Well, hell. Somebody's got to post on the conclusion of the Spanish football League, so I guess it's got to be me. With two games to go, Real Sociedad controlled its own destiny. They lost, putting Real Madrid in the driver's seat, and Madrid doesn't blow the big games. League title to Madrid, number 29 so far. Real Sociedad still had a great year; they're generally a midtable team but this year they put it all together and gave Real Madrid a genuine run for their money. Deportivo de la Coruna came in a respectable third and Celta de Vigo fourth. They all go to next season's Champions League. This is also a good showing for Celta, another midtable squad.

Valencia came in a disappointing fifth and Barcelona squeaked into the last UEFA Cup place for 2003-04. I wish they hadn't; they haven't been punished enough for me to be able to go back to them. Being left out of European competition altogether would have been an appropriate expiation of their sins. Athletic Bilbao was seventh, if that counts for anything.

The third UEFA Cup place goes to the winner of the Spanish King's Cup, which will be either midtable Mallorca or, get this, Recreativo de Huelva. Recre is one of the three teams that will go down to Second,along with Rayo Vallecano and Alavés of Vitoria. Coming up are Zaragoza, normally another midtable squad but fallen on hard times, and Albacete and Murcia, firm candidates already to be back on the elevator, but downward, next year.

FC Barcelona news: Frank Rikjaard is to be the next coach, not a bad pick. He's got a four-year contract, which means that they're giving him the reins. Txiki Beguiristain will be the technical director, general manager in American. Frank De Boer will be gone next year; they have already announced they won't sign him. Frank is pissed and threw a snit. Gee, Frank, Barça wanted you so bad they agreed to buy your brother, whom they didn't want, in order to bring you here. Then they paid you well for four years. Meanwhile, you sucked. You were supposed to be a good defender. You weren't. You were supposed to be able to make the long pass. You couldn't. You were supposed to play at a professional level. Half the time you didn't know where the ball was or only figured it out when it was too late. If I were going to be a jerk I'd say you voided that clause in your contract that says something about "the player must stay in shape and not get fat or anything." They are going to re-sign Cocu for one season at a reduced price. OK, I suppose, but don't let him start. If he's your fifth or sixth midfielder that's all right, if he comes cheap. The problem comes if you treat him as your second or third midfielder. Cocu should begin every game on the bench unless somebody's injured.

They are not going to pick up their options on Mendieta (good move) or Sorin; I'd buy Sorin if he came cheap. Riquelme and Kluivert are slated for "talks" with management; they're almost certainly going to get rid of Riquelme, who's just not very good, and they want to cut Kluivert's huge salary. This Turkish goalie they bought named Rustu counts as one of the three "excellent" players that the new Joan Laporta regime has promised us. He still hasn't gotten the two superstars, either.

Real Madrid news: the Vanguardia printed a really snotty story on how the Real Madrid players behaved like jackasses at the official We Won the League celebration they always hold at the Cibeles fountain in central Madrid whenever Real wins something. They are going to get rid of Hierro, which is a good move, it's time. If I were Hierro I'd retire. There's no point playing out the string for a couple of bad years with a bad team. He must have plenty of money already. They are also canning Vicente del Bosque as coach. He only won two Leagues and two Champions' Leagues in four years. I'd say that's extremely successful. He is apparently what they call a "players' coach", though, and what with all the huge egos in the Madrid clubhouse, now plus the biggest Madrid has ever seen, they're getting some guy from Manchester United who is, like, businesslike or whatever.

I love Barcelona. I really do. Hey, just a couple of days ago it was Corpus Christi, and they have a cool local tradition: on Corpus, in the fountains in the city's several medieval cloisters, they place an egg on top of the spout and the water plays with it; I assume the inside of the egg is blown out first. Anyway, though, the egg is continuously held aloft by the water spouting up. It's called "l'ou com balla"--"the dancing egg". It's pretty to see inside the cloisters at Santa Anna or Felip Neri or Sant Pau.

But I bloody well hate the verbena de San Juan, St. John's Eve. San Juan is a big holiday in Catalonia and they blow off tons of fireworks and everybody goes out and parties their asses off. There is an excellent fireworks display every year, but my problem is that every single kid in Catalonia is blowing off hundreds of firecrackers per second even as I speak.

I don't like big crowds or loud noises. They make me nervous. They frighten the cats. And I don't like party nights when everybody goes out and gets wasted en masse. It's amateur night, a whole lot of people who aren't used to drinking hitting it way too hard and getting smashed and puking all over the place and starting fights and generally acting like a bunch of morons.

Conclusion: If you like going out and wandering the streets and getting trashed and spending lots of money and being subjected to sharp loud noises and getting puked on, San Juan is your night. I will admit that the city's fireworks display is pretty spectacular for people who like that sort of thing. But except for that, I stay home on the night of San Juan.

Here's Joe Posnanski from the Kansas City Star--Joe and Jason Whitlock are the Star's big sports columnists, and they really are quite good. Joe is taking the piss out of St. Louis and its snobbish baseball fans. Kansas City and St. Louis have an, uh, "friendly" rivalry. So, for you furriners out thar, here's what we real Amurricans think of y'all: we don't even like those damn people in St. Louis, much less immigrants from countries whose name ends in Stan.

The Jedman went to see Pearl Jam at the "Sandstone Amphitheater" out in KCK. Here's his chronicle:

I went to the Pearl Jam Rock and Roll show. It was at the amphitheater. We met at Hooter's on the way out to the show. I went with one dude and two chicks. We ate 50 wings. It was great. I kept telling the chicks to pick up their paychecks before we left for the show. When we got out to the ampitheater, the sky was black. Thunder could be heard. Rain was spitting. The opening act played and right when they finished, it started to pour rain and it poured and poured. Then, the lightning came. I was lucky. I took my high tech rain suit. There was no cover anywhere. We were standing under the short awning of the beer stand, but the asphalt slopped down to the base of the stand and the water was pretty high up to my ankles. So, I had my rain suit and I decided to stand on higher asphalt and take the beating of the rain. That worked until I adjusted my collar and rain poured down my front and soaked my t-shirt. It poured rain for about 45 minutes with tons of lightning. With my power pack* I felt like a human jumper cable out there. Then, the rain seemed to let up a little bit and the show started. There was still lightning and the drunks cheered whenever the sky lit up. It was pretty dangerous. With the lights shining on the crowd you could see the rain still coming down pretty hard. The JAM played an hour of hard core PJ fan toons. Then, they played an hour of hits for the pop kids like me. Late in the show, there were some dudes without shirts on running down the hill and sliding on the grass. They did this over and over. Then, I looked over again and one of them was a chick without her top. So, it was the best of all worlds on many levels. There was a young, hot, drunk, wet, and naked party girl engaging in athletic competition. That was the best part of the night. What more is there. Aside from the front of my t-shirt getting wet, I was dry everywhere else except my feet. My shoes were soaked. I took my socks off and left them there. It was a class move by theJEDMAN.

*The Jedman has a pacemaker. This is one of the reasons that he is so into physical fitness now after years of being a lazy-ass beer-swilling slob. Gotta congratulate him for getting down to 195, which is pretty strong there for a big guy like him--he's six-foot-three and built solid, not skinny.

Headlines You Might See Every Day:

5. "Mideast Talks Stall"
4. "West Bank Violence Continues"
3. "Terror Attack in Israel"
2. "International Summit Planned"
1. "Tyson Jailed after Street Fight"

According to Catalunya TV, antiglobalimoron Jose Bove has been arrested in France and has been hauled off to jail to serve a ten-month sentence for, get this, destroying an experimental field of transgenic rice that belonged to a laboratory. Way to go, Jose, that's what I call doing your best to help out the poor in the Third World, opposing technologies that would allow agricultural production to increase. Of course, Jose doesn't give a rat's ass about the poor in the Third World, or the environment; his goals are a) to get as much publicity for himself as possible b) to bash the United States and c) to protect subsidies to French farmers. The story says some 800,000 idiots have signed a petition to get Bove's sentence commuted. I say they lock him up for ten more months for that McDonalds he trashed. Hey, if I go in and wreck a Catalan torradas amb pernil restaurant and smash everything and scare the crap out of the people in or around there (even if no one gets hurt) and cause thousands of euros in damage and lost income, I go to jail, on about twenty charges of destruction of property and simple assault, right? Things should be no different for Bove.

Libertad Digital is reporting that we hit a convoy in Iraq last Wednesday that might have been carrying Saddam and one of his sons; they are checking what's left of the convoy for DNA. I hope they got him. What a way to go, sneaking around like a rat. You didn't figure Saddam would go down gloriously leading his forces in a last-ditch defense of Baghdad, did you? I sure didn't.

My friend, buddy, and pal the Jedman had a Major League Experience related to Raytown, Missouri, for you Raytown followers out there. Apparently two characters in the story are named Raytown and Raytown II after their hometown. The thing about the Jedman is he has connections. He can get you Royals tickets and he can get you into the luxury box. You can watch the spectacle that is Major League Baseball from the comfort of the box, which has a fridge full of beer inside it. Should you be hungry, deli-tray snacks and hot dogs are available.

Actually, no kidding, the Jedman really can get free baseball tickets; we went three times last time I was there last August. We saw the Yankees, Twins, and A's beat the Royals; we thereby managed to see our hometown heroes get thrashed by the three teams that made the AL playoffs but not by the eventual World Series winner, the Angels.

No, that's not why I hang out with him.

Raytown trivia: "Mama's Family", that thing that started out as a long-running skit on the Carol Burnett show back in the Seventies (I know it got over to England) and then became a TV show on its own not starring Carol Burnett, was set in Raytown, Missouri.

Also, local witty and humorous disc jockey Max Floyd, who, of all things, is distantly related to me, is known to occasionally play his own version of "Raytown Sally", to the tune of Eric Clapton's "Lay Down Sally": "Raytown Sally, why don't you lose some weight..."

