The Vangua has a story by Rafael Poch, who's normally their Moscow correspondent and is quite obviously in the pocket of the Russian government (whether from misuse of his own free will, because they slip him a few lechugas, or because they have photos of him with a handsome sailor in St. Petersburg, I don't know). Anyway, he went off to China for some Sino-Russian summit meeting, which received absolutely no coverage in the rest of the world because any joint declaration between Vladimir Putin and whoever is running China--or not, as the case may be--is worth less than the Internet bandwidth it takes up. Mr. Poch reports over and over about how the Russians and the Chinese are going to get together with India and Indonesia and, like, Iran or Vietnam or somebody and set up an alliance that will be a counterweight to Washington. This is extreme wishful thinking on the part of Mr. Poch and his editors. Instead of advocating something that might be a little painful to increase Europe's relative power compared to the United States (by, say, increasing defense spending, or cutting social spending and reducing intrusive regulation, things which would be good for all concerned in every way), Mr. Poch would prefer to have somebody else provide that power counterweight. Why he seems to favor that counterweight being still-Communist and undoubtedly despotic China and unstable, mafia-ridden Russia is beyond me, but seems like the height of irresponsibility.

By the way, a very dumb notion that is being peddled around here is that the United States is applying pressure on the EU to admit Turkey in order to dilute the naturaleza of Europe. The Vangua's editors and especially the Catholic bigot and anti-Semite Xavier Bru de Sala are pushing this line. See, Europe's nature is Christian, and if they have to let Islamic Turkey in, it will somehow dilute Europe's natural essences and bodily fluids and therefore weaken the EU, leaving Washington paramount and without challengers. This is completely nuts, of course. An EU including Turkey would suddenly have a much more kick-ass army than it does now. Turkey, if given a deadline by the EU for admission, would have to take those steps necessary that still remain between where it is now and real democracy. And, of course, EU entry for Turkey would nail down that large, populous, strategically important country as both an ally and market and prove that Islamic societies can follow the guidelines of democratic capitalism. Perhaps American pressure is having some effect; Schröder and Chirac proposed the opening of negotiations with Ankara in July 2005 if Turkey fulfills the Copenhagen criteria for admission, which apply to all new candidates. Sounds fair enough to me.

Anyway, a few days ago in the Vanguardia there was a story about what representatives of the various political parties thought about putting a plank on how Christianity is one of the pillars on which the EU is based in the European constitution. The Communist, Socialist, Republican Left, and, guess what, the conservative People's Party were all against it. The only ones in favor were the Catalan Nationalists, demonstrating, first, how strong the connections between Catalan nationalism and the Catalan Church are and second, that Catalan nationalism, while not racist in nature, is not precisely real open to folks who aren't Catalan nationalists, with all that implies.

Getting back to Mr. Poch, today's big story is that he's in Chungking, that the place is an absolute hellhole, but it's the biggest city in the world with 34 million inhabitants. I said, "Hmmm, who knows, might be true, there is huge urban growth in China," and proceeded to read farther. Then Mr. Poch lets slip that the Chungking city limits include 80,000 square kilometers, which would be 200 kilometers X 400 kilometers, 120 by 240 miles, or a good bit more than half of Kansas. I bet if you counted everything between Wilmington and New Haven as one city it'd top Chungking. Or what if we counted southern Holland, northern Belgium, and the Ruhr as one city? That'd probably top Chungking, too. And neither of those places are hellholes.

I got a Google hit for "Bayern Mencken football team". Uh, that's Bayern München, or as we call it Bayern Munich. H.L. Mencken was an early 20th century American essayist and critic. Important to distinguish between the two.

OK. This is it. James Taranto's column includes this testimony:

"Saddam was something of a loner, famous for carrying an iron bar wherever he went that he would heat until it was white hot and then use to impale unwary animals--dogs, cats, whatever made the mistake of coming within his reach."

Saddam impaled kitty cats and puppy dogs with a white-hot poker. I have five cats, and I am now even more in favor of getting rid of Saddam than before. How can anyone, especially the liberal cat-lovers who listen to NPR, be against overthrowing a kitty-cat torturer?

The news from the Galicia oil spell is bad. Spilled fuel has reached the middle Galician coast in quantity between Corrubedo on the south and Cedeiro to the north. Fishing and shellfish gathering are banned in that area, which includes the major ports of La Coruña and El Ferrol. There are several different smaller pools of fuel moving into the three Rías Baixas, the three southernmost fjordlike inlets in Galicia closest to the Portuguese frontier. This is said to be the richest area in either Europe or the world for shellfish gathering. Other pools are making their way north of Galicia into the Bay of Biscay; fuel in amounts so far insignificant is washing up on the shores of Asturias and Cantabria, but it's moving toward the Basque Country and France. There are five suction boats working to prevent the fuel from moving north and six trying to keep it out of the Rías Baixas. One new Italian suction boat arrived yesterday and another is arriving today. Thousands of recipients and containers of various sizes have been set up at the Galician ports to hold the fuel being brought out by the suction boats, who are working heroically. Thousands of volunteers, cleaning fuel up with shovels and buckets, are already working, and more thousands are expected to arrive this weekend. There may be so many that they get in the way. If you're thinking of traveling to Galicia to help, you might help more if you stayed home. If you want to do something ecological, clean up a vacant lot in your neighborhood and plant some flowers or something there.

Meanwhile, estimates of the amount of fuel leaked range from an almost certainly too low government figure of under 11,000 tons, while the wildest high estimate is 55,000 tons. The Portuguese are claiming that more fuel is leaking from the sunken wreck of the ship, which the Spanish deny; they claim that the bathyscape inspections that a French ship and crew made prove that no fuel is leaking out.

Remember, this situation is not the Spaniards' fault. The boat was perfectly legally passing by the Spanish coast on the way from one place to another, neither of which is in Spain. It just happened to get in trouble near Spain. Now, you can argue that the Spanish government should have reacted more quickly and done more earlier, but you can't blame them for the situation's having happened in the first place. This situation is a farily serious political blow to the conservative PP governments in power in both Madrid and in the Galicia autonomous region. Most Spaniards think they've bungled the job so far, and Prime Minister Aznar hasn't visited the affected area yet. Remei said cynically, "He's supposed to pay attention to his constituents. Well, he stayed at the NATO meeting instead of going to Galicia. That's because he wants to be President of the European Union next. All those government leaders and foreign ministers were there, and they're the people he wants votes from now. They're his new constituents."

I was looking through Paul Johnson's Modern Times as long as I'd gotten it down from the bookshelf, and I came across the conflict between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. It reminded me of those "Ginger or Mary Ann?" ads that used to be on TV and were based on the mid-90s parlor game in which the questioner gave a choice between two pop culture icons; the choice the answerer made was supposed to tell you something about the answerer's personality, you know, like "Lennon or McCartney?" So I made up a list. Feel free to put down your answers in the Commernts section, in which case I will psychoanalyze you, or to add more questions.

Sartre or Camus?
Carlos Fuentes or Octavio Paz?
Burke or Paine?
Whitman or Dickinson?
Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin?
Jefferson or Hamilton?
Eisenstein or Riefenstahl?
Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson?
Byron or Keats?
Wellington or Marlborough?
Ingres or Delacroix?
Lee or Grant?
P.D. James or Dorothy Sayers?
John Ford or Howard Hawks?
JFK or RFK?
Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde?
Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra?
George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde?
García Lorca or Machado?
Velázquez or Goya?

There's twenty, that's plenty.

Chomsky-bashing is kind of like masturbation in the sense that you always know you'll want to do it again. Here are a few smacks upside Noam's head from Front Page.

From Right Wing News:

14) Goatse.cx: I don't know who popularized this incredibly disgusting web page with a picture of some guy's naked ass and horribly deformed anus, but they should be beaten with a nine iron until they talk in an Al Gore style monotone for the rest of their lives. I could provide a link to this page or worse yet, trick you into going there like many people do on forums and other websites, but that would be unconscionable. Take my word for it -- trust me -- you don't want to see this website.

You heard John. Not me, the other John. Pay heed. Do not go to this site. Whatever you do.

Actually, of course, prison rape is no joke. Check out this report from Human Rights Watch. You might look at a few of their links if you want further information. Christina Hoff Summers, in Who Stole Feminism? asserts that quite probably there are more male rape victims, due almost exclusively to prison rape, than female rape victims. We're not taking sides, we're just saying that we're against anybody's getting raped.

We've written several times about the English-school frauds that have been news in Spain over this summer and fall. Well, Alfredo Ibáñez, the boss of Brighton, which collapsed in October, was arrested last Friday by police who came with a search warrant and found the company books, which Ibáñez had taken with him when he "disappeared" to his palatial house in Cabrils.

Brighton has always been known to local English teachers as a rotten place to work, where they paid poorly and usually late, didn't provide the teachers with professional materials and support, and threw together students of widely different abilities and ages in the same class. The only people who would work for them were newcomers, who didn't know any better, and people who were desperate for some income somehow.

When I came back to Barcelona in fall 1994 after getting my master's degree back in Kansas, I applied for a job at Brighton, needing money right away. I went in and there was absolute chaos. I finally found someone who could give me an application; all they asked was very basic information, and then they gave you this long psychology test. I wrote at the top of the application, "I think this is pretty silly but I'll play along," and filled out the questions honestly. Then I waited a long time and some guy who was ugly and had no social skills interviewed me in Spanish. By then I'd sussed out that this place was extremely bad news. They never called me back, which is just as well since I found a good job at the beginning of 1995. I did know an English girl named Hannah who was around here in 1998 or so; she worked for them and had to threaten to take them to court to get her last couple of paychecks.

