Spain, France, and Italy.

Check out the Linguablogs web ring if you're interested in language. Right there are links to ten or so interesting blogs, at least for us linguists, teachers, translators, and the like. We get the idea that these guys are sort of their own little blog ghetto, as we'd never seen any linguistics sites before and suddenly came across not one but a lot. We're not sure if we count as a linguistics blog, but we do seem to find ourselves talking about language a lot.

We are now true Blogger users. A post just got eaten.

You know the holiday season is coming up in Spain when you see, in the neighborhood shops and bars, participations in the Christmas lottery for sale. The Spanish Christmas lottery, known as "El Gordo" (The Big One), is supposedly the biggest single lottery draw in the world, in the sense that it distributes the most money. It's also supposed to be the lottery that returns the highest percentage of the takings in the payoffs. A décimo in the lottery costs 20 euros, and there are 66,000 numbers. The payoff for the Fat One is 200,000 euros per decimo, 10,000 times what you paid for your ticket. There are lots of very appetizing smaller prizes. You're not the only person holding your number; many other people, quite likely thousands, are certainly holding it. Décimos are traditionally bought up by civic groups (the block Christmas lighting commission, the fiesta mayor association, choral groups, football fan clubs, and the like) and then divided up into much smaller participaciones which are resold door-to-door and in shops and bars. A 20% surcharge is added to benefit the group in question. So, for example, the local choral group is selling one-euro participations for one euro twenty. If you buy a ticket you're helping them out and taking a little flyer on the lottery as well. Most people buy several different participations and perhaps a whole décimo or two as well, all of different numbers, so you're riding several different horses, as it were. It is not unusual for people to buy fifty or a hundred bucks' worth of tickets, or more. We usually wind up with twenty-five dollars or so "invested".

December 22 is the day of the prize draw every year, and the numbers themselves are selected by, get this, blind children from a special school in Madrid; that, we suppose, is about as innocent as a hand can get. The whole country spends all morning watching the drawing on TV, and by the time of the afternoon news on TV the Big One has been drawn along with all the other prizes. The newspapers come out with special editions and everyone is checking his participations. The fun part is that the prize money is widely spread around since most people hold very small stakes in the number, just a couple of euros or so, and so the probably thousands of holders collect twenty or thirty or forty thousand euros each--ten thousand times the money they put in. The holders are concentrated in the one town or neighborhood where the number was distributed in the local shop or bar, so if you win, you and everybody you know are rather better off but not life-changingly rich. The TV networks immediately send their reporters to wherever the Big One and the several second, third, fourth and fifth prizes have fallen and film joyous small crowds jumping around and drinking cava. The clichés, repeated every year, are that the Big One ha caído en un barrio popular (it landed in a working-class neighborhood) and that the prize money has been muy repartido (widely shared). And then it's Christmas, so if you won it's a very nice one and if you didn't win, you forget about it in a hurry.

Here's the sports update for all you folks that are just dying for it. In last weekend's Spanish first division soccer, FC Barcelona put up a poor show in Santander but got out of there with a 1-1 tie. Real Madrid failed again to win, tying 0-0 against Deportivo under the rain again in Coruña. Valencia won against Español here in Barcelona, 0-1. Valencia has scored the second-most goals so far (17) and has given up the fewest (5). That's barely half a goal allowed per match. Real Sociedad won again, 0-1 in Villareal. We still think they'll come back to earth. The top of the standings: Real Sociedad 20 points, Valencia 17, Mallorca 15, Celta 14, Betis, R. Madrid and Deportivo 13, Barcelona and Málaga 12. In the Mutha Fucka watch, he scored 10 points in Barcelona's 93-82 loss at Caja San Fernando.