Anyway, here's the Jedman:

Wednesday, June 11, 2003
It was theJEDMAN's Major League Experience. I hosted several colleagues at a major league experience last night. Most of them were chicks. Before the experience, we hung out in Raytown. It was raining out so we hung out in Raytown longer than expected. My guests enjoyed several adult beverages. As we pulled in the lot at the stadium, my guests were fighting to see who would pay the parking fee, but I pulled out the parking pass and stated, "We are going big time tonight!" In the lot, it was still raining and I surprised my guests with ball caps. Each one received a ball cap. Inside the venue, I scored some free bobble heads. Each of my guests received a bobble head. At this point, I was looking like an excellent host. The experience started two hours late, but we stayed for the whole game. One of the members caught a foul ball. Not to be confused with Raytown, but Raytown II got hammered. Raytown II was leaning on me as not to fall out of the chair. So I purchased another adult beverage for this person. This is what I do. I love to make people happy and the rain didn't hamper theJEDMAN's major league experience. I'm theJEDMAN.

There's some chat going on about the Ten Most Influential Blogs. Here's my take:

1. InstaPundit
2. James Taranto
3. Andrew Sullivan
4. Mickey Kaus
5. Steven Den Beste
6. The Volokh Conspiracy
7. Jane Galt
8. James Lileks
9. The Corner
10. Dr. Weevil

I'd put VodkaPundit on this list somewhere, but he doesn't like me--as a beginning blogger, I apparently committed a faux pas which, he has stated publicly, will not be forgotten or forgiven. Well, that's his problem, not mine, if he refuses to link to Iberian Notes--he's just closing off one more option to his readers.

By the way, the criteria for my list is: which blogs reach AND influence the most bloggers and blogreaders I know and respect? Most bloggers I'm cyber-acquainted with don't pay much attention to what, say, Alterman or Atrios thinks. I might well title this "Ten Most Influential Blogs in My Little Corner of the Greater Blogosphere".

This article from the Telegraph about street crime in Barcelona is sadly all too true. Muggings, pickpocketings, and purse-snatchings are much too common. Tourists who appear to be well-off are the main--really only--targets. Locals are rarely molested. The main culprits are Arab street kids. This is not racism. It is a fact. Holes in the Spanish legal and judicial system prevent us from either locking up the little bastards or deporting them. Yes, they were born poor--they now have plenty of ill-gotten cash and flashy name-brand sports clothes--and have had crappy lives. No, that doesn't give them the right to victimize those people who were not born poor and have not had crappy lives.

The Barcelona Tourist Board's response, which is provided by the Telegraph, is a lie. Nothing is being done, at least not effectively, against the street-crime wave that has been going on for several years.

For visitors to Barcelona:

1) You are a target. They recognize you as a foreigner. Remember this at all times.
2) They will not kill you. They very well might hurt you, normally in a take-down from behind.
3) Do not walk the streets wearing expensive clothes or jewelry. My mother stubbornly refuses to listen to me; she won't take off her (modest) jewelry in Barcelona. Something bad is going to happen one day. 4) Do not carry around camera equipment casually. If you want to take photos, plan to spend a day dedicated exclusively to that. Then stick the damn camera in your hotel safe. Or get one of those disposable cameras that cost ten bucks.
5) The Raval, the area to the left of the Ramblas, going up, is a no-go area after dark unless you are 22 with a group of four friends. If you are vulnerable--a woman, a small man, an older person--stay out of there after dark and be damned careful during the day.
6) The Ramblas is dangerous. Go there but be careful. You won't be mugged during the day--that's when the pickpockets operate. You very well might be violently mugged after dark in the Ramblas itself. It happened to me. Watch out for crowds of tourists at street spectacles.
7) The Plaza Real is dangerous. Party there at your own risk. The scene there isn't attractive for anyone not looking to get wasted anyway.
8) The rest of the Old City, to the right of the Ramblas going up, is a better and a safer area than the Raval, but still watch yourself and don't go down dark black alleys. It's better if there are at least two of you. EXCEPTION: the area right around the Picasso Museum. Watch it around there.
9) Consider spending more money and staying--and eating--in the wealthier and safer Eixample (the area in the center of the city with large, octagonal blocks, "north" of the Old City) or Sarria-Sant Gervasi (the area near and above the upper Diagonal). There are fewer tourists and virtually no muggers in those parts. Watch out for pickpockets in the area around the Pedrera and around the Park Guell.
10) WATCH OUT FOR SMALL GROUPS OF ARAB TEENAGERS. I'm sorry. I don't care if that offends anyone. Stay away from them. They will rob you and they don't mind if they have to hurt you.
11) The Barcelona city government is negligent in not clarifying the risks that a visit to Barcelona incurs. Barcelona is safe enough if you behave yourself as if you were in a dodgy part of Chicago or New York. If you do not take precautions, YOU WILL BE A VICTIM. One of these days those damned kids are going to kill a tourist from one of those luxury cruise ships and then the shit is going to hit the fan.
12) The Barcelonese themselves don't really give a shit. You'll get sympathy, but you'll also get "well, everyone knows that's a bad part of town" and "well, you shouldn't have had your wallet in your back pocket" and "we're sorry but there's nothing we can do." They don't particularly care because they themselves are rarely victims and you are just another tourist.

Anecdote. A couple of years ago I was in KC and I went to get my drivers license renewed six months before it ran out. The clerk down at the DMV got a little suspicious and asked why. I replied that I was going abroad and just wanted to make sure I had a valid license. She asked where and I said Spain. She said, "Oh, you'd better watch out in Barcelona, it seems like half the people who come in here for new licenses got robbed in Barcelona." If the first thing that comes to the mind of a typical, standard American, a clerk at the Kansas Department of Motor Vehicles, when she thinks of Spain, is "Barcelona is dangerous" and not "Spain is beautiful", then we've got a problem, Houston. Over and out.

Here is the US State Department's take on crime in Spain from a tourist's perspective. Read it.

CRIME: While most of Spain has a moderate rate of crime and most of the estimated one million American tourists have trouble free visits to Spain each year, street crimes against tourists occur in the principal tourist areas. Madrid and Barcelona, in particular, report incidents of muggings and violent attacks, and older tourists and Asian Americans seem to be particularly at risk. Criminals frequent tourist areas and major attractions such as museums, monuments, restaurants, outdoor cafes, Internet cafes, hotel lobbies, beach resorts, city buses, subways, trains, train stations, airports, and ATM machines.

In Barcelona, a number of attacks have been reported on Las Ramblas, near the Picasso Museum, in the Gothic Quarter, in Parc Güell, in Plaza Real and on Montjuic. In Madrid, incidents have been reported in most major tourist areas, in the area near the Prado Museum, near Atocha train station, in Retiro Park, in areas of old Madrid including Sol and El Rastro flea market, near the Royal Palace and in Plaza Mayor. Travelers should remain alert to their personal security and exercise caution. Travelers are encouraged to carry limited cash, one credit card, and a copy of their passport; leaving extra cash, credit cards, passports and personal documents in a safe location. When carrying documents, credit cards or cash, you are encouraged to secure them in a hard-to-reach place and not to carry all valuables together in a purse or backpack. Crimes occur at all times of day and night and to people of all ages.

Thieves often work in teams or pairs. In most cases, one person distracts a victim while the accomplice performs the robbery. For example, someone might wave a map in your face and ask for directions or "inadvertently" spill something on you. While your attention is diverted, an accomplice makes off with the valuables. Attacks have also been initiated from behind, with the victim being grabbed around the neck and choked by one assailant while others rifle through or grab the belongings. A group of assailants may surround the victim, often in a crowded popular tourist area or on public transportation, and only after the group has departed does the person discover he/she has been robbed. Purse-snatchers may grab purses or wallets and run away, or immediately pass the stolen item to an accomplice. A passenger on a passing motorcycle sometimes robs pedestrians. There have been several reports of thieves posing as plainclothes police officers sometimes beckoning to pedestrians from cars. American citizens are encouraged to deal with uniformed law enforcement personnel only. Some attacks have been so violent that victims have needed medical attention.

Theft from vehicles is also common. Items high in value like luggage, cameras, laptop computers, or briefcases are often stolen from cars. Travelers are advised not to leave valuables in parked cars, and to keep doors locked, windows rolled up and valuables out of sight when driving. "Good Samaritan" scams are unfortunately common, where a passing car or helpful stranger will attempt to divert the driver's attention by indicating there is a flat tire or mechanical problem. When the driver stops to check the vehicle, the "Good Samaritan" will appear to help the driver and passengers while the accomplice steals from the unlocked car. Drivers should be cautious about accepting help from anyone other than a uniformed Spanish police officer or Civil Guard.

While the incidence of rape and sexual assault is statistically very low, attacks do occur. Americans should not lower their personal security awareness because they are on holiday. Spanish authorities have warned of availability of so-called "date-rape" drugs and other drugs, including "GBH" and liquid ecstasy.

American citizens have been victims of lottery or advance fee scams in which a person is lured to Spain to finalize a financial transaction. Often the victims are initially contacted via internet or fax and informed they have won the Spanish Lottery (El Gordo), inherited money from a distant relative, or are needed to assist in a major financial transaction from one country to another. For more information, please see the information sheet on the Bureau of Consular Affairs website at http://travel.state.gov/scams.html.

Here's Barcelona Business on safety in Barcelona:

Catalonia is Spain's third most frequently visited province, with Britons the most numerous tourists, followed by Germans. Barcelona was Britons' most popular 'city break' destination last year. Rising street crime reported in the UK press has caused more concern than the statistically miniscule risk of being hurt by ETA bombs.

Tourists in Barcelona are targeted by gangs using strangleholds and carrying knives and bottles. Baggage is snatched from hotel lobbies and tour coach unloading spots. Police inaction and a judicial vacuum encouraging reoffenders tempt hundreds of foreign professional criminals to the city during the tourist season. Official figures show that a crime is committed in the city every two minutes, up 7% on last year, with 65% of reports for assault or theft. Many attacks go unreported.