Brighton kept going downhill after that; Ibañez spent a lot of money on expensive full-page ads in La Vanguardia, from where it is rumored that he got kickbacks, and there are a lot of rumors that he spends a lot of money on cocaine, among other things essential to a rather pimpish lifestyle. By the beginning of this year they were having trouble meeting rents and payroll. They were evicted from a couple of their centers, and they haven't paid all their teachers all they owe them; a lot of people are short one or two months' pay.

According to Ibáñez, the bankruptcy of another English-school chain, Opening, that used similar techniques of very aggressive, almost violent selling caused the number of students to drop 70% at Brighton and drove them to the wall in October 2002. Ibáñez took off with the books and the computer and students and workers sacked the offices when they heard the news. So, you figure, no big deal for the students, right? The school closes, they stop paying, right? Wrong. When students had inquired about Brighton, they were immediately subjected to a hard sell and they agreed to sign up for a year or more at a time. (And, Sr. González, if you sign up for THREE years you get a 75% discount on the third year!) The students were given the impression that they were signing a deal by which they would pay Brighton X amount of money a month for Y months of English classes, and that they could stop paying if they stopped attending classes. What they were actually doing is signing up for a bank loan; the bank paid Brighton up front and the student's deal was thereafter with the bank. And the bank wants to be paid back the money it gave to Brighton, which the student legally borrowed. The bank is fully within its rights. So if you're one of the unfortunate 3500 Brighton students, or one of the some 5000 Opening students, in the Barcelona area, who signed up for one of those deals, you're going to be paying off your bank loan for whatever remains of Y months, and Brighton or Opening already has the cash.

Ibánez has been indicted for fraud, and the money involved may be as much as three million euros, all of which Ibáñez has certainly spent. The prosecution asserts that Brighton was still accepting money from students while they knew they were going to have to close up, that people who tried to pay by Visa card were instructed to go to a nearby ATM and get the money in cash, and, get this, that during the month that separated the collapse of Opening and the collapse of Brighton, Brighton aggressively tried to recruit former Opening students, who had already been defrauded once, offering them special huge discounts on English courses. What gall. ¡Vaya cara! That's almost as bad as the official definition of chutzpah: the guy who murders his parents and then at his trial throws himself upon the mercy of the court as an orphan. Hacienda, our local IRS, is also coming down on Ibáñez; he owes them and Social Security more than a million euros in back taxes.

So they've thrown Ibáñez in the Modelo, the notorious "Black Hole of Catalonia", the worst of the Catalan jails. Since last Friday he'd been in one of the holding cells at the Via Layetana police station, and now he's being held without bail, awaiting trial, with the worst father-stabbers, mother-rapers, and father-rapers in this whole lovely land of six million. Ever hear that song, "Texas Jail Cell", by Jon Wayne? "Ossifer, Ossifer, this here big Indian next to me says he needs some sexual healing! Ow! Hey!" Deliverance is on TV tonight; hope it doesn't give any of the guys in the slam any ideas.

Here's a story from Front Page on the loony Christian left in the US. The language and rhetoric used by Christian far-leftists in the US is exactly that used by such Spanish organizations as Justicia i Pau (Justice and Peace). Thomas Friedman of the New York Times imagines President Bush writing a letter to the leaders of the Muslim world. One nitpick: Bush wouldn't really have called the deaths of innocent Palestinians "shameful", as the Israelis are not intentionally killing Palestinian civilians. He would have said something like "tragic and unfortunate".

There's a discussion going on in the Comments section about Henry Kissinger. Feel free to join in. Just scroll down a few posts.

That stupid asshole Liam Gallagher picked a fight in Munich and lost it along with two of his teeth. He started trashing his hotel room (come on, dude, that wasn't even cool when Keith Moon used to do it in the Sixties), they called the cops, Gallagher kicked a cop in the chest, and the cop beat the crap out of him. Gallagher spent the night in jail and has been charged with assault and battery. Good. I hope they convict him and lock him up for a few months. What a jerk. This reminds me of the time a few years back when Marky Mark Wahlberg got his ass kicked in Manchester for hitting on the wrong chick in a Pizza Hut, of all places.

Here's some good news for tourists visiting Barcelona and Catalonia. Currently, Barcelona Metropolitan Transport runs what they call the Bus Turístic, a double-decker bus that runs a loop around Barcelona with stops at all the major tourist attractions. It's a good idea and it even makes a profit; it gets a million users a year and last year it made six million euros. And it's a very simple, practical way for Barcelona to show itself off and leave a good taste in visitors' mouths so they'll want to come back. Never forget that tourism is Spain's largest industry, and anything that makes it easier and more fun to be a tourist that doesn't cost us locals an arm and a leg is good for all of us in the long run. Anyway, what they are planning to do is launch two new tourist bus routes, one to Girona (the old Jewish quarter, the Arab baths, the medieval churches) and maybe Figueres (the Dalí museum), and the other to Tarragona (Roman ruins, including an amphitheater, a triumphal arch, and an aqueduct, a great archaeology museum, and a medieval cathedral, along with lovely views over the ocean.) These places are all well worth visiting and deserve some touristic promotion, too; this will be good business for everyone concerned and will make life much more convenient for tourists, especially those interested in visting the aqueduct and the triumphal arch, which are both a few kilometers away from downtown Tarragona. Even better, the new routes will be a public-private venture, with two well-known bus companies taking part. The service will begin next spring.

Here's a story from today's Vanguardia, on page eight in the International News section.. Steven Erlanger, a New York Times correspondent in Europe, spoke in Barcelona yesterday on America and Europe. Here's what he had to say:

"The Americans view Europeans as teenagers asking for the keys to the car."

"(The alliance forged after World War II) is breaking up; this is inevitable and dangerous, but that's the way it is."

"The Americans feel that they're at war; the Europeans don't. (9-11) was an act of war and the US responded as a country attacked in a wartime situation."

"(Germany perceives the world) as a peaceful place where no one has a conflict with them, the Germans, and they only want social welfare and ecologism from the EU....This is a tacit and not-thought-through view of the world...Seeing the world as a benign place is strange and absurd, and it creates an unhealthy European dependence on a United States that protects them."

"(Europe is used to territorial terrorism, like the IRA and the ETA), and it does not understand what 9-11 meant and what Al Qaeda is...a form of totalitarianism that promises a world changed through war, sacrifice, and the dictatorship of an elite."

"There's no way in which a Mohammed Atta could one day feel himself self-identified as a German...Europe does not integrate its first and second-generation immigrants. And it doesn't want Turkey in the EU, something essential to legitimate moderate Islamism as an alternative to Islamic jihad."

"Europe is a fantasyland, a wonderful bourgeois paradise that doesn't believe that what it is creating deserves to be defended...Europe should begin taking itself seriously so that the United States will begin to take it seriously, too...What are the Europeans willing to fight for? This is a question that Europeans never ask themselves."

The Vangua reporter, Plàcid García-Planas, was favorably impressed by Erlanger, who comes off as rather a Cassandra in the article. He says, "(Messages like Erlanger's) are a breath of fresh air, a hard but essential wind to help clear up something that needs to be cleared up: the values for which the citizens of the different NATO countries are willing to fight for." Intelligent, sensible man.

This piece by a Canadian journalist on recent diplomatic blunders and Canada's military preparedness is well worth a read. David Frum's new daily political column in NRO is an excellent source for those who want to keep up with US politics; today's takes apart new Presidential candidate John Kerry of Massachussetts and calls the Dems dum-dums, a party going nowhere because their current stances are simply reactive to whatever the Reps do. They have no coherent platform of policies and are taking the initiative on nothing. In his blog on Slate, maverick Democrat Mickey Kaus takes a piece out of Kerry, too, and links to some other non-conservative writers who are also Kerry-critical. If the moderate-liberal New Republic is slagging off Kerry two whole years before the 2004 elections, his candidacy will go nowhere. (But then we all know that TNR is in Al Gore's pocket.) But I don't think the Dems have any concievable candidate who can derail Bush, barring unforeseen disaster. Kerry might be the best that they can get, in which case the Reps win in a walkover. Glenn Reynolds links to this article by Barry Rubin from Foreign Affairs called "The Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism", which you ought to check out; no earth-shaking developments here, but an excellent summary of the situation. James Taranto links to the just-released British government report on human rights abuses in Saddam's Iraq. It makes horrific reading. Among the sources are such notorious right-wing imperialist groups as the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. This is a must-read. Get this, AI is slamming the British government for warmongering, using this report to justify a war against Saddam. Well, the report bloody well justifies a war against Saddam. I can't believe that any responsible person can read such an indictment and not demand that something be done to stop these crimes.

Here's a piece by Oriana Falacci, the Italian journalist, on Israel and European anti-Semitism. This is a polemic; Falacci is very emotionally involved with this issue, and she exaggerates the level of anti-Semitism in Europe. It exists, though, and I for one am concerned about it. There are very few Jews in Barcelona, a couple of thousand at the very most, and people here simply have had no personal experience with Jews and so don't see them as people like you and me who happen not to eat pork and who get the tips of their willies clipped off. Jews are seen as aliens, not frightening ones, but definitely not just plain Spaniards like everyone else. Many people here still believe that Jews hold a great deal of power, especially financial power, and that Jews are behind-the-scenes manipulators in the Spanish worldview's great conspiracy that is made up of everything. There's a good deal of anti-Israeli feeling around here, and one thing you'll hear a lot is that America supports Israel because of the Jewish lobby in Washington. To be honest, there is an influential, organized Jewish lobby in the States, just as every group from the undertakers to the universities to the underwear manufacturers to the Ugandan refugees has a lobby. This lobby is a factor in the degree of American support for Israel, but it is by no means the main factor. The main factors are that Israel is the only 100% democracy in the Middle East--hell, Israel and Turkey are the only countries in the region that could be called stable--that it is a stalwart American ally, that it is a real military power, and that we all owe the Jews a homeland of their own after so many hundreds of years of brutal abuse culminating in the Holocaust. Spaniards don't usually dislike Jews as individuals, though. They did a survey a couple years back among Madrid university students, and they found that 36.5% had a negative opinion of Gypsies, 35% viewed drug addicts negatively, 30.5% disliked alcoholics, 26.5% are down on Arabs, 26% don't much care for Communists, and 23.5% are not too big on Catalans. Below the Catalans come the French, the Americans, and priests. At the bottom come the Basques, with 11% disfavorable, and Jews, with 6% disfavorable. (Source: Manuel Trallero, Los siete pecados catalanes.)