Criminal activity tends to break down ethnically: while eastern Europeans use various scams on La Rambla, the Old Town back streets are best for bag snatching, often at the hands of young north Africans. The situation is a disaster for racial harmony in a city only just coming to terms with immigration.

Armed international gangs hit Barcelona jewellers, well-stocked for the season, and bands of highwaymen (usually termed 'Peruvians' by the Spanish press) cruise Catalonia's highways on the lookout for foreign numberplates. Foreign motorists are more at risk this summer due to the confusing renaming of Catalonia's highways, with route names not appearing on international tourist maps (see Story, Roads renamed).

This Blogshares thing is kind of fun. I sold a hundred shares of IEIN in order to get some spending money and diversify, and bought some Ibidem, since it's the blog of record from Madrid; I bought some HispaLibertas because it's a damn good blog and because it's in Spanish--the Spanish blog market is growing now, it's booming; I bought some Puerta del Sol because it's a new blog that is going to become more popular--its owner frequently writes in our Comments section; I bought some Merde in France just because I like it; and I bought some Dissident Frogman because of the Frogman's unique perspective and his ability with computer graphics. He's moved, by the way.

Somebody should figure out how to get Cinderella Bloggerfeller into this. I'd buy his stock. I think his blog is a bit too complex intellectually for a lot of people (not you guys, of course, I mean the people from Raytown, Missouri, out there), but he consistently gets good links from InstaPundit and other well-known, high-profile blogs, and he's the only guy out there discussing writers like Glucksmann and Revel.

English-Language Movies Most Overplayed on Catalan TV:

5. All those movies about how wonderful life is in a crap neighborhood in Dublin based on Roddy Doyle books
4. Michael Collins
3. In the Name of the Father
2. Rob Roy
1. Braveheart

John Lilly sent me a letter, and it is absolutely spot-on. No fair commingling Franco's regime with the PP. There are about three connections: Manuel Fraga, President of Galicia, was important in Franco's cabinets through the 60s and 70s, but Fraga was considered pretty liberal for Spain at that time and he was one of the designers of today's Constitution. He has played ball democratically ever since the Transition. Fraga was the founder of the AP, the predecessor of the PP. Jose Maria Aznar, as a youth under Franco's regime, wrote several sophomoric articles praising the Franco National Movement. I'm glad none of you people can find any of the stuff I wrote when I was nineteen. Aznar's father was a pretty big wheel under the Franco government.

Aznar, however, is scrupulously democratic and has been so ever since he discovered sensible conservative politics during his university days. If he were American he'd fit well into the moderate Republicans. He'd be rather left for a Republican on government spending issues. Aznar might also fit in pretty well with the Democrat "far right", but those Charlie Stenholm Texas wheeler-dealer guys might be too corrupt for his taste. See, one of the things Aznar did was to clean up the Spanish conservative wing, getting rid of old Franquistas and local caciques. The most famous to fall were Cantabria's Juan Hormaechea, who did some jail time, and the PP's Balearic confederation, up to their eyeballs in corrupt construction-development sleaze.

By the way, several notable people who later joined the Socialists also worked in the government under Franco. To be fair, these were "technocratic" administration rather than ideological guys--somebody's got to take charge of the country's finances, for example, whether we've got a dictatorship or not. Two examples are former economics minister Miguel Boyer and the late former foreign minister, Paco Ordonez. Boyer has now jumped the Socialist sinking ship and is considered close to the PP.

Forgive me if this is an annoyance, but I don't know where else to
turn! In this Slate piece on the Beckham business
http://slate.msn.com/id/2084564/ the New Republic's F. Foer pulls THE
classic boner of latter-day offhand, ill-informed Spanish political
analysis. The relevant passage:

"Like so many European business stories, Real Madrid's success begins
with government help. Generalissimo Francisco Franco adored the team,
lounging around his palace on weekends and watching it on television;
his dictatorship allegedly secured Madrid the best players of the day.
And this is not only distant history. In 2000, Madrid's right-wing City
Council paid about $350 million to buy the club's training ground."

Now, I'm sure Mr. Foer would argue that he's only associating the PP
with the Franquistas because of their common habit of helping out Real
Madrid. Which would be false, if perhaps strictly defensible. In any
case, it seems to me that referring to the PP as "right-wing" in the
historical context of Spanish politics is pretty obnoxious in its own
right, and certainly misleading to an American audience: on many
important issues the PP is well to the left of, e.g., the Democratic
Party. On most issues, I'd say--and I tend to vote Republican.
Certainly the PP don't run around in patent-leather tricorn hats
jailing Communists, etc.

The NYT used to indulge habitually in this slander-by-implication--to
my great annoyance--but now they seem to refer to the PP as
"center-right," which is at least edging closer to the realm of
accuracy. I guess someone complained. Anyway, I can't figure out how
to get in touch with either the editors of Slate or Mr. Foer (short of
writing a letter to TNR)--although perhaps I'm not trying hard enough.

If this irks you as it does me, perhaps you'd like to comment on it
publicly. Or perhaps not. Anyway, thanks for the blog.

Best,
John Lilly

Here's a news piece from the Telegraph which says that Aznar is trying to play the American card to get Britain to turn over sovereignty or partial sovereignty or whatever of Gibraltar, and that Blair is hoppin' mad. Here's the opinion piece. This damn Gibraltar thing--the Spaniards consider Gibraltar España Irridenta and they want it very badly. They consider the current situation, with Britain owning Gibraltar, intolerable and unacceptable. They also know they can't go to war with the Brits over this. So they continually pressure the British, and everybody else who might have some influence over them, to turn over Gib. Now, the problem is that 99% of the Giblets don't want to be turned over to Spanish sovereignty, and the British can't just turn 'em over without their say-so. This isn't like it was Hong Kong or something. Or, more accurately, Spain ain't China. Next thing the Arabs are going to start yelling for Gib to be turned over to them, since they did, after all, hold it from 711 to 1492, while Spain only held it between 1492 and 1714.

Derb from National Review has been reading Sir Martin Rees and he's feeling despondent and fatalistic. Cheer him up! Send him an e-mail in favor of your state's sodomy law!

This is kind of funny. Iberian Notes is being traded on Blogshares; it's going for $148 a share and it has skyrocketed since the postwar blog blahs. So go out and buy some if you're playing! It's probably not a blue chip, more like at the small-growth-company level.

Oh, yeah, here's a good story from Australia, home of John Pilger, Saddam's propaganda pimp, that InstaPundit linked to. It completely debunks the horror stories that certain elements of the media, such as the Pimp and Beirut Bob Fisk, spread about the so-called genocide of the Iraqi children during the embargo.

The Times of London takes Michael Moore apart. Check it out. (Via Andrew Sullivan). I'm going to start carrying this article around with me and pull it out the next time I run into an Intellectually Aggressive Brit.

Intellectually Aggressive Brits are working- or lower middle-class Englishmen--you don't often find this phenomenon among other inhabitants of the British isles, or among women--who have been to a (red-brick) university and who have a degree in something useless like English lit or education. These people are acutely class-conscious and know exactly where they fit in the English social scheme, which is here: Guardian readers who think they're smart enough to run things but know they'll never get another chance in A. T. (After Thatcher) England, so they simmer in the anger and shame that their irrelevance causes them while lecturing on labour history at the local polytechnic somewhere gray like Nottingham or Sunderland. If they can't hack even that, they show up down here. I enjoy listening to them lecture to me about Barcelona after having been here three months.

Anyway, you, as an American, can expect to get a good talking-to by this brand of Brit. He will lecture you up one side and down the other on the perfidiousness of your home country, and he knows it's true because Noam Chomsky or Robert Fisk or Michael Moore or Naomi Klein or (formerly) Christopher Hitchens or Mr. Unfunny Self-Hating Yank Comedian Bill Hicks (whose basic joke was a bitter diatribe against ignorant fat people from Iowa who had the gall to visit Britain, his adopted homeland) says so. No point in arguing with these guys; they've got their minds made up based on what they consider Received Truth.

I met up with three unpleasant Brits of this type this very week, one at the coffee shop and the other two in separate visits to Miguel's downtown. All three approached me; I did not initiate any of these conversations. I prefer, when alone in public, to mind my own business; however, I will talk courteously to anyone who starts talking to me. Now, this is an unusual week; I normally get one of these a month or so.

These folks all lit into me about the United States and got Intellectually Aggressive when I didn't roll over and start whimpering like Bill Hicks and the other Self-Hating Yanks (note: most Yank expatriates are self-hating in one way or another; some are more extreme than others, but, let's put it this way, they've read Howard Zinn's History of the United States and haven't read Paul Johnson's) they've run across. In fact, I managed to get two of the three all tangled up in their own logic by simply questioning the premises behind their assumptions, which are often laughable; amazing how much more Intellectually Aggressive Brits think they know about the US than Americans themselves. Jeez, a Brit who is a friend of mine but just a little I.A. once told me in all seriousness that George Bush was a fanatical born-again Christian; Bush, of course, is a Methodist. The third guy, though, launched into this long story about how there were no Cuban troops on Grenada and nobody got shot and how, get this, it happened in 1993. Fortunately, I had to go home right then, having discussed what I had to discuss with the bar's owner.

American Movies Most Overplayed on Spanish TV:

7. All those slapstick parody movies with Leslie Nielsen
6. Those damn Chevy Chase vacation movies
5. Thelma and Louise
4. Fried Green Tomatoes
3. Those pieces of crap with Clint Eastwood and the ape
2. The Shawshank Redemption
1. Mississippi Burning

OK, here's the Vanguardia's take on the David Beckham signing. Joan Laporta, then a candidate for FC Barcelona's presidency, negotiated a deal with Man U's directors in which Barcelona would buy Beckham from Manchester United, subject to Beckham's approval, which was announced on Tuesday, June 10. Beckham announced then that he did not want to come to Barcelona. Somehow the Barça's "entorno" managed to miss these statements, Laporta was elected president Sunday, and until approximately yesterday it was assumed that, no matter what, the Barça had Beckham tied up.