I received this bit of spam today. It looks like one of those typical Nigerian scams, but this one has an interesting twist. The baited hook is that if you don't cooperate and open a bank account with your money so they can transfer alleged funds there, the money in question will go to buy arms "to promote War in Africa". So it's your moral duty to help these guys get this money out of the country. In addition to the greed motivation, they're appealing to the altruistic motivation. Great scam. Somebody must bite occasionally, or they wouldn't continue sending these things to everybody in the world.

You want to see a piece of real American history? Check this out. When you get there, click on "Gallery of Photos". This was a famous museum exhibition a few years ago. People with sensitive stomachs should not click here, and young children should not see this. This is what we had to overcome, all of us Americans, and we're not all the way finished with overcoming it. But the great majority of us are pretty decent people, and we're doing what we can. As for the rest of you, please don't condemn us without remembering the similar horrors in your recent pasts. You have to confront the past head-on if you're going to make any real changes in your society. This is why I am a moderate libertarian conservative. I firmly believe that a representative democracy with the rule of law, a Constitution, and a Bill of Rights, with government as limited as possible and individual freedom as extensive as possible, and with emphasis on the rights of life, liberty, property, and, yes, Jefferson was right, the pursuit of happiness, is the way to promote everybody's well-being. If I weren't convinced that democratic capitalism is the best system for everyone, the rich and the poor, the Americans and the Mozambicans, then I wouldn't be in favor of it.

And I hate those evil people who monopolize power without respecting the intrinsic human rights supposedly guaranteed to everyone by democratic capitalism. I can live with some dictatorships, though I don't love them--but reasons of state sometimes take precedence. You think I like being allied with Musharraf, for example? Hell, no, but sometimes you just have to hold your nose. There are some dictatorships that are so evil they must be crushed, though, like the Allies crushed the Axis or like NATO crushed Communism. I seriously think that the point has come where it is time to say that enough is enough and, since we helped to get rid of our former dictator friends like Marcos, Duvalier, Somoza, Pinochet, Chun Doo Hwan, and Trujillo, who apparently got so out of control even the Americans couldn't stand him anymore and had a CIA hit squad knock him off, it's about time we got rid of the former Soviet satellite governments in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, as well as the goddamn Saudis. We can do it. We've got the men, we've got the ships, we've got the money too, as the old rhyme went.. Come on, you international Leftists. How can you possibly defend these regimes that not only tyrannize their own people but also pose a threat to their neighbors? Anyone really in favor of human rights would be jumping up and down and screaming "Three cheers for the 101st Airborne and the Desert Rats!" as they captured brutal jailers and secret police assassins while rolling straight to Baghdad, Damascus, and when we get through with them, Riyadh. Note that I didn't mention Iran; I'm convinced that they're evolving toward democracy, maybe a sort of weird kind of it--imagine a country with free elections but a rather modernized version of the sharia law code. Iran was never a Soviet stooge; they hated the Soviets even more than the Americans, and I think they're salvagable without violence. As for the rest of them, somebody needs to let them know that flights to the French Riviera are quite cheap and it might be real smart for them to be on the next one.

Des is in transition between troll status and useful citizen status like the rest of us; he's got another good question which deserves a good answer. We talked about this back on the old site (which for some reason hasn't been taken down yet), several times, but it's about time we talked about it again.

How is Spain and the ordinary Spanish Juan coping with the North African influx?
Des | Email | 11.30.02 - 10:53 p

a href="http://www.lavanguardia.es/web/20020522/23891892.html">This link is to a May 22, 2002 article from La Vanguardia on the subject. When asked their opinion of immigration--and everyone in Spain associates immigration with North African Muslims--42% of Spaniards said they had positive feelings about the general concept of immigration, while 31% were against. I suppose the other 27% are confused and could go either way depending on how things develop. However, here in Catalonia, the figures were 37% negative-35% positive, with 28% not real sure how to spell their last names, much less opine on anything of serious import. (Look, everywhere you go 50% of people are of below-average intelligence by definition. Catalan dumbasses are no smarter nor dumber than dumbasses anywhere else, with one possible exception.) The theory that Catalans are more anti-immigration because they are one of the regions of Spain with most immigrants is defeated by the fact that other Spanish regions like Madrid and Andalusia also have a lot of immigrants and their citizens are much more favorable toward immigrants than the Catalans. What I'm afraid this means is that, simply, there are more racists in Catalonia than in other parts of Spain. A clue to this is that 52% of Catalans, but only 41% of Spaniards in general, say there is a connection between immigration and crime. The age groups in all of Spain that were most anti-immigration were the over-55 group, which isn't too surprising or too worrying, because these folks are going to die off, and the 18-24 group, which is something that Spanish society ought to be concerned about. The lower, lower-middle, and middle classes are anti-immigration, while the upper-middle and upper classes are in favor. (Remei says, "They're hypocrites. They'd never eat with a Moroccan.")

Gràcia, where I live, is a very multi-culti and boho kind of place, and here we're all pro-immigrant, because we see the advantages of immigration. First, the first thing immigrants do is open up restaurants, and now there are many Lebanese, North African, Egyptian, and Syrian places around here. At some of them you get good food and two of them are rather high-dollar, or should I say high-euro. Second, this is a very crowded neighborhood, the most crowded in Barcelona, which is the most crowded city in Europe as far as inhabitants per hectare goes. I calculated it once and Gràcia is well more densely-populated than Manhattan. This means that there is all kinds of small-scale economic activity around here, and I mean shops the size of your bedroom are all over the place. So a lot of cheap labor is needed, and everywhere we go we're faced with immigrants from somewhere. You can either say, "Well, it's cool, I don't care who they are if they don't break the law," or you can get all bitter and nasty and wind up getting nowhere in the end. Most people here have made the wise choice and welcomed immigrants. And, as far as I can tell--I spend a good bit of time in rural Catalonia because my wife's family has a house there--country people don't have a problem, either, as long as you can pick lettuce or whatever they've hired you to do. Seriously, the central Catalan agricultural area of la Segarra, l'Urgell, la Noguera, les Garrigues, and la Conca de Barberà would have real problems if it weren't for North African workers, and there are in particular a lot of Arabs in the slaughterhouses in Guissona and the prefabricated housing factories in Sta. Coloma de Queralt. The people there aren't real enlightened but do recognize that these people are human beings.

This isn't true in more working-class neighborhoods. Remei has family in the industrial suburb of Terrassa, and these people are stereotypical racists. They believe and repeat such well-known urban legends like the one where the government is giving free apartments to immigrants who then proceed to use the bathtub for a coal scuttle or whatever. I seriously think a lot of the problem is sexual; the sexual taboo is the only one that still exists between the races in the United States, and the United States is a hell of a lot more enlightened on racial / ethnic matters than Catalonia is. It shouldn't be surprising that if that's the only taboo surviving in America, then it certainly exists here. There have been several serious ethnic disturbances in Catalonia, mostly in lower and lower-middle class industrial areas, and the one in Terrassa about two years ago in the Ca'n Anglada slum is the one I remember. Arab youths lounging around a plaza made comments or something to some local girls and a scuffle turned into a gang fight turned into damn near a pogrom, with Arab-owned bars and shops assaulted. Good thing no one was too badly hurt. Remei's redneck relatives, of course, were terribly offended that these scumballs were daring to speak to local girls.

The Vanguardia article, self-exculpatorically, names three possible factors to explain the greater rejection of immigrants in Catalonia than in other parts of Spain. The first is the controversy about a proposal to build a mosque in Premià up the coast; the locals were afraid it would attract bad elements. Joder. People who attend religious services don't tend to be people who do bad things. Now, certain Muslim leaders in Catalonia have said certain very stupid things in public, but no dumber than what I've heard some Christians say, and so I vote we give the Muslims the benefit of the doubt and wait till we see some Talibans hanging around the mosque before we start to get too worried. The second is that Artur Mas, now Convergence and Union official candidate to succeed current Catalan Prime Minister Jordi Pujol, in office for 22 years, shot off his mouth about there being a disproportionate number of North Africans in Catalonia. That didn't help anything any. The third seems to me to be a crock of crap: they blame the Madrid central government's denouncing immigrants as the cause of the most recent crime wave, which I don't remember happening at all. I think La Vanguardia is making it up. I do remember statistics being released that said that 40% of those arrested in Spain were foreigners, which I believe, but not all foreign dirtbags are North African.

Different people have different interests for different reasons. I'm from Kansas City--my ancestors come from Texas and Kansas and before that Tennessee; they originally came over from England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland (before the American Revolution, who knows exactly when or how; they were definitely largely Scots-Irish, Ulstermen who mostly emigrated during the first part of the eighteenth century) and from Austria during the 1880s. Well, Harry Truman was from Independence, Missouri, which for a long time was an important town on the trails West but now has been absorbed as a suburb of KC, and Ike Eisenhower was from Abilene, Kansas, about a hundred or so miles west of KC and definitely within its catchment area of influence. So between 1945 and 1961, perhaps the most critical decade-and-a-half of the 20th century, America was governed by people who were from where I'm from. This is why I'm fascinated by Truman and Eisenhower and their times. I know I'm a partisan, but I really think they were two of the four best Presidents of the 20th century; the other two would be Franklin Roosevelt, despite all his faults, and Reagan. TR would be number five and Wilson would be damn near at the bottom, though above Kennedy and Carter.

This was a good question from the Comments section, and I thought it deserved a good answer, so here it is.

Just a thought, but why didn't the victorious allies get rid of that cunt Franco at the end of the war?
Des | Email | 11.25.02 - 8:55 pm

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During the war, Franco's personal sympathies were with the Axis. However, he managed to avoid openly committing himself to their side (in part he got lucky; he made major demands on Hitler in 1940 in exchange for joining the Axis, which Hitler refused. If Hitler had met those demands Franco would have entered the war and gone down for sure) and by '44 Churchill was openly flirting with Franco, knowing the war was won and not wanting to make it any longer by having to fight Spain, too. Using military force to overthrow Franco was never on the Allies' menu.

Anyway, on June 19, 1945, at the San Francisco Conference, the United Nations (which was the reincarnation of the Allied Powers) voted unanimously to exclude Franco's Spain. Then, at the Potsdam Conference later that summer, Stalin proposed that everyone break all relations with Spain, a worldwide total boycott, and that the Allies should aid the "democratic opposition" within Spain; Truman was in favor, though he feared another civil war, but Churchill wasn't. (This might be the last time the Americans and Soviets ever agreed on anything.)

Churchill pointed out, first, that Britain had strong trade links with Spain and the last thing anybody needed in Britain in 1945 was more people out of work due to a trade cutoff. He also said that "interference in the internal affairs of other states was contrary to the United Nations Charter." (Paul Preston, Franco, p.540; Chapter XXI in general). So Churchill made the same argument against getting rid of Franco that the anti-war people are making against getting rid of Saddam, who, to use your terminology, is an even bigger cunt than Franco was. Now, I'm not saying Franco wasn't a right cunt in many ways, but Saddam manages to out-cunt him, in my opinion. In the middle of Potsdam, Churchill lost a general election to Clement Attlee, who became Prime Minister; Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin did not change British policy toward Spain. Anyway, the decision made at Potsdam was to definitely exclude Spain from the UN, but not to use economic and other diplomatic sanctions to try to force Franco out. Britain won out over the Soviets and Americans.

Bevin washed Britain's hands when he said to the Commons on 20 August 1945, "The question of the regime in Spain is one for the Spanish people to decide." Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Council of Ministers, "sent a secret message to Franco to the effect that he would resist left-wing pressure and would maintain diplomatic relations with him" sometime in summer 1945; French Foreign Minister Georges Bidault was also against action against Franco.

In January 1946, Dean Acheson, American Undersecretary of State, "suggested a joint declaration from France, the United States, and Britain that for Spain to be accepted into the international community, the Spanish people would have to remove Franco and set up a caretaker government to organize elections." But by then Washington was coming around to London's position, and Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington, pointed out the danger of a Communist takeover in Spain to Acheson. "American pressure diminished...British policy in fact aimed at restraining the French and the Americans from taking precipitate action against Franco." (p.552)

On 26 February, a month after De Gaulle's resignation, the French government closed the frontier with Spain and broke off economic relations after Franco executed ten left-wing guerrillas. France wanted to bring the question of a total economic blockade of Spain to the UN Security Council, but both London and Washington did not want to give the Soviets a chance to influence anything. On 4 March Paris, Washington, and London released the Tripartite Declaration, in which they called Franco a right cunt but said "There is no intention of interfering in the internal afairs of Spain." Franco privately accused Truman of being a Mason, which, of all things, he really was. It was no secret; it's in his autobiography.

Then on 5 March Churchill made the "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Missouri, and it was all over.

Good news. I went to see my shrink today with the most recent blood analysis they did on me in hand. There's no problem with the cocktail of pills I'm taking. I have to go on a healthy diet, which I don't mind doing; I've been surviving on a pizza-and-tangerine based diet and it's about time that I started eating lentils and garbanzos and rice and salads and vegetables and fruits and no eggs or dairy products or stuff like that. I actually like healthy food, I'm just too lazy and incompetent to make it every day. That's going to have to change. I need to start getting more exercise, too. I take a twenty-minute walk every morning, but I'm going to get my bike fixed so I can ride it at least on the weekends. That ought to be enough exercise, a 20-minute walk every day and two or three one-hour bike rides a week. I'm allowed to drink beer in moderation (no more wine; bummer) and, get this, I don't have to quit smoking. Cigarettes or cannabis. I'm under doctor's orders NOT to quit smoking because it would cause me too much stress. I love Spain. No wonder they live longer on average than us Americans. Your doctor tells you to eat right, exercise, relax, and avoid stress. And you can smoke whatever you want.

Hey, people, you know, the Comments section down there under each post is for you to make comments. I especially like questions. If I don't know the answer I'll make something up. Also, should you want to e-mail me, the address is crankyyanqui@yahoo.com.

Check out Atlético Rules, who has a nice post on celebrating Thanksgiving in Spain. I don't celebrate it, because I don't like holidays. Most Americans over here do something, though. I remember a particularly eventful Thanksgiving a few years ago at our friend Jane's place. Cinderella Bloggerfeller has pulled off a hilarious spoof of the "delinking" issue that is suddenly all over Blogistan. He's also been adding to the Axis of Porcel, which should have a rapidly expanding readership after this inspired publicity stunt. And Sasha Castel and Andrew Ian Dodge have something to say, so y'all ought to go on over there and check it out. Merde in France, which you ought to be reading--it's even good French practice, since it's bilingual--links to Dissident Frogman and Sofia Sideshow, the first belonging to a rather non-traditional Frenchman and the second to an American who is apparently a movie producer. The Jedman has something growing in his belly button.

Here's a site, called the Expatriate Café, which is aimed at people living or planning to live in Spain. It doesn't appear to have a blogmeister, but is open to all posters, and some people post there a lot. I'm an Old Barcelona Hand so I already know most of this stuff, but it might be of interest to some of you. The site is rather full of youthful exuberance, and I advise anyone influenced to do something based on what he read there to check with me first. There are, unfortunately, people looking to exploit new arrivals, and I noticed a couple of them as posters to this site. (Check out Bob, who'll have $100,000 in five years because of a lawsuit, who is looking for investors in a disco-bar. I wonder if the laws regarding interstate fraud would allow the Attorney General to bust Bob, as his fraudulent ass is hanging out in all fifty states through the Net.) The great majority of the posts look legit, but you should beware of anyone who asks you for a significant amount of money no matter under what guise. I'm exaggerating a little; if you see somebody selling, say, hams over the Net, and you decide you want to buy one, that's perfectly reasonable, but "business opportunities" are clearly something very different, and anything that sounds too good to be true is.

Christopher Hitchens, a writer whom I normally like despite disagreeing with him 90% of the time, has had a falling-out with his friends on the Left over the War against Terrorism. Hitch is for it and almost all his other pals are against it. The situation has become so tragic that Hitch has had to leave the American left-wing rag The Nation; this means there is now no longer any possible reason I might have to read The Nation. He's got two posts up in Slate, one on anti-Americanism and another that I don't agree with but will link to out of fairness on Henry Kissinger; it wouldn't be fair to claim Hitch as a complete convert to the Right. Not yet. I bet he's well on the way, though, just as I figure that Orwell, his hero, if he'd lived, would have come over to the Right on economic and international issues. Orwell was too anti-totalitarian to have sided with the Russians in the Cold War, as we know from his list for the British government and Nineteen Eighty-Four. As for economics, a lot of intelligent Brits of Orwell's age were some kind of radical Socialist. They'd grown up and lived their young adulthood in Britain between 1914 and 1945, an especially rough span of years to be British. No wonder they were pissed off at the system in general. Everyone was poor, nothing worked, and it always seemed like another war was right around the corner. The most intelligent of that lot figured out by about 1956 that capitalism could be combined with a lot of social-democratic rhetoric and some social-democratic action (though most didn't come all the way over to capitalism), and that Soviet Russia was definitely an evil to be resisted. If they didn't figure that out after Hungary in 1956, they weren't smart enough to ever figure it out. Orwell would have been one of those who was smart enough to figure it out. By '56 he'd have become a hawkish supporter of Labour.

In soccer news, last night Barcelona beat Bayer Leverkusen away, 1-2. Van Gaal started a rough, defensive team with only one forward, Kluivert, in what looked like a slightly confused 4-5-1. (Four defensemen, five midfielders, one forward.)Near the end of the first half Bayer scored on a header off a corner kick. At halftime Van Gaal pulled out Mendieta, who needs a benching, and defensive midfielder Gabri, and put in Riquelme and Saviola, changing to a 4-3-3 with Riquelme playing behind Saviola and Kluivert and feeding them passes. Saviola almost immediately stole the ball and ran a give-and-go with Riquelme; Savi blasted the ball into the goal from close range. One-one. Then they fouled Kluivert in the area and Riquelme blew the penalty kick. Barça kept attacking and they put in Overmars for Motta, making the alignment even more offensive, really a 4-2-4. This was very exciting football, with two chances for Savi, one for Riquelme, and a header by Kluivert off a corner, with Bayer defending all-out but one step behind the Barça players. Then, with only a couple of minutes left, Riquelme fed Kluivert in the area, who unselfishly fed Overmars, who crossed up the goalie and drove the ball to the far post. One-two. Barça has won its last seven European games, in contrast with their extrememly mediocre performance in the Spanish League.