Wrong. The deal that brought Beckham to Real Madrid was made in Sardinia last Friday and Beckham gave his approval yesterday. Madrid will pay Man U 25 million euros. The Vangua's story does not say how much Madrid will pay Beckham.

This is actually a good move for Madrid for three reasons. First, Madrid already has the structure of a team, and the Beckham piece fits into the puzzle. He'll play right midfield next to Figo, at right wing, and Zidane in the center, who plays behind forwards Raul and Ronaldo. Madrid's starting eleven will look like this: Casillas; Salgado, Hierro, Helguera, Roberto Carlos; Figo, Beckham, Zidane, Makelele; Ronaldo, Raul. They'd do well to replace Hierro, who is at the end of his career, but except for him, this team is hard to beat on paper. Salgado could be upgraded, but he's OK, not a problem, he's on the national squad. If you were looking for somebody to buy and you were Madrid, though, he'd be the first guy you'd replace after Hierro.

Second, Madrid has the money to spend. They've got the big bucks, and they've got a plan set up in which they buy one superstar at his peak every year. You can get away with this if you have big, big money, and a successful squad to build on.

Third, Beckham will help Madrid's marketing and merchandising business a great deal, and Madrid is allowed the luxury of hiring players who will bring money in to the club from off the field. Barcelona does not have that luxury; it needs to put together a winning team before it worries about T-shirt sales.

Oh, and fourth, 25 million euros is a hell of a good deal for Beckham if you figure he's 29 and you'll get about two or three more good years out of him. Compare this with some of the prices from the last few years for big stars and with some of the prices being thrown around for guys that the Barça is interested in:

12.5 million for Chivu, Ajax Amsterdam's central defender. That's pricey for a defenseman, and he'd also use up one of your four "extracommunitarian" spots because he's Romanian. He's only 22, though. And Barcelona needs someone who can play defense.

16 million for Kezman, PSV Eindhoven's center-forward. I thought we already had Kluivert and Saviola. Of course, I wouldn't mind getting rid of Kluivert and Saviola. Another extracommunitarian--he's Yugoslav. And he's 24, so you could get five or six years from him. But two-thirds of Beckham's price?

15 million for Makaay, Deportivo's center-forward. OK, if we're getting rid of Kluivert and Saviola. He's proven he can play well in the Spanish league. But he's 29 and right at his peak. I don't like spending big money for guys over about 26.

15 million for Deco, Oporto's center midfielder. We already have eighteen of those guys. Only if you're going to get rid of Xavi and Gerard or Cocu. He's 24, a good age to buy a player.

Other players in the rumor mill are Ronaldinho from Paris-St. Germain (I bet he costs more than 20 million) and M?rquez and Luisao from Monaco.

Barcelona has already signed Rustu, one of those many anonymous goalies with some experience out there, just like Dutruel and Enke and Hesp and Bonano and all the other goalies they've gone through over the last few years.

Now, supposedly, Laporta has 50 million with which to sign "two cracks (i.e. superstars) and three good players." Right. Let's look at who you have. De Boer and Cocu's contracts run out and I would not re-sign either of them. The club wants to negotiate with Kluivert to reduce his salary. I just bet he don't go along with that. So sell him. He's a good player, but he's earning superstar money and he's not playing like one. Sor?n and Mendieta have been "rented" from the clubs who own them; I would buy Sorin and send Mendieta home. Alfonso and Geovanni are now being "rented out"; I'd get rid of both for whatever I could get for them. They want to get rid of Riquelme and wouldn't mind unloading Rochemback. This leaves next year's team looking something like this: Rustu or Valdes, Gabri, Puyol, Navarro, Sorin; Motta, Xavi, Gerard, Overmars; Kluivert and Saviola. Ouch. That team sucks. You need two central defenders, two wingmen, one on each side, and two forwards.

They ought to think about buying a few Spanish players: maybe Atletico's Garcia Calvo, maybe Munitis from Racing, Joaquin from Betis for sure, Morientes if he comes cheap, Luque or Tristan from Deportivo, De Pedro from Real Sociedad--Joaquin on the right and De Pedro on the left would be a damn good pair of wingmen--maybe Baraja or Vicente from Valencia.

So how about this squad: Valdes; Puyol, Chivu, Garcia Calvo, Sorin; Joaquin, Xavi, Gerard, De Pedro; Ronaldinho and Kezman. With Laporta's 50 million and the, say, 25 million you'd get in a fire sale of Kluivert, Saviola, Riquelme, Rochemback, Alfonso, Geovanni, and Overmars, that ought to be doable.

They have decided on a coach: Guus Hiddink, who just won the Dutch league with PSV Eindhoven and was South Korea's coach in the 2002 World Cup. He has also coached Valencia, Real Madrid, and Betis. Not a bad choice, though I didn't know we were willing to accept Real Madrid's sloppy seconds.

Here's Dinesh D'Souza in Front Page on reparations and why they're not only a bad idea, but unjust. And check out this piece that Mickey Kaus linked to on the Council of Europe's proposal that might force us bloggers to give equal time to those we criticize. Now, that's not prior-restraint censorship, but if they actually begin enforcing this rule, I quit. I have no desire to provide a forum in which the SocioCommunists get half the space to express their ideas. Let them start their own blogs and get into the marketplace of ideas on their own merits.

Oh, well, if this dumb thing actually goes through, which it won't, we'll be able to make El Pais give us tons of space to spout off our points of view.

Here's Victorino Matus from the Weekly Standard on the most recent European conference at Lake Como. I hope he's right and that the Western Alliance will be able to patch up its wounds, and it suffered plenty. The Americans will not forgive the French for a good little while; they feel truly betrayed over the French threat of a Security Council veto. The Yanks would not have objected in the least to an abstention mixed with some anti-Bush rhetoric, but the threatened veto is not seen as the action of a friend who disagrees with you; it is seen as the action of an enemy.

Still, though, it's about time to get our relations back on track. I vote we don't do the French--or the Germans or the Belgians--any favors over the next few years, but that we don't become their open enemy either, and that we don't do anything petty and childish in seeking revenge. We should treat them fairly and politely but without warmth. It'll take a while to wake up those friendly feelings again, but it can be done, and that is much more important than the temporary fun we've been having bashing the French. Not that they didn't deserve it.

Oh, just a comment. There have been several short articles in the Vangua about the "xenophobic anti-French campaign" in the United States, based apparently on decreased sales of French wine and the wave of French jokes that swept the US this spring. Jeez. They dis us all the time, right and left, over nothing. It is absolutely impossible to pick up a newspaper in continental Europe that doesn't contain an anti-American slur somewhere; if nowhere else, the TV section will insult most of the movies on that night. But we tell a few jokes like the French rifle advertised for sale--never fired, only dropped once; that's the one that seems to make them the maddest--and there's a xenophobic campaign going. Jeez.

Here's the BBC's take on the FC Barcelona presidential elections and on the "possible signing" of David Beckham, which the Barcelona sports papers are reporting as nearly a done deal while the British press is saying no way he's coming to Barcelona. If I were Beckham I wouldn't come anywhere near a team that won't be back in the Champions' League anytime soon, and if I were the Barça I wouldn't try to sign him anyway since he's a player at his peak with only one direction to travel in his career--downhill. Players at their peak are at their highest price based on their past accomplishments--and they have one or two more good seasons left in them before they're clearly in the decline stage. You don't buy a player at his peak because he's already accomplished most of what he's going to. You don't buy seventeen-year-old kids, either. You buy players between 21 and 23 or so. These guys have already established that they're developing players--they're not just phenoms, but they're still cheap because they haven't accomplished much yet. They may not turn out to be great but they'll be at least competent.

Murph says that I might be right footballistically, but that the whole deal with signing Beckham is the publicity and the marketing. I say that the best publicity and marketing policy is having a winning team and that Becks is not the way to go to build a winner.

Also, who's going to be the coach?

Speculation by Murph: Joan Laporta will have the shortest honeymoon as president in history, since Real Madrid will almost certainly sign Beckham sometime this summer. "The squeals of delight from Laporta's pijo backers will turn to howls of rage when Becks puts on the white shirt, and he will be lame-ducked," says Iberian Notes' Official Inside Football and Political Ideology Prognosticator.

First Axiom of Sustainable Forum-thought, according to Our Dear Leader:

This phenomenon is formulated thus: "The internalization of the consequences in time and space is the basis of sustainability". Restated in practice, this means that everyone has to learn to "eat dirt".

From a speech by Mayor Joan Clos of Barcelona, November 2002, linked to below.

Just a Year to Go--Forum 2004

We preview Barcelona life in the immediate future
by Alan Murphy and John Chappell

“ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE”

OFFICIAL FORUM-2004-THOUGHT COMPLIANCE DIRECTIVE #4032

All Barcelonans will be obliged to appear naked at the Diagonal Mar Fine Arts and Sustainable Urbanism Peace Camp at 6.25 AM tomorrow for the inauguration of the “International Workshop on Gender-neutral Encounter on Clothes-Optional Peace and Arts Sustainable Governability Project for Solidarity”. Organic pita bread and garlic-lentil casserole will be served for breakfast. All citizens must bring their pita-bread ration card, from which two Forum Solidarity Points will be subtracted.

Those with “NO TO WAR” already tattooed on their left buttock cheek will be exempted from the Semiotic-Workshop on Body Messaging this evening. Those who have not yet fulfilled their solidarious commitment will have the message tattooed this evening. All citizens with surnames A-M will report to the Rigoberta Menchu Tattooage and Ethical Body-Piercing Commissariat at the site of the Lenin Barracks in Plaza Espanya by 22.00. Those with surnames N-Z will report to The Jose Saramago Forumization and High-Colonic Enema Institute, at the Port Olympic, also before 22.00.