In Barça's Group A, it's Inter Milan and Barça with three points each and Bayer and Newcastle zero. In Group B, Valencia tied Ajax last night, 1-1; the standings are Arsenal 3, Ajax and Valencia 1, AS Roma 0. Group C: Borussia Dortmund and AC Milan 3, Real Madrid and Lokomotiv Moscow 0. Group D: Manchester U 3, Deportivo and Juventus 1, Basel 0.

The fallout from the fans throwing crap on the field last Saturday in FC Barcelona's Camp Nou is hitting the fan. Some joker threw a (roasted) piglet's head at Madrid player Luis Figo. Other possibly dangerous stuff, like mobile phones and a whiskey bottle, was also thrown. You need to remember, as the National Geographic survey proved, not all Europeans know too much about geography. The most that most people in Europe know about Barcelona is the soccer team, which, until now, was highly respected in the rest of Europe. (OK, people remember the Olympics, too. Gaudí is known among those who can read.) This episode has not made either the team or the city look too good. The German papers headlined, "Achtung! The pig throwers are coming!" over their stories about Barça's visit to Leverkusen. That is not precisely the image the city fathers wish to promote. Get this, one of the Barça executives commented regarding the piglet's head, "It's a setup by the Madrid papers. Here in Catalonia we don't eat roast piglet." (It wasn't a setup. It really happened; the TV footage shows it.) Van Gaal also had a good quote when some German reporter asked him how his team was reacting to the vilification of everything regarding the Barça by the German press: "I don't think my players read the Bild am Sonntag."

In war news, the Vanguardia is reporting that the American plans for Iraq include a small, fast invasion aimed at paralyzing the Iraqi state's communication channels and energy supplies. There are some 30,000 soldiers now in position to be used and there are 45,000 more who can be deployed in the area within a few days. There are more than 1000 tanks and thousands of tons of supplies at American facilities in Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrein, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Turkey, and Diego Garcia, ready to be used. Hundreds of land-based planes are stationed in the area, and there are two carrier groups on the scene, the Abraham Lincoln and the George Washington. Three more are on the way: the Constellation, Kitty Hawk, and Harry Truman. Each carrier group can attack 700 targets a day, four times as many as in Gulf War I. CIA operatives have supposedly already infiltrated northern Iraq, and, we wouldn't believe this if they hadn't cited Time magazine, Israeli units have already swept Iraq's western desert looking for Scud launch bases. Meanwhile, should Iraq fire at any British or American aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones, as they have the bad habit of doing, there will be retaliation--not just the destruction of antiaircraft batteries and radar installations, but also of command and communications centers and the Iraqi fiber-optic network.

This is overwhelming force. Saddam's government and army will fold up like a house of cards when it is turned loose. We just hope they get him before he can gas or infect our guys, which he will undoubtedly do if he gets the chance, since he knows the only outcome of this is his head on the end of a pike no matter whether he uses bio-chem weapons, which he certainly possesses, or not. There should be no retaliation by Allied forces with bio-chem or nuclear weapons. We'll win anyway, even without them, and it would be silly as well as inhumane to use that stuff on troops who are only a day or two away from surrendering anyway, not to mention any unfortunate civilians in the area. And how much do you want to bet they're planning some sort of Skorzeny-rescuing-Mussolini caper, ready to jump in there and grab Saddam by surprise? If they could somehow pull that off it would save a lot of lives.

Said Susan Sontag in Madrid, as quoted in yesterday's Vanguardia: "I've always been a little ashamed to be American." (I've always been a little ashamed that you're American, too. You know, if you're ashamed of it, you could easily emigrate to a country you could feel proud of. I hear there are opportunities for sugar-cane choppers in Cuba.) "This is something that comes from long before 9-11 and Bush." (Let me get this straight. 9-11 makes you embarrassed to be American?) "It's a good thing to feel uncomfortable." (Perhaps this is why Ms. Sontag enjoys autoflagellation so much.) "Now there's no political debate there." (Gee, I looked at today's Washington Post and Fox News and it looked to me like there was plenty of political debate.) "We have only one party there, the Republicans, because the Democratic opposition doesn't exist." (Doesn't exist? What party do the Baghdad Three, Maxine Waters, and Terry McAuliffe belong to, not to mention Billy "White Stain" Clinton and Al Gore? And whose fault is it that they keep losing elections? America is a democratic republic, remember, and if the Dems are out of power, it's because the people put them there.) "They're building a new, horrible imperialism." (You call it what you want, Susie. I think "national security" is a better term, myself.) "A lot of people are against this, but they have no voice or political representation." (Remember, Susie, we've had a couple of elections in the last two years, and a handful of smart people like you torpedoed Al Gore in 2000 because he wasn't quite nutty enough for you. You had to go bolt the party and vote for Nader. Now, I'm thrilled that you did, because you took enough of the Democrat vote to put Bush in. It was the Left, using its voice and political representation, that got Bush elected. As for your European pals, the French Left is so dumb, even dumber than the American Left, that they went out and did the same thing a couple of years later by wasting their votes on assorted Trotskyites and got their man Jospin massacred in the first round.) "Since 9-11 I've received death threats, in writing and by telephone. But as long as they don't shoot me, it doesn't bother me." (Susie, you're so brave and heroic. Look, you are so insignificant in the global scheme of things that it's not worth anybody's while to take the necessary risks involved to kill you. If you are assassinated, I will personally eat The Road to Serfdom at high noon in the Plaza Sant Jaume with all-i-oli and salsa brava.)

Here in Spain we not only have the ETA, we've also got a minor-league terrorist gang called the GRAPO. They're not nationalists like the ETA, though ETA also proclaims itself to be Marxist; they're extreme leftists, like the Baader-Meinhoffs or the Red Brigades. The last really bad thing they did was a couple of years ago when they robbed an armored car in Galicia and a couple of security guards, I believe, were killed in the shootout. Their most famous recent crime was the kidnapping of prominent Zaragoza businessman Publio Cordón a few years back; the GRAPO claims that they got the ransom money and turned Cordón loose. They've been quite insistent about it over the years, but Cordón has never turned up. I'm sure they didn't kill him; killing a kidnap victim after you've received the ransom money is very bad business. The most popular theory is that Cordón died on them in captivity of a heart attack or something along those lines. Another hypothesis is that Cordón took the opportunity to disappear after he was set free and is now living it up in Rio or Bangkok.

Anyway, the GRAPO is just about finished and a good solid nail was driven into its coffin by the Guardia Civil, who busted seven of its leaders on Tuesday in Madrid. Among the arrested were two of the three members of the command troika and several smaller fish in the propaganda, finance, and communications organizations. Good. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. One of the arrestees, María Carmen López Anguita, was released from prison in 1999. She had been sentenced to 385 years in 1979 for the murder of eight people in a Madrid coffee shop. Two of the other arrestees have also done serious time.

Here's a good piece from National Review on what college international relations textbooks are teaching about terrorism these days. If you want to read a real right-wing American hawk, check out this article by Victor Davis Hanson. And here's Jonah Goldberg's Thanksgiving column, which he had the gall to reprint from last year.

For some insane bullshit regarding the ETA check this out. Check out the rest of the site, too. These people are nuts. I hope they're too insignificant to be dangerous.

The Vanguardia has a table on the sources of petroleum pollution in the oceans. In thousands of tons of petroleum and its derivatives spilled into the oceans per year, these are the six biggest sources:

Sewers (urban and industrial waste): 1,343.
Ship maintenance (cleaning, etc.): 466.
Atmospheric emissions (carried by rain to the sea): 340.
Natural sources (undersea geological releases): 229.
Tanker accidents: 126.
Oil drilling platforms (maintenance and accidental spills): 51.

What the chart shows is that tanker spills have a disastrous effect but only in small, specific places. The best thing that can be done to protect the environment in general from petroleum pollution is to build water treatment plants and hazardous waste disposal sites and to stop dumping the stuff straight from the sewers into the ocean. This kind of pollution is concentrated in poor countries, since the rich ones have already built the necessary facilities. Barcelona has barely started on its water treatment plants; they've built a small one on the Llobregat south of town, but they have to build another to take care of all the crap from the Barcelona suburbs out there. As for the Besós north of town, they're building a big plant right now which will go into operation within a couple of years. But, right now, of the crap that Catalonia dumps into the Mediterranean, only about a fourth of it is treated; this hasn't been permitted in America since the Seventies. The other thing that really needs to be done is some enforcement of the international maritime standards on when and where you can clean the bilge out of your ship. Again, this kind of pollution tends to be concentrated in the Third World--the Equatorial Guinea harbor police, say, probably aren't nearly as efficient, or existent, as those in Copenhagen. After that, doing things to reduce emissions into the atmosphere, like mandating unleaded gas and getting cars with primitive, i.e. pre-Nineties in America, emissions systems off the road is important not only for air quality but for water quality, too.

If I were to put my anti-pollution money where my mouth is, the first thing I'd do is get rid of my 1988 Renault and buy a new car with a catalytic converter. (The Spanish government runs a successful plan every few years to get old hunks of junk off the road, giving you a big tax break if you buy a new car and junk one that is more than, say, ten years old. They also have a strict vehicle-inspection program, and crappy old cars just don't pass it. We applaud both measures.) The second thing I'd do is demand that my taxes be raised in order to build bigger, better water treatment plants so that my poo will no longer just float on out to the Mediterranean. Well, I'm all for spending lots of my tax money on water treatment plants. That should be a major governmental priority. I'm just against spending it on some of the other dumb stuff they currently spend it on--not so much the conservative central government, which has balanced its budget three years in a row, but the Catalanist regional and Socialist municipal governments, neither of whom even bother to pretend not to be lavishly spending our money on toys.

Note on American sports in Spain: Basketball is very popular. The Spanish league is one of the two or three best in Europe, and many former NBA players play over here. The Catalans are very proud of their homeboy Pau Gasol, who plays for Memphis in the NBA. The Spaniards just don't get the concept of baseball, perhaps justifiably. As for American football, the Barcelona Dragons of NFL Europe are not precisely a hot ticket. A common Spanish complaint is that it's exciting when there's a nice pass or a good tackle or a long runback, but the game is just too slow and has too many interruptions.

What I'd do to get rid of all the damn interruptions is to set up a very simple rule: Allow no substitutions during a series of downs and allow only thirty seconds between plays. Substitutions during a series could only be made if a player was injured, and that player couldn't return to the game. This would reduce the time between plays and would force the team to always have a player who could kick on the field, since you wouldn't be allowed to bring in specialist kickers and punters. The all-around player would have a big advantage over the specialist; you'd want decathletes instead of sprinters and weightlifters. You wouldn't see nickel backs or designated pass-rushers or third-down backs or deep snappers or quarterbacks who can't do anything but throw. Teams would go for it more often on fourth down and a 40-yarder would become a long field goal again. If you proceeded to get rid of TV timeouts, allow the same 30 seconds for a change of possession as for any other break between plays, get rid of the two-minute warning, get rid of video replays, and cut rosters to 40 players to force everyone on the team to be able to play both ways and in several positions, that should bring the game down to a little over two hours and make it a lot more exciting, much more like the glory days of the late fifties and early sixties that old-time fans remember as the best years of the NFL. As for TV commercials, there would be a lot fewer, sure; that would make them more valuable so the networks could charge more for each one--and if the game became even more popular because it was faster and more exciting, the ad spaces would cost advertisers that much more. Will they do this? Naah.

Spanish Cannabis Slang:

hashish: chocolate, costo, grifa.
marijuana: maría, hierba.
a joint: un porro, un canuto, un petardo.
a hit: una calada.
stoned: fumado, colocado.
a stoner: un fumeta.
to light (a cigarette or a joint): petar.
to roll (a joint): liar.

La Ley del Fumeta:
El que lo lia lo peta.
The Smoker's Law:
The guy who rolls it lights it.

I felt like getting out of the house last night so I went down to Miguel's bar downtown. It's sort of like a speakeasy--it doesn't have a sign, you have to push a button outside that lights up a bulb inside, so they know to let you in. It's all stone inside, what used to be the stable and the basement storage rooms of a large fifteenth-century house. The effect is kind of like that of an opium den with heavy metal on the stereo. It's not like an exclusive place or anything; I've never seen anyone turned away, but you do have to know where it is. Miguel sells, uh, herbacious and other organic substances. He has a code that I think is more of a joke than anything else; you ask for, say, a twenty-five euro ticket to the Al Green concert. This will get you six or seven grams, which is a pretty good deal. You can also ask for tickets to James Brown or Barry White. I don't do Barry White. It's a lot easier to get James Brown around here, since we're so close to Morocco. The Rif is the world's number one producer of hashish, and smoking hash is really very traditional among those social classes along the margin of respectability in Spain. People used to pick up the habit doing military service in old Spanish Morocco, the Spanish Sahara, Ceuta, and Melilla. Al Green is so much more bulky than James Brown that they don't ship Al in from Morocco--it's all locally-grown. When you can find Al, which isn't always, it's available at a better price-per-puff than James since it only passes through one or two hands between the grower and the seller. But you can always find James at reasonable prices. The supply is guaranteed.

Miguel's place is interesting because not only is it an emporium for organic substances, but it's a regular bar that people come to for regular bar reasons. There wasn't much business last night, so I sat down with Miguel, this guy Lluís, and this Dominican guy named Mike who lived in New York for a few years. He likes me because he can speak English with me--he's justifiably proud of his good English, and I understand his English better than his Spanish anyway because his Dominican accent is so thick. Dominicans drop word-final S, among other consonants, and they don't distinguish between the Y and LL; both sound like an English ZH. Mike pronounces the name Lluís "zhoo-EE", while a Catalan would say something like "lyoo-EES". We engaged in mild substance abuse and watched the soccer on TV--Milan beat Real Madrid in Champions' League play, 1-0, and Deportivo tied Juventus 2-2. Both games were very good, and in deference to this blog's 75% American readership, I shall speak of soccer no more today, except for this TV note: All Champions' League games on the same day are played simultaneously, so they show one game live on the main Televisión Española channel, TV1, and don't tell you anything about the other one. Then, when the live game is over, you switch over to TV2 and they show the other game as if it were live, and since you don't know the final score, it might as well be. This is why, when Miguel let somebody into the bar during the second game, the first thing he said was "SSSHHHHTTTT!" just in case the guy was going to spill the beans. It's a great, compressed, three-and-a-half hour sports extravaganza, the best teams with the finest players in the biggest stadiums with the loudest fans, and you can see two whole games in the time it takes you to watch just one NFL game.

Here's the first paragraph of a piece by Miguel Ángel Aguilar from today's Vanguardia. Aguilar is not an idiotarian, though I've never found him too interesting in general. Anyway, check out what he's got to say.

Some American journalists are running around Europe digging into the environmental level of anti-Americanism. This search in Spain is completely useless. Here anti-American feeling died fifteen years ago. During decades it fed on two sources. The first, the defeat of 1898 in a war touched off by the falsehood of (American accusations of Spanish guilt in the sinking of) the Maine, which was perpetrated through the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst, a true man-before-his-time. Since then, all wars have been preceded by the necessary media preparation, destined to promote warlike ardor, spread hate, and foster antagonism. The second, the support provided by the United States to General Franco. The Americans say because of the necessities of the Cold War. But there is a contrast: in so many European countries the Americans were liberators from the Nazi-Fascist yoke, while here they appeared as a support for a dictatorship that without them and the agreement of the Holy See would have lacked the necessary oxygen to survive.

Aguilar's point about the Spanish-American War is dead on. That was, realistically, a naked American power grab; the only possible excuses are the fact that other countries at the time were even more rapacious in their search for colonies and influence and by the fact that the Americans treated their colonized peoples better than anyone except the British. Aguilar, I think, is mistaken about the Americans and Franco. Franco had been in power by 1953 for fourteen years and he had no serious opposition within Spain. The Americans had tried being unfriendly to Franco between 1945 and 1953--Truman hated Franco and America refused to have anything to do with the Spanish government during that time. For example, America vetoed Spain's application to join the UN in 1946. Spain was not admitted to the original Marshall Plan. But a civil war was raging in Greece between the Communists and the Western-backed anti-Communists, and the Russians had just finished their own power grab in Eastern Europe, culminating in the 1948 coup in democratic Czechoslovakia and the Berlin Airlift. Then the Russians tested an atomic bomb and Franco began looking not so awful. When Eisenhower became President in 1953, replacing Truman, the last obstacle to a Hispano-American rapprochement was gone; Churchill had become British Prime Minister again the year before and he, too, was in favor of an aperture to Franco. The deal was made that same year: America would get bases in Spain and Spain would get American economic aid.

The international acceptance of Spain coincided, probably not randomly, with the softening of the Franco regime. In 1950 Spain was desperately poor, internationally isolated, brutally governed, and dependent upon Argentina's Perón for food shipments. In 1960 things were clearly looking up. Spain was more prosperous than before, in touch with the modern world, and Spaniards could pretty much do what they wanted except express themselves politically in public. Not a great situation, but better than before, and by 1970 democracy was clearly on the horizon. Anyway, Franco would not have been overthrown by the Spaniards themselves, and American aid didn't change that; Franco had already been in power for fourteen years in 1953 with no serious attempts at removing him, and the choices for America were 1) hold your nose and use Franco as an ally against the Russians, or 2) maintain Franco as an enemy and hold the moral high ground. There are good arguments for both possible choices, but everybody needs to accept that choice 3) get rid of Franco was not on the menu, unless the Spaniards did it themselves. And that they didn't do. Many Spaniards, like Aguilar, blame America for Franco's long dictatorship; they might do better to look in the mirror.

Paul Hollander says that there are four causes of European anti-Americanism: historical grievances, Marxism, fear of the cultural threat, and nationalism. Aguilar is correct when he says that Spain's historical grievances against America are mostly forgotten in Spain today. That's largely true. If they're not completely forgotten, they're no longer deeply felt. As far as historical grievances go, the Spaniard-on-the-street is more likely to be anti-British (over Gibraltar) than anti-American. He is, however, obviously wrong on the other three counts, as our recent series of translations and dissections should demonstrate.

The French cops have done it again. They made eleven arrests in the Paris suburbs over the weekend of people affiliated with Al Qaeda, including Slimane Jalfoui, an Algerian who is a main connection between various European Al Qaeda cells. These guys are suspected of being behind a planned attack on the London underground which was foiled and also the Frankfurt cell's plot to blow up Strasbourg Cathedral at Christmas 2000. We do a lot of France-bashing, but we've always paid our dues when it comes to the French police and security services. They've been doing good work rounding up both Al Qaeda and ETA terrorists.

I've been listening to this "Internet radio" station out of East Tennessee that bills itself as playing "Americana and bluegrass". They play good stuff, real down-home music, not slicked-up country-pop. In case any non-Americans want to hear real hillbilly music, check these guys out. And you'll love the disk-jockeys' accents, some of which you don't hear all that much anymore now that American culture has become so homogenized.