Failure to comply will result in obligatory attendance at the Sustainability of Solidarian Forum-Thought, to be held at the Manresa Rock Quarry from August 1-31 2004.

As you all know, our right buttocks are being reserved for the “ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE” message to be inscribed there for the gala Closing Ceremony. Expect another directive on this during September.

Yours in solidarity,

OUR DEAR LEADER, JOAN CLOS

COMMISSAR FOR SOLIDARITY COMPLIANCE, INMA MAYOL

Announcement published in LA VANGUARDIA and other newspapers on May 16th 2004.

For further information click here for Our Dear Leader's 2001 speech on Forum-Thought.
Click here for the Ur-vision of the Forum by Our Dear Leader in December 2002.

David Skinner revisits his piece about the Toni Morrison PSAT question; of course, we were right. The sentence as it stands is grammatically correct. Also, it's patronizing to black people and just plain false, which was Skinner's main point. But it's not ungrammatical. We also point out to Skinner that we, at least, understood his point, as is demonstrated in our previous comment on this.

Damn, it's hot here in Barcelona, well over ninety F. This is unusual. Barcelona summer weather is normally low or mid-eighties by day, high sixties at night. I went down to the roast chicken stand to get Remei and the cats their Sunday chicken, and I thought I was going to die in there, what with the chicken roaster being on full blast. You know what's gross? People bring glass jars to the chicken guy and he fills them up with the chicken juice that's dripped to the bottom of the roaster. Ick.

It's normally pretty tolerable without air-conditioning, which we, along with most people, don't have. It's becoming much more popular these days, though, since affordable A/C units that actually work and can cool a whole apartment are on the market at less than a grand.

My strategy: Ventilation first. In Barcelona it's important that your apartment be oriented toward the sea; you get the breeze off the Mediterranean and sun in the morning. Our place, of course, fulfills that criterion--we're picky about this when finding a place to live.

Then, when at home, relax and take it easy while wearing as little 100% cotton clothing as possible. Are you overheated now? Is your T-shirt one of those 50-50 cotton/polyester things? There might be a connection. Take it off, just to be on the safe side.

Also, get a tall glass. Fill with ice cubes. Add 1/3 cheap rosé wine, 1/3 orange juice, and 1/3 Fanta lemon or 7-up. Take in moderation as needed.

It's fruit season here--I swear I've been eating a pound a day of apricots and cherries, which are at the peak of their season. Strawberries are now in decline but still available. They have these little yellow plums here which aren't much bigger than cherries--those are good.

Now it comes out. Remember the big nude-o photo shoot some joker set up on Montjuic a few days ago? Turns out our city government paid 100,000 euros to this joker Spencer Tunick to get everybody naked and pose them so he could photograph it. All in the Holy Name of Art, of course.

The circus in the Madrid region continues. The PP is calling for new elections. The Socialists are yelling that it's not fair and are accusing everyone of being corrupt. Everyone is pointing out to the Socialists that you can't charge corruption with no evidence, which as of now they don't have any of. The PSOE doesn't want to go to the polls again because they'd get creamed after this most recent enormous political gaffe. They have lost and they have lost badly. Even if they eventually wind up getting to keep the Madrid regional presidency, they are the laughingstocks of the country.

Every time Esperanza Aguirre, the PP candidate, comes on TV, she can barely restrain herself from cracking up. The irony is intense, since the Socialists have always demagogically smeared Aguirre as being stupid--supposedly when Saramago (Jose) won the Nobel Lit prize, she asked "Who is this woman Sara Mago?", which I don't believe because it's far too obviously an urban legend--and Esperanza the Supposedly Stupid is smiling like the cat that swallowed the canary while Zap is really quickly trying to make everyone forget that it was the "traitors' " votes that got him elected as boss of the Socialists.

The other thing is the Socialists did, in the early '90s, exactly the same thing as the PP is being accused of wanting to do now, in the so-called "caso Piñiero". The PP had won by a narrow margin in the Madrid region and two PP representatives turned coat and went over to the PSOE, giving them the presidency. Now the PSOE is accusing the PP of doing exactly what they did--benefitting from the votes of turncoats.

By the way, "to turn coat" in Spanish is "cambiar de chaqueta". I wonder which of the two languages the calque originates in, or whether we both got it from the French. Stands to reason the French would be the ones to invent that particular expression.

A couple of Kansas City natives are big news in the Vanguardia today. Tom Watson, who won five British Opens, had a terrific first round at the US Open and is still one of the leaders--he won't win, of course, but it was nice to see him have such a good first round. The Vangua seems to appreciate him and gave him a nice big sports feature story and a photo.

I have actually met Tom Watson. In the summer of 1984 I worked as one of those awful people who waylay you in the mall--in this case Metcalf South in Overland Park--and ask you if you want to help with a market research survey. I was sent out to get men 25 to 49 or whatever for a soft drink taste test study, which I am positive was part of the introduction of New Coke. I saw this gentleman walking through the mall, not knowing who he was. Seemed like a nice fellow, well-dressed and all--I never stopped people who looked grumpy or in a big hurry, even though I was supposed to. I stopped him and asked him to participate and he said sure and I brought him back to the testing center, where I was immediately informed that I had somehow snagged Tom Watson, the famous golfer. Mr. Watson was very kind and shook hands all around and was surveyed, and then we turned him loose.

The thing is he didn't have to do that. He went out of his way to help out a kid making a minimum wage job--or was too nice to say "Go away and don't bother me," whatever--, and the kid didn't even know who he was. So I always root for Tom Watson.

There's also a back-page interview with Pat Metheny, who is in town. Metheny is one of those guys whose talent and creativity you have to respect, but whose music I'm not particularly interested in. I know Metheny and his brother, Mike, have done a lot for the Kansas City jazz scene, but he sure sounds like a jerk--and a schizophrenic--in this excerpt from the interview:

Q. Would you play for Bush?
A. No! No way! No.
Q. They say music soothes the savage beast.
A. Yes, but the beast has to have a certain sensitivity. And in this case, seriously, I don't think there's any sensitivity there. There is nothing that makes me think that Bush has the most remote appreciation of beauty.
Q. Is silence better?
A: I've never experienced it. We live in a world where silence does not exist. I always hear things.

I know it's "the savage breast", but the misquotation has made it over to Spanish and is now an accepted saying.

Now here's one for Andrew Sullivan's Sontag Award. It's Paul Auster, who is very popular here among our local Illustrated and Enlightened--a good rule of thumb regarding fiction is if the Barcelona critics like it, it's probably a bunch of pretentious crap. Anyway, he's in town for a month because the Catalan regional government has named his wife the Invited Author of 2003 with our tax money, and the Vangua gives him space for some cogent political analysis here.

Auster explained yesterday how the Bush Administration irritates him, just the same as the New Yorkers, "who are much more liberal than the rest of the country", t the point where some are already asking for independence. "A poetry magazine ran this headline on its last front cover: "USA OUT OF NYC". To the writer, "The Bush Administration is the extreme right, not even conservative. It's obvious what they're trying to do: destroy the (state?) governments, drive them to bankruptcy, so that they'll be unable to help anybody. Everything will be privatized except the armed forces. Bush is the devil, evil. He brings disaster. We had no right to invade Iraq. With "preventive war" we can invade any country in the world, because we're always threatened by something. Bush wasn't elected, he lost the elections and there was a legal coup d'etat."

Auster, by the way, shows his philistinism regarding Spanish culture when he states he is going to Madrid to meet Pedro Almódovar and then to Granada to see Lorca's house. Oh, jeez, has any American ever heard of any Spanish writers except García Lorca, who is massively overrated and is still known--not read by anyone but Spanish lit majors, though--today largely because of the manner of his death? Trust me, people, forget all that crap about how Lorca reaches down into the soul of Spain and puts the depth of sensitivity of the pueblo de España into words on the printed page. Spare me that "Verde que te quiero verde" stuff. And I personally wouldn't bother crossing the street to talk to Almódovar. We'd have nothing to say to one another. He would hate me and I probably wouldn't like him.

Here's Roger Kimball taking apart the press and the frenzy over the "looting" of the Iraqi national museum.

Here's some lovely invective from loudmouth Ann Coulter:

According to an ABC poll, 48 percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of Hillary, 53 percent of Americans don't want Hillary to ever run for president, and 7 percent of Americans have been date-raped by Bill Clinton.

And if this open letter from Dick Morris to Hillary is the truth, Bill Clinton is guilty of assault and battery along with probably over a thousand other felonies. You know, I just don't see Eisenhower beating up on one of his political advisors. Ignoring or scorning, maybe. Tackling and trying to punch, no.

The political circus in Madrid continues. It looks very much like the two defectors from the Socialist Party are going to throw the government of the Madrid region to the PP. There goes the Socialists' big electoral prize and boy, are they pitching a fit. Manuel Chaves, the Socialist party president, says that "economic and development interests that do not want the Socialists to govern in Madrid" are behind the two Socialist defectors. Gas, the Commies' leader, is accusing the PP of somehow being behind "a conspiracy to change and twist the majority will of the citizens of Madrid who decided that the left should govern." The PP is going to sue Gas for slander. Typical leftists; there's always a secret conspiracy of nefarious forces of evil thwarting them from making the world perfect for The Children.

The PP's response to the Socialist accusations of conspiracy is, says José María Aznar, "Solve your own problems." Adds Mariano Rajoy, "If you've got problems, don't blame them on everybody else." They say that the Socialists are the ones who put these two people on their electoral list and they are the ones who were unable to maintain their loyalty, so this whole circus is their own damn fault. Touché. Score one for Aznar and Rajoy.