For those of you interested in the Gibraltar controversy, here's the appropriate section of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Article 10, which deals with the cession of Gibraltar to the British Crown. Note in particular the first paragraph, which puts the lie to the canard that by treaty no civilians were to live in Gibraltar, and in which it is specified that Gibraltar is to be ceded to Britain forever. Also note the clause on Jews and Moors, who according to the treaty are not to be permitted to live in Gibraltar. During the Franco years Spain demanded the return of Gibraltar on the ground that the British had broken this clause. They no longer use this particular argument, at least not publicly. The last paragraph does specify that Spain is to have the first right of refusal if Gibraltar is to be sold or granted to another nation, but it doesn't say anything that conflicts with the current state of affairs, though it might be used to impugn the possible independence of Gibraltar.

National Geographic has this survey on geographical knowledge that you might want to take. You really ought to get a perfect score if you're smart enough to read this blog, or any blog. We won't beat you too severely if you miss a couple. The fun part is that the survey was given to 300 18-24 year-olds in each of these countries, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Sweden, and to 500 Americans in that age group, and you can compare your scores to theirs.

The disgraceful thing is not so much the Americans' lousy performance, which is pretty awful, worse than anyone except Mexico. Canada and Britain didn't do any better than America. It's everyone's lousy performance. People around the world are geographically illiterate. That doesn't mean you guys, it means the Great Unwashed out there.

We suppose the story is this. Most people retain information that is useful to them and forget information of marginal or zero utility. If you don't travel and have a typical office job, if you don't read much and watch a good bit of TV, if you don't keep up with a newspaper or use the Net to get the news, you don't need to know much geography except for that of your immediate area, no matter where you live. So you forget it and are never reminded of it again in your life until you see it on a goofy test like this one. It's like the necessity of knowing a foreign language; if you stay in your country, don't need a foreign language for your job, and don't read much, you'll never need to know a foreign language in your life, so you forget what little you learned in school. And I sure don't remember the quadratic theorem, not having used it since Math 101 in fall semester 1984, in which I got a B. About the most I can do mathematically is simple algebra, because that's the maximum I need to know--that and enough about statistics to have some idea of whether they're legit or not.

It's still pretty disgraceful that significant percentages of people got any of these geography questions wrong. Typical slackers.

I love the Crime Library. Check out this story about this idiot, getting paid eight hundred bucks a trip in order to smuggle in leather goods from Pakistan. How smart is that?

The Jedman shares his views on personal space, current fashion, and personal hygiene.

James Taranto let his readers write his column today, on the theme of reparations for slavery, and the results are hilarious. Check it out.

A lot of the knowledge we take for granted among our readers, like basic Spanish geography or who the various political parties are, is really not particularly interesting to casual readers. Every now and then, though, we think we need to update basic information for the benefit of new readers. The following is a list of the 17 Spanish "autonomous communities", which I usually just call regions, with their approximate locations, their populations, their political tendencies, their economic levels on a 1-10 scale, with 1 as Morocco and 10 as, say, Southeast England or Holland or Western Germany, and anything else of interest. These are the three nationwide political parties: the PP is the conservative, centralist governing party in all of Spain, the People's Party, the PSOE are the Socialists, now "socialistas light" , and IU are the Communists, the United Left. In Catalonia we have conservative Catalanist CiU, Convergence and Union, and lefty Catalanist ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia). They have the conservative but weird Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) and the pro-ETA Batasuna in the Basque Country, the leftist nationalist BNG (Galician National Bloc) in Galicia, and the conservative and not-too-bolshily-nationalistic Canary Coalition (CC) in the Canaries.

Northwest Spain:

Galicia. Pop. 2.7 million. Economy: 6. Politics: PP, PSOE, BNG (in order). Most speak Galician.

Asturias. Pop. 1.1m. Econ: 6. Politics: PSOE, PP. Strong regional identity.

Cantabria. Pop. 0.5m. Econ: 7. Politics: PP, PSOE.

Basque Country. Pop. 2.1m. Econ: 7. Politics: PNV, PSOE, PP, Batasuna. Some speak Basque.

Navarra. Pop. 0.6m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. A few speak Basque.

La Rioja. Pop 0.3 m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE.

Aragon. Pop. 1.2m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. Some regional identity.

Mediterranean:

Catalonia. Pop. 6.3m. Econ: 9. Politics: CiU, PSOE, PP, ERC. Most speak Catalan.

Valencia. Pop. 4.2m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE. Some speak valenciano (Catalan).

Balearic Islands. Pop. 0.8m. Econ: 9. Politics: PP, PSOE. Some speak Catalan variants.

Murcia. Pop. 1.2m. Econ: 7. Politics: PP, PSOE.

Central and South:

Castile and Leon. Pop: 2.5m. Econ: 8. Politics: PP, PSOE.

Madrid. Pop. 5.4m. Econ: 9. Politics: PP, PSOE, IU.

Castile-La Mancha. Pop. 1.8m. Econ: 7. Politics: PSOE, PP.

Extremadura. Pop. 1.1m. Econ: 6. Politics: PSOE, PP.

Andalusia. Pop. 7.4m. Econ: 6-7. Politics: PSOE, PP, IU. Strong regional identity.

Canary Islands. Pop. 1.7m. Econ: 7. Politics: PSOE, PP, CC. Somewhat distant from Peninsula.

Ceuta and Melilla. Pop. 0.15m. Econ: 5. Politics: Unpredictable. Not an autonomous community. Cities on N. Moroccan coast.

I got into a friendly discussion a few weeks ago with a guy from London; he said the BBC were a trustworthy source because they were unbiased. I said, "Aw, come on," but he wouldn't back down (he kept repeating, "It's like gospel," which I didn't think was a British expression at all to refer to the undisputed truth) and I had to admit that I had no real evidence to back up my doubts, except that the BBC showed a patently absurd documentary that maintains that O.J.'s son did it which was rebroadcast on Catalan TV. Well, a group of British bloggers, among them the estimable friend-of-Iberian Notes Patrick Crozier and the indefatigable Natalie Solent, have set up a site to give us plenty of ammunition that's called Biased BBC. Check it out.

I noticed in Jay Nordlinger's column in NRO that Republican ex-football star Steve Largent got beat by the Democratic candidate for Governor of Oklahoma largely because Largent was in favor of a proposed ban on cock fighting. As Nordlinger said, "Cock fighting! In America! In 2002!" Well, the pro-cock fighting lobby seems to be pretty powerful in Oklahoma. I wonder if there's a fish-dynamiting or stop sign-shooting lobby; I guarantee you there's a snake-handlers' organization of some kind. And then these foreigners accuse us of having no respect for rural tradition. Hit's aggravatin', Ah kin shore tell ya.

The Vanguardia instituted a new policy a few months ago. The paper, which is fun to read because of its many local quirks though often maddening, has been around since 1881 in the hands of the same family. Anyway, they started printing letters to the editor in Catalan. Before, even if you had written your letter in Catalan, they printed it in Spanish, I suppose because they'd always done that way. The following letter from today's Vangua breaks a trend. For about the last eight consecutive days they'd published at least one thing that was horribly anti-American. Today there's no Yankee-bashing; today it's the Brits' turn. The interesting thing about this Brit-bashing letter is that it's written in Catalan. Anyone who would use Catalan to write to a publication that's 99% in Spanish must be a pretty serious Catalan nationalist; that person is using Catalan out of context and you only do that if you want to make a point. But this letter upholds Spanish claims regarding Gibraltar, which is really weird for a Catalan nationalist, since being pro-Catalanist automatically implies being anti-Spain around here and often implies being either a Francophile, a Germanophile, or an Anglophile. I'm confused. I think the letter-writer is, too. Here goes. It's in italics.

After the English betrayal of Catalonia (1714), as payment for their services, Castile ceded them the occupation of Gibraltar so that they could defend the Strait with their powerful Navy as long as they considered it necessary, and then return it without transferring it to a third party.

This was confirmed in the Treaty of Utrecht, in which it was specified that Gibraltar could only be occupied by the British Army and Navy and that no civilian could reside there. Therefore, the current inhabitants are squatters with no right to self-determination or anything else. And even less so the Moroccans, the Indians, et cetera, who the British brought there when Franco closed the frontier in response to Churchill's new betrayal; he had promised that if granted a little more Spanish territory to build an airport, when the war against Nazism ended, they would return the Rock to Spain, but they forgot about it. And now Spanish airplanes are not even allowed to land there, while they illegally overfly Spanish territory whenever they feel like it.

In the end, Gibraltar has become a cave of Ali Baba, where, without paying taxes to anyone, every souvenir stand gives out the address to open up hundreds or thousands of fictitious companies that launder money and traffic in drugs and then invest the enormous profits in land all over the Costa del Sol.

If the British had any common decency (vergonya, literally "shame"), something they've never had, they wouldn't have a colony within a European state like theirs which is even in NATO.

JOSEP-ANTON GELI PUYOL
Platja d'Aro

Note the entirely made-up history--France was Spain's ("Castile's") ally in the war that ended in 1714, not England; the war ended with the French royal house, the Bourbons, on the throne of Spain. The English had given some support to the Catalans, many of whom opposed the Bourbons, but when the general war ended in 1713, a peace treaty was signed at Utrecht, England got Gibraltar (among other things) as a victorious power, and the Catalans obstinately held out. The British washed their hands and the Catalans got stomped. Some betrayal. And I seriously doubt Churchill promised Franco anything other than a swift kick in the ass if he didn't do as told, since after it became obvious in 1943 that the Nazis were going to lose Franco was hanging by a thread. The Allies seriously discussed ousting Franco as a consequence of World War II. Also note the conspiracy theory about Gibraltar as an important nexus of cash and illegality, the ridiculous resentment at the English "illegally overflying" Spanish territory, the antidemocratic assertion that those who live in Gibraltar have no rights, the racist-sounding statement that "Moroccans and Indians" have even fewer than no rights, the persnickety legalism about strict adherence to insignificant clauses of a 1713 treaty, the intemperate insult about the British lack of vergonya, and the nationalist fury behind the whole letter. This guy is angry because Britain has dissed Spain by not giving up Gibraltar when politely requested to, so he hates the entire British people, in his eyes just a bunch of poca-vergonyas and hijos de la Gran Bretaña.

In Spanish, hijo de la gran puta means, literally, "son of the great whore" and figuratively "motherfucking son-of-a-bitch". Hijo de la Gran Bretaña is obviously a play on this. That's what they call you guys around here, Des. Do you like it?

The Spanish Mediterranean coast is very similar in a lot of ways to Southern California. The climate is more or less the same; Barcelona gets a bit colder in the winter than LA does and also gets a bit more rain. Like Southern California, this very pleasant climate area wasn't densely populated in the pre-technology days; the huge booms in population in both places occurred only after the locals got hold of enough capital to attract extensive outside investment, which happened about the turn of the last century in both California and Catalonia. One of the things they had to do in both places was assure a supply of water, and aqueducts (much larger in LA than in Barcelona) formed the basis for the further expansion of those areas. I would figure that nearly half the people in Spain live along the Mediterranean--figure six million in Catalonia, four million in Valencia, a million in Murcia, seven million in Andalusia, and a million in the Balearics for a total of nineteen million out of Spain's forty million.

Anyway, the Mediterranean regions of Spain desperately need more water. There are millions of people living along a narrow coastal strip with a dry climate. The small rivers in southeastern Spain, the Júcar and the Segura, just don't provide enough water, especially with the drought that's affected that area over the last few years. So what they want to do is spend a bunch of government money on what's called the National Hydrological Plan, which would ship water from the Ebro River, the only large river in Spain that flows into the Med, south to Valencia and Alicante, and would purchase water from the Rhone in France, which carries an inexhaustible supply of fresh water out of the Alps, to be carried to the Barcelona area by aqueduct. (They say in Barcelona that the Rhone is the river that empties the most water into the Med. That would imply that it carries more water than the Danube, the Nile, and the Dnieper. I don't know whether this is true, but the Rhone is certainly an impressively big river when you see it at, say, Avignon. The Ebro's really not too much of a river by American standards; it's wide but shallow. The Rhone is deep.)

A good many people are against this plan, mostly Aragonese from the Ebro Valley, who want the Ebro's water to be used for irrigation in Aragon itself rather than farther south. The Catalans from the Ebro Delta are against it, too, because they fear that the rich Ebro Delta rice-growing area might dry up--the Plan says that won't happen, that only excess water unnecessary to sustain the lower river valley and delta will be sent south. The Ebro Delta Catalans don't particularly trust the government, though.

This plan has created beaucoup de political problems. The conservative governing PP has lost support in Aragon, maybe even enough to put Aragon in Socialist hands at the next elections. The PP never had much support anyway in Catalonia, but the Plan serves as something for enemies of the government to rally around. But in Valencia, a PP stronghold, the Plan is quite popular, and the Valencian Socialists are in trouble, since they can't oppose it like the Aragonese and Catalan Socialists can. The Valencian Socialists' support base is in favor of the plan, so they're left with a dilemma: support the Plan, which would imply supporting their enemies, the governing PP, or oppose the plan and anger their base. The Greens are agitating against the Plan, which makes sense, and the Communists are too, which doesn't. Both groups might pick up some single-issue support in the next elections but I doubt that either will make anything more than minor, very short-term gains.

Since we're moving into the world of Internet porn translating, I figure it's my business to do some research into the sector. There are several websites devoted to marketing and sales in the Internet porn industry, all of which make fascinating reading. We liked this one here, called Adult Webmaster Consultants--sounds pretty professional, right?--with a long list of articles. Another one we liked was Cozy Frog, which takes rather a frat-boy approach to the whole thing. Another very complete and detailed page is X-Biz. It's quite clear that the objective of all these sites is to persuade people to set up porno websites and to sell them the necessary products. AWC and X-Biz take a rather more professional approach, while Cozy Frog, which bills itself as "your buddy"--reach for your wallet now and hold onto it tight!--uses an "it's fun and easy" approach and is directing itself at the first-time porno webmaster, maybe a college kid without much money. If you want to take a look at the innards of the industry--rather a sanitized version, and all on the marketing, sales, and distribution side of the porn industry rather than the production side--you might want to check these websites out. If you do, remember that they're trying to sell you the idea of being a porno webhost. Resist that idea. I have a feeling that a whole lot of people get skinned thinking they can just jump into the clannish porno industry.

Well, we went down to the bar to watch the soccer game last night. We wandered around at game time, 9:00, looking for a bar that wasn't packed, and finally found one down on Calle Providencia. Remei ate a hot dog and a whole ración of patatas bravas, which in their nasty form, which these were, are frozen fried potatoes with mayonnaise, and in their delicious form are fresh double-fried potatoes--they put them in the deep-fryer for a couple of minutes till they're golden-brown and then let them cool, then put them back in for a couple of minutes, which makes them super-crispy--with a spicy sauce, sort of like KC-style vinegary, hot barbecue sauce. The best in Barcelona are at the Bar Tomás on Mayor de Sarrià below the Plaza de Sarrià. So, they ran out of bottled beer and we had to drink some pretty foul stuff out of the tap. Avoid tap beer if possible in Barcelona. This isn't true in Madrid or the País Vasco or Old Castile. I have no idea why. Perhaps it's just that Estrella, the dominant beer in the Barcelona market, is gross out of the keg, and that the brands in Madrid and the North are simply better keg beers. Estrella is fine out of the bottle; it's a standard, fairly strong Pilsener.

Anyway, we had to stand up at the back but at least it wasn't crowded and we could see the TV pretty well. I keep thinking somebody ought to introduce the sports-bar concept into this country; they could at least put in several TVs, invest a thousand bucks, so everyone could see better. But no bar has more than one, and that one is often no bigger than 21 inches. The game itself wasn't very exciting. The first half was quite dull; both teams were playing scared and couldn't put anything together on the attack because they were both playing on the defensive so much. Barça coach Louis Van Gaal changed his standard 3 defensemen-4 midfielders-3 forwards formation, an attacking setup, for a more balanced 4 defensemen-2 defensive midfielders-3 attacking midfielders-1 forward formation. The guys who were supposed to be attacking midfielders played defensively during the whole first half. Mendieta, who is not having a great year--he may be too old at 29--was especially static and Kluivert, the forward (Van Gaal benched the small and rather one-dimensional forward Saviola for the bigger and more multifaceted midfielder Motta) was all by himself in the middle of about eight Madrid guys. Ronaldo didn't play for Madrid, he's sick or something. Figo played and he stood up to the pressure very well, with all 108,000 fans yelling for his scalp. The very first thing Cocu, who was marking him, did was to foul him. By minute two Cocu had fouled him twice. And the next forty-three minutes went more or less like that, with the sole exception of a very nice bicycle kick (what they call a chilena here) by Cambiasso that Barça's goalie Roberto Bonano stopped with no problem. Raúl was never a factor. Neither were any of the other Madrid players for the rest of the game. The closest they got to the Barça goal for the rest of the match was a corner kick, a very eventful corner kick, for sure.

Barça came out for the second half fired up and in a 3-4-3 formation, and after three minutes Mendieta, from the point, made a very nice first-touch pass with his heel for Gabri, who had burned his man Iván Helguera and who was onside on the inside of the box, and who just as quickly fed it to Kluivert charging into the small box, who was wide open and blasted the ball into the lower-right corner of the goal well outside the reach of a diving Casillas. The ref annulled the goal, incorrectly, saying that Gabri had been offside. In the ref's defense, the play was very fast and I'm sure his error was unintentional. On the other hand, I'd like to strangle the son-of-a-bitch. The Barça players then began bombarding Casillas, Madrid's goalie, with long shots that he stopped without much trouble. Then Cocu muffed one when he was wide open in front of the goal, and then Motta injured Makelele with a vicious tackle for which he should have been red-carded. Then, with twenty minutes left, Figo went to take a Madrid corner kick and the fans began throwing shit at him, including an empty J&B whiskey bottle which might, with a little bad luck, have killed somebody. A couple of people threw mobile phones, which is pretty stupid when you figure that if you throw your own phone, the cops can probably figure out who it belongs to. On the other hand, the kind of guy who throws a mobile phone at an defenseless opposing soccer player's head is quite likely to have stolen said mobile phone.

So the ref, quite rightly, suspended the game for ten minutes while the crowd got calmed down. Nothing much happened during the last twenty minutes except that Riquelme bounced a free kick off the crossbar that had Casillas beaten. It ended up 0-0 and with only one fairly serious bit of rioting. Let me make something clear about European soccer hooligans. The Spanish hooligans are considered soft by the Brits and perhaps by the Dutch, maybe even the Italians, but they're plenty violent by American standards. These Spanish guys, Barça's Boixos Nois, Madrid's gang of openly Fascist wealthy skinhead toughs Ultra Sur, the Frente Atlético, Español's wealthy and Fascist Brigadas Blanquiazules, that mob of squatter thugs that roots for Seville, Bilbao's pro-ETA Abertzale Sur, would all eat the Oakland Raiders' fans for lunch. That bunch of fat middle-aged drunken idiots wouldn't last a minute against these young guys who know how to fight and who carry weapons, often knives. Remember, the Frente Atlético murdered a Real Sociedad fan, stabbed him to death, only three years ago, and the Boixos Nois stabbed a French supporter of Español to death not so long ago, either. Earlier this year a lynch mob of Seville fans had a security guard at their mercy and beat him bloody before the TV cameras. Not even American hockey fans would stand a chance in a square-go with these thugs. Not even Detroit Red Wings fans. Not even those animals in Philadelphia.