The press is disgusted at this show of complete incompetence on the part of the Socialists and their striking out blindly in anger when they don't get what they wanted. There is near-complete unanimity, except in El País, the Socialist house organ, and the SER, the Socialist radio network, that the conspiracy and corruption accusations are unfounded. Says Alfredo Abián in the Vangua's page 2 signed editorial, "At this late stage in the game, the new PSOE is springing more leaks than the Prestige (the ship that sank off Galicia). And at the rate things are going, there are few doubts that we'll have the PP for a long time more." The Vangua's lead editorial on page 28 blasts Zap and Gas and their ilk, "(Saying this was) a maneuver by the PP to prevent the PSOE-IU coalition from governing in the Madrid region and not justifying it with accurate facts and evidence is no more than a simple insinuation that, for one thing, contributes to the poisoning of the political climate."

Enough of these clowns. They couldn't manage to catch the clap in Tijuana.

The sociologists strike again. The Soc department at the University of Barcelona, domain of Eulàlia "Chemical Lali" Solé (from now on Inma Mayol is "Anthrax Inma"), has a study out on homosexuality and adolescence. Now, this is a serious subject, and gay kids frequently do have psychological problems. I imagine that a lot of real work has been done on this subject and that it's something that is generally considered as significant among health and education professionals in the West. But is it true that in the US 30% of teenage suicides are caused by homosexuality-related traumas, as they say? I doubt it.

Check out these quotations from sociologist Ester Nolla, "We have to break with heterosexual language and neutralize heterosexuality as we did with sexism", and from sociologist Öscar Guasch, "The Spanish state practices a regime of apartheid, promoting a heterosexual lifestyle."

Oh, Lord. Look, people. Heterosexuality is the norm. 95% of human beings are heterosexual. Heterosexual behavior is necessary for the propagation of the species, which according to Charles Darwin is the goal of each living organism: to reproduce itself. Now, for some reason, 5% of people are not heterosexual. That's fine. As long as you're kind and honest and fair and considerate and love your neighbor, you're ace with me. I don't care what you do in bed or where you go to worship or what continent your ancestors came from. Hell, we're all originally from Africa anyway. But trying to deny that an enormous majority of people are heterosexual and that all societies consider heterosexuality as the norm is just plain nuts.

Something else about this so-called study that bugs me is that it is clearly activism masquerading as science. Its purpose was to "analyze the problems of discrimination and violence that affect non-adult gay or lesbian persons in Catalan society." That's begging the question. What the point of the study would be, if it were legitimate, would be "Do gay and lesbian adolescents face problems of discrimination or violence in Catalonia?", and my answer would probably be, "Yes, but don't a lot more people than gays and lesbians suffer from violence and discrimination in schools, especially at the hands of bullies? Isn't violence and discrimination against anyone a problem? And isn't the best way to stop it a hard line on discipline in the schools, punishing any student who uses any violence, verbal or physical, against anyone, and kicking out the ones who don't want to be there and just cause trouble? Let's look at the problem as a whole instead of focusing on only those victims who are homosexual, and let's crack down on those who are causing the problem."

Oops, that would, like, imply that actions have consequences and we wouldn't want to get into that. It would also imply that one has a limited number of chances to fuck up before one is officially labeled a fuckup, and that's not very inclusive, is it? These damn sociologists are the ones who caused all the goddamn problems in the schools anyway with their goofy dictates.

Note: The Vangua's photo shows some sociologists sitting around a table, on which is prominently displayed a book titled, "Paula tiene dos mamás." I'll bet you dollars to pesetas that it's the Spanish translation of that educational classic Heather Has Two Mommies.

Kitten Update: She can eat a whole 80-gram can of tuna within a couple of minutes. Now that we've cleaned her up and that her own efforts are taking effect, her white bits of fur are now actually white. She and Oscar have been spending their free time chasing one another and the Superball up and down the hallway. Bart is the only one of the established cats who is still furious. Keep those suggestions for names coming. Folks, this is a high-quality kitten we're talking here, not like this here loser. Hurry up before someone else adopts her; you don't want to miss out on having your own warm furry ball of fluff.

There's bad news today regarding two of Spain's biggest social problems, illegal immigration and domestic violence. Nine immigrants drowned when their raft sank off the Canary Isle of Fuerteventura, the island closest to the Moroccan coast. So far in 2003 ten rafts are known to have sunk, with 67 confirmed dead or missing and presumed dead. These statistics include 15 drowned off Fuerteventura in January and 12 drowned from a raft found between Tenerife and Grand Canary in February. Yet the Spanish media go wild when a truck full of illegal Mexicans get found dead somewhere in West Texas. The problem in both countries seems to be the same to me; more people want to come to Spain and the US than, at least some believe, either country can handle. As long as that attitude persists, there will be illegal immigration and some illegal immigrants will die, since illegal immigration is by definition dangerous and full of low criminals likely to take your money and dump you in the sea under the pretext of guiding you to the promised land. By the way, Iberian Notes strongly supports the execution of "coyotes" who abandon their "clients" to die. That's first-degree premeditated murder with the aggravating factors of extortion and breach of promise. Hang them. They're scum.

More than forty people have died in Spain this year as victims of domestic violence. Yesterday, in the crummy part of the Sant Andreu working-class area of Barcelona, a man beat his common-law wife to death with a hammer. The two were fiftyish alcoholics. They had met seven months ago and she invited him to live with her, since he had nowhere to go. The two argued and fought all the time, according to the neighbors, and threats of violence were heard several times by different witnesses. The cops spent a lot of time breaking up fights at their place. Once she locked him out and he took off all his clothes and pounded on her door until three in the morning (there's the pacifism and tranquility of nudism for you). She finally got a restraining order. Not much later he jumped her from behind when she opened the street door to her apartment building; he was waiting inside and clubbed her to death with a hammer. She had been out walking her dogs. The reporters point out that the dogs, found in a state of shock by the woman's body, immobile and trembling, were the only so-called irrational animals in this story. This, of course, is another case of premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances, including violating a restraining order and breaking and entering to get into her building. There's no insanity defense since he knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. Hang him. He's scum.

In the wake of the great nude "No to the war" assembly in the holy name of Art, Baltasar Porcel reminds us, in today's Vanguardia, that he danced nude on stage in the last, uh, act at the opening night of "Hair" in Paris in 1969. I do not want to see the photos, thank you.

Here's the latest twist in the soap opera which is Spanish politics. In the Madrid regional Parliament, the PP got 55 seats, the Socialists got 47, and the Communists got 9, giving a Popular Front coalition a 56-55 majority over the conservative PP. That was the deal that was made, and the Socialists and Communists agreed to ally and put the Socialist candidate in as President of the regional government, the biggest prize they won in the May 25 elections.

But the best laid plans of mice and men go straight to hell. Two of the Socialist deputies, Eduardo Tamayo and Teresa Sáez, bolted the party yesterday and refused to appear and vote for the prospective Socialist Chairman of the Parliament (i.e. Speaker). This put in the PP woman, Concepción Dancausa, instead of the SocioCommie guy, Francisco Cabaco, as the wielder of the gavel. The two rebel deputies have been summarily kicked out of the Socialist Party and now the question is what they're going to do. If they abstain or do not appear when the vote on who's going to be the President of the region comes up, the PP candidate, Esperanza Aguirre, not exactly a member of the PP brain trust, will win 55-54. There goes the Socialists' big victory from March 25, the control of the Madrid region with its more than 5 million residents.

Tamayo says that the two rebel deputies refused to appear because they do not believe that the Socialists should pact with the Communists in a coalition; they say that such an alliance "is a betrayal of social democracy". Tamayo says he informed the party leadership about his and Sáez's votes on Saturday, so they knew what was coming several days in advance. Continues Tamayo, "A deal (with the communists) does enormous damage to the interests of the Socialist Party, because if what we try to do is to obtain power at any price without respecting the voters, the voters will end up punishing you, and Rodríguez Zapatero (Zap) has a date with the ballot boxes in a few months. We will not permit this kind of agreement, which takes the Socialist Party toward the extreme left. Someone has to represent the moderate Socialists in the Madrid regional parliament."

The Socialist Party spin is that, as everyone knows, there are various factions within the party. The two big factions are the "guerristas", named for their leader Alfonso Guerra, who are the fairly hard-left Party apparatchiks who control the regional party groupings, especially those to the south of Madrid where Socialist power is based, and the "renewers", who are rather Gary Hart-like--they have "new ideas" but nobody's sure what those new ideas are; they do generally believe that it would be a good idea to remove the guerristas from their positions of power within the Party.

The two rebel ex-Socialists, Tamayo and Sáez, are members of a small faction called the "balbases", formed in the early nineties under power broker José Luis Balbás. Historically they've switched between the two major factions in the party; in 1995 they supported Joaquin Leguina against the guerristas; in 1999 they supported the guerristas against Leguina. In 2000 their support was crucial in getting Zap named Party leader. Meanwhile, both Balbás and Tamayo have been accused of corruption and dishonesty regarding a few real-estate deals.

Anyway, both guerristas and renewers were in favor of getting together with Gas and the Commies and hoofing the PP out of the Madrid regional parliament. But the balbases threw a monkey wrench into the works, because they're resentful at not getting enough bones thrown to their faction. So say the Socialists. The PP is howling with laughter again, since it looks like they're going to keep the big electoral prize that the Popular Front coalition would have taken away from them. Also, the Socialist party looks like a bunch of disorganized and incompetent doofuses, as usual, and helps to convince responsible Spanish voters to vote for anybody except them. The PP is going to win the next general election. This fiasco is going to put them over.

The Upper Gràcia Kitten Rescue Squad has struck again. On Saturday Remei heard a kitten meowing piteously up on Calle Sant Salvador, but it was up in the motor of a parked car and I couldn't get it out. I came back every day to bring food and water, and it was in the motor of a different car every day. Finally last night I managed to coax it out with some tuna and grabbed it. She's a female, about two months old, and, like all kittens, is mega-cute. She's obviously used to people, so somebody must have dumped her, which is why she had no idea of how to shift for herself and was hiding out somewhere totally inaccessible. She's calico, white and brown and gray tabby all mixed in patches.

She's very friendly and playful; right now she's playing with a Superball on the floor of this room. She's also gotten into my wastebasket and knocked a book off my desk within the last fifteen minutes. She got over being frightened in about fifteen minutes after I got her home. This afternoon we're going to the vet. I'm already working my circle of contacts to see if there's a kitten-adopter among them. Oscar is the established cat who's reacted the best; he's just sitting and watching her, fascinated. This is the first kitten he's seen except for himself. He's already dared to sneak up on her and sniff her butt. The Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, have seen it all before and are neutral. They'll get used to her in a couple of days. Lisa has her little kitty nose seriously out of joint, though, and Bart is hiding behind the chair out on the balcony and he won't come out.

This kitten is prime adoption material, and anyone in need of a cat should contact me at crankyyanqui@yahoo.com. This is a kitten who will sleep curled up under your chin and play with your shoelaces when she's awake, so don't hesitate.

We're also going to hold a "Name That Kitten" contest. Remei wants to name her Daisy, but I don't much like that. So send in your suggestions for kitten names.

From James Taranto:

All the Nudes That's Fit to Print

Reporting from Barcelona, the New York Times' Sarah Lyall describes her participation in an "art project" that involved 7,000 people doffing their clothes and crouching in a fetal position:

" "The moment you take your clothes off is the worst moment, but then you feel integrated," said Ángeles Rubio, 33, a shoe designer, who said it was not so bad for her as she was a nudist and vegetarian.

Not this reporter. Aside from being worried about losing my clothes altogether and being forced to wander the back streets of Barcelona with nothing on, I discovered that a notebook does not work as a makeshift skirt. It was embarrassing while naked to happen upon people I had already interviewed while dressed. One of Mr. Tunick's earlier projects, involving nude older women in Australia, began to seem like a better bet in terms of participatory journalism."

It's good to know that with the Howell Raines era behind it, the Times is returning to its tradition of serious newsgathering.

Yep. No dog doo. It really happened--check the Vanguardia or the Periódico if you want to see the pictures. For a full gallery of photos, click on "La tapiz humana de Spencer Tunick" over to the right of your screen when you go to the El Periódico link. The horror, the horror. The whole thing made the front page of the Vangua below the fold. Here's the scoop.

One Spencer Tunick, a New York "artist", called upon the people of Barcelona to come out and get photographed nude en masse. 15,000 people signed up and 7000 actually came out--at four in the morning--to get naked and get photographed on Avenida María Cristina near Montjuic. They're saying it's the "greatest collective artistic nudity" in history, breaking the record of some 4000 naked leftovers from the Sixties set by Tunick himself in Melbourne. Anyway, at 6:20 AM, Tunick decided the light was correct and posed the crowd two different ways, lying on their backs and curled up in a fetal position. He was finished by 7:45.

Says our intrepid reporter, Justo Barranco, "The most generalized feeling was that it was strange that the situation didn't seem strange," "We, all together, feel surprisingly like brothers and sisters," "Blai, a young teacher who came with his boyfriend, said, 'I thought it would be like a dream in which you wake up and you're naked and everyone else is too'," "People began doing "the wave" and shouting 'No to the war'," and "(Tunick) reminded us of the paradox that in Barcelona his work is celebrated as an "artistic happening" while in his country, the United States, and in his city, New York, it would have been considered a crime."

Oh, geez, here it is again, that part of the American Black Legend that says we are puritanical philistines. Nobody would have said boo if Mr. Alleged Artist put on his show in Central Park as long as he had a municipal permit, which they would have given him in the holy name of Art. It's New York. They've seen everything. This would be no big deal there, certainly not front-page news in the local newspapers.

If he'd tried to put this crap on in Central Park, though, the Great Unwashed would have stood around in enormous crouds hooting and hollering and generally making fun of the stupid assholes who get up at four in the morning and get naked in the chill dawn in order to promote the notoriety of (and make money for) a fraud calling himself an artist. Our New York volunteers would not have enjoyed themselves nearly as much as the collection of pseuds, wannabes, and phonies who make up our city's element of the Illustrated and the Enlightened and who showed up at Montjuic.

Here's a piece on the revival in popularity of swing and jazz standards; this is not quite new news, since Tony Bennett, for example, has been hip again for several years, and "lounge" music was a trend a couple of years back. Lounge was a joke, though, but both the retro and the innovative trends in music today have a common source.

I really think the trend in question, applicable to both retro and new music, is toward "authenticity", however we want to define that. Now, commercial pop music can be "authentic" as all hell--look at the Motown singers, for example, or the Beatles, but a lot of the stuff that used to be hyped up by the media is not catching on with the American public in general.

What's popular now among a lot of younger people is funk-dance beat stuff, hip-hop plus soul and rap or whatever you want to call it, the stuff the kids like to listen to and can experiment with making themselves. It's got authenticity because it's the music that these kids would be making if they weren't trying to be big stars. Something that's very hip among the twenties-thirties crowd is so-called world music, especially fusions of Algerian or Dominican or West African or whatever dance music and standard Western pop-rock. This stuff gets its authenticity because it's what the people in other countries really listen to. Country music, especially the "authentic" bluegrass and Bakersfield strains, is increasing its popularity a great deal since it's seen as the real voice of the American people. Rock and roll is still healthy, and it's certainly always been hip to be into blues.

What's dropping off in popularity, I think, are the wilder excrecences of Eighties pop, from Madonna to Jacko. Remember that crap like Culture Club and A-Ha and the Thompson Twins and Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Adam Ant? A Flock of Seagulls? How about those one-hit wonders like "99 Red Balloons" and "Der Kommissar"? (Van Halen, who had a sense of humor, got the "Der Kommissar" guys to open for them once in Kansas City.) Have they euthanized Cyndi Lauper yet? God, that stuff stank, just as bad as the last gasp of Rock Music, your last and most incredibly boring albums by the Who and Floyd and Zep mixed with your wimp-metal bands like Journey and Foreigner and REO mixed with those hair-metal bands like Quiet Riot and Twisted Sister and Poison. God, the Eighties were an awful time. I'm supposed to be nostalgic for it, and I suppose I am, but not for the music that was on the radio at the time in the deep Midwest. It was phony, riddled with Salingeresque arch-phoniness.

Anyway, the Eighties stars who did that wacky shit are seen today as a bunch of phonies, and even the ones who didn't do wacky shit sucked. Huey Lewis and the News. Bon Jovi. Duran Duran. Hall and Oates. Billy Idol. Bryan Adams. Ouch. Phonies all and commercially dead now, if they were ever alive. Remember that Bryan Adams song called "Summer of '69" about how cool it was in 1969? Bryan Adams was like eight when the righteous shit was going on at Woodstock or whatever. Phony, phony, phony. Maybe we can deport Bryan Adams back to Canada if our relations with our northern neighbor get any worse. They can have all the old Second City TV people and their friends back, too.

Next trend to get the axe for being phony: the boy bands and the teenage sluts of the late '90s. In three years no one will remember any of them. Some of them, like Christina Aguilera, are already as forgotten as Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.

Comment: British music is as non-influential as it has been in the United States since the Beatles. I can't think of a British artist who's broken out in America for a few years now. Oasis bombed. So did the Spice Girls. As did Kylie Minogue, who I think is Australian anyway. Hypothesis: the British pop culture scene is seen as phony in the States.

The big news in Barcelona are the elections for the presidency of FC Barcelona. The Barça has about 100,000 members, who pay a substantial but not enormous sum--I believe it's some $400 a year, less than any other football club in Spain, and there's a several-year waiting list--and in exchange get tickets to the 19 League home games and a vote for the club president. The Barça is "owned" by its members, not by an owner like, say, George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees. 58% of the club's members are in Barcelona city and more than 90% live within Barcelona province, so this is something that affects the average Joe here, who can afford to be a member and get the season tickets. The guy who owns the newsstand in the plaza, for example, is a member. So is my psychiatrist. Now, about 58,000 people here in town are members out of about 1 1/2 million within the city limits. That's a sizable chunk of the population, and it's a very middle-class bunch of people, very much the kind of established, civic-minded people who are the backbone of the city.

To demonstrate the importance of these elections, the Vanguardia has been devoting several pages daily to them and TV3 has also been giving us daily, in-depth reports. The two sports daily papers (each of which has a circulation of over 100,000 and is at least 75% devoted to the Barça) are talking about nothing else.

José Luis Núñez was the club president for more than twenty years between the late '70s and late '90s. Núñez was never a popular president, but he was a good money manager and cleaned up the club's financial situation, putting it in excellent shape to make big signings and to invest in the future. Barcelona had traditionally been a disappointing team, the "Wait till next year" club, like the Red Sox or the Cubs or the old Brooklyn Dodgers. In the early '90s, finally, Núnez signed a few superstars and coach Johan Cruyff put together a fine squad that won four consecutive Spanish Leagues, a Cup Winners' Cup championship, and a European Cup championship. Then, a few years later, a much less popular squad won two Leagues under very unpopular coach Louis Van Gaal. As soon as Van Gaal's squad failed to win any titles, the club members threw a snooty fit because Van Gaal was so hated and they wanted to get rid of him. Núñez was offended at this internal revolt and resigned, and Van Gaal did too.

Joan Gaspart became the team president and rapidly became much more hated than Núñez had ever been. He wasted tons of the money Núñez had carefully saved up on crap signings and left the Barça in a similar situation to the New York Mets right now: a club that should have a lot of money and a bright future, but which has a ton of crappy over-the-hill players with huge contracts that they can't get rid of and that the fans hate (i.e. Frank "Where's the Ball?" DeBoer). The straw that broke the club member's back was when Gaspart rehired Louis Van Gaal, of all people, at the beginning of this last season. That was it. Everybody in town was ready to hate this squad, and the squad has repaid the fans by stinking up the League in what has been by far the worst season in the history of FC Barcelona. Next year will be the very first season in which the Barça will not qualify for European competition since said competitions were introduced in the 1950s. Van Gaal got run out of town on a rail along about January, and Gaspart resigned as president in about March or so.

Now, I am royally pissed off at the Barça. Here are five excellent reasons: 1) they hired Serbian fascist Slobo-loving Radomir Antic to replace Van Gaal as coach 2) they held an anti-American demonstration when the players became the only squad in Europe to wear "No to the war" T-shirts 3) they played a friendly match against Gadafi's son's team in exchange for €300,000 4) the fans threw mobile phones, whiskey bottles, and a pig's head at Luis Figo when Madrid came to play in the Camp Nou, getting the Barça headlines around Europe; the papers in, I think, Newcastle, where Barça was scheduled to play the next week, headlined "Beware! The pig-throwers are coming!" That's just great for the city's image 5) the League closed the Camp Nou for two games as punishment and the Barça sued them in regular court instead of accepting it as a fair consequence of discreditable behavior by its fans. The sentence still hasn't been served.

Well, as if I needed any more reasons to hate the goddamn Barça, anti-Semitism has reared its head in the Barça presidential race. Lluís Bassat is the leading candidate; he's a well-known advertising man who runs the local branch of Ogilvy and Mather. Mr. Bassat normally uses just his father's surname; here in Spain you can go by either just your father's surname (Pablo Ruíz) or by your father's and your mother's (Pablo Ruíz Picasso). Either way is fine.

So Jaume Llauradó, one of the other five candidates, has made an issue of the fact that Mr. Bassat uses only his first surname, which is standard Catalan, like Johnson in English though less common. Mr. Bassat does not habitually use his mother's surname, which is Cohen. You see, Mr. Bassat is Jewish. I didn't know that before, and I don't particularly care whether Mr. Bassat is Muslim or Catholic or Protestant or an atheist or whatever. Like me, most Barcelonese didn't know Bassat was Jewish before Mr. Llauradó clued us in. It's a curious fact that he's Jewish because there are very few Jews in Spain, but it doesn't matter, of course. It's like finding out that a black guy is Jewish. You're surprised because very few blacks are Jewish, and it goes against your expectation, but it doesn't change the way you think about him.

Unless, apparently, your name is Jaume Llauradó. Mr. Llauradó, who, we must assume, is no dummy, seems to believe that the tactic of publicizing Mr. Bassat's Jewishness will cost Mr. Bassat votes. This does not speak wonders for Mr. Llauradó's conception of the members of the Football Club Barcelona, as it shows that he believes that real Barcelonese won't vote for a Jew. If Bassat doesn't win--and he is the big frontrunner right now, he is the best-known and most prominent citizen of the candidates, he's signed up Barça hero (and drug-user) Pep Guardiola as his general manager-in-waiting and Barça legends Eusebio Sacristán and Guillermo Amor as Guardiola's assistants--who knows more about soccer than these three guys, all known as smart players with character?--, and he has the support of Miquel Roca, perhaps the city's leading citizen and its most powerful lawyer--I will assume that it is because he has been outed as a Jew.

The Vanguardia has been giving very little attention to this little contretemps, which would get Mr. Llauradó read out of decent society where I come from, just like Glenn Close in Dangerous Liasons. They are also paying very little attention to the success of the racist and xenophobic political party Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) in the municipal elections. If you want fascism, you'll do a lot better looking at the PxC and its Francoist leader, Josep Anglada, than at elected Prime Minister Aznar or elected President Bush, who have been getting labeled as Fascists by the illustrated and enlightened among us in the pages of the very newspaper that is playing the ostrich regarding these outbursts of xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism, which have included several anti-Arab near-pogroms right here in Catalonia, especially in the redneck working-class Terrassa neighborhood of Can Anglada. (Note: there is no connection between the names of Josep Anglada, the racist politician, and the Can Anglada neighborhood.)

Manuel Trallero, the Vangua's gadfly, blows the whistle in his column in today's edition in an article titled "Catalunya racista".

One of the most extraordinary things that has happened recently is that the so-called Plataforma per Catalunya has managed to win City Council seats in several Catalan municipalities, among them Vic. The fact that a xenophobic and racist organization has obtained such a result has seemed to all of us the most normal and natural thing in the world. No one has been screaming to the heavens or rending his garments. As usual in Catalonia, nothing happens around here.

There is a perverse logic according to which, if there are immigrants, the logical result is racism. Racism in Catalonia is no longer socially looked down upon, it's not politically incorrect anymore. The attempts of the media of communication to hide their heads under their wings have failed.

It isn't just that Mr. Anglada has won his first council members--Mr. Le Pen started off in France in exactly the same way--it is that anything goes against the immigrants. From the president of the Generalitat (Jordi Pujol) who blames them for the possible disappearance of Catalan--blames them, precisely those who just got here-- and who minimizes the violence in Can Anglada over and over, to the (racist) public statements of his honorable wife (Marta Ferrusola), or those of the former leader of the (ultraCatalanist) Republican Left, Mr. Heribert Barrera, who still holds his well-deserved medal awarded by Parliament, or the evacuation of a few immigrants camped out in the Plaza Catalunya, decreed one summer by (Communist) vice-mayor Mrs. Inma Mayol ("Chemical Inma") while the real mayor was out of town, while the workers of the Sintel company, all white, of course, camp out on the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid as long as they feel like it.

We've accepted that all this is normal, habitual, everyday, and that it forms part of us, ourselves. That is why Mr. Llauradó has committed the offense of raising suspicions when he denounced that Mr. Bassat did not use his second surname in order to hide his Jewish origin. This is an attack of, pure and simple, anti-Semitism, which anywhere in Europe would have provoked an enormous scandal, but here has been unnoticed.

We still have the consolation that, if the cases of woman-battering are higher in Catalonia than in the rest of Spain, it is not because we Catalans are stupider and more violent (más energúmenos) than the Spaniards, but because our women are braver in calling the police. We Catalans, according to some, are seen as racists because we admit it, while the Spaniards keep their mouths shut. All I can say is good for them.

All right! It looks like Blogger is willing to let me post again. I don't want to get my hopes up too much, though.

The idiots in the Basque Nationalist Party, who control the Basque Parliament, are behaving like a bunch of pricks as usual. The Supreme Court told them that ETA's political arm, Batasuna (or whatever it is this week), has been illegalized. Outlawed. Banned. And that the Administration was perfectly inside the bounds of the Constitution in doing this. This means that the Basque Parliament must kick out all the Batasuna deputies. They are refusing to do so.

The Basque Parliament has no choice but to comply. This is not a proposed Administration policy. This is a Supreme Court decision and all administrations, national, regional, provincial, comarcal, and municipal, MUST comply with it. That's called the Rule of Law, and it's more basic even than democracy in the defense of our rights as individuals. Remember that the Liberals in the 19th century wanted written constitutions, checks on the power of the king and the judges and the Parliament, as the first step in getting rid of the ancien regime. They didn't get around to asking for "one man, one vote" until the latter part of the 19th century.

But the Basque Nationalists are, as of now, refusing to obey the Court's sentence. They want to negotiate about it. Sorry, guys, there's no negotiating a Supreme Court decision, as the state of Arkansas found out when Eisenhower sent the troops into Little Rock and as Mississippi learned when Kennedy marched them into Oxford. You got two choices: obey or go to jail. Which is it gonna be?

Basque Nationalist leader Retch (Juan José Ibarretxe) and Basque Communist leader Javier "the Madman" Madrazo are daring the central government to get tough on their asses, claiming that this whole shebang is a cover-up for the evil PP Spanish Nationalists to destroy Basque freedoms and accusing Aznar of getting ready to apply Article 155 of the Constitution, which states that "exceptional measures" may be taken if a regional government does not obey the principles of the Constitution.

Well, if I were Aznar that's what I'd do. Close 'em down. He can suspend the activity of the Basque Parliament if they do not comply with the Constitution, and he should. This is not a matter for negotiation. This is Spanish society telling Retch and the Madman and that gang of psychopathic killers that we are heartily sick of terrorism and are not going to tolerate it or its apologists and sympathizers and fellow-travelers, and as for the democratic process, it is perfectly democratic and legal to close these bastards down for defying the Supreme Court.

Can we pass a law forcing members of the Basque Nationalist Party to be those who clean up the blood and guts and human hands blasted onto rooftops that ETA leaves lying all around Spain? Yes, Mr. Zugazugatxoia, that's you. Please pick up that severed hand and carry it down, the coroner is waiting, and then use these paper towels to mop up the blood and collect the bone fragments. Now may we have your reaction towards the latest ETA atrocity? You still seeking to remedy the root causes of the discontent of the oppressed Basque people, who are as wealthy and privileged and free as any group of people in the Western world, before worrying about arresting murderers and breaking up their support groups? Don't puke all over that hand, we need it for evidence, and we hear the widow wants to bury it along with the rest of her husband later.

OK, let's try it again.

The French are going into the Congo with orders to fight when necessary in order to keep the peace, such as it is around there, according to the Telegraph. I am completely in favor, but 100 French Special Forces aren't going to do much good. They need thousands of Special Forces and elite troops in order to clean that mess up, and it's not only the Congo, it's also Rwanda and Burundi and Uganda and Angola and Zimbabwe.

Questions: Do the French have UN approval for this little expedition? If they don't have it, why not? Seems that the French have attempted to set the precedent that the US has to check with the UN in case we want to attack somebody. To be consistent, they can't send their guys roaming all over Africa without asking anybody, at the same time they tell us we can't take out a major international criminal without their permission. Also, how do we know the French aren't there just to grab the diamonds and the other mineral riches of the Congo? They said, after all, that we just went into Iraq to grab the oil. Why should anybody believe that the French are any more moral and altruistic than we are? I challenge Robert Fisk to head off to Congo and start turning out exposés on the behavior of French troops in Kivu or wherever they are. But I'm afraid he'll be staying in his luxurious manse in Beirut while regurgitating everything negative anybody, no matter who, tells him about the United States.