I think I set a record in last week's Spanish First Division soccer picks. I went 0-for-10. Got every single one of them wrong. That leaves me at .000 for the week and .000 for the year.

Here's next week's picks; I can't possibly do worse.

Espanyol-Barça 2
Nastic-Getafe X
Celta-At. Madrid X
Osasuna-Betis 1
Racing-Real Sociedad 1
Valencia-Levante 1
Sevilla-Mallorca 1
Recreativo-Deportivo 1
Athletic Bilbao-Villarreal X

I got a Google hit for something like "spain three kings blackface offensive." Yep, it is true that traditionally in Spain, one of the Three Kings paints his face black.

The story is that every city has a parade on Three Kings Eve, Jan. 5, when the Three Kings (the Wise Men from the Bible), all dressed up in flowing robes, ride through the streets on their way to bring presents to all the good little boys and girls and caca i carbó (poop and coal) to the bad ones. (Now, the poop and coal are meringue candy with brown or black food coloring.) In Spanish tradition, one of the Three Kings is blond and wears a blond wig and beard, and one of them is black. Since black people in Spain were extremely rare until about five years ago, and are still rare in a lot of places, they usually get a white guy to black up in order to be the black King--I think Baltasar is his name. The other two are Melchor and Gaspar. As far as I know, here in Barcelona they get a real black man to play Baltasar, but in smaller places they paint someone's face.

Come on, people, this isn't offensive. They're not making fun of black people here; they just need someone to dress up as a black Wise Man. Remember, the character of Baltasar is a good guy, one of the wise Kings of Orient who brings pressies to the kids. He doesn't do a minstrel-show Stepin Fetchit act, he throws candy to the kids lining the streets and waves at them.

People interested in language ought to look at this report from the American Dialect Society. I like the verb "to pluto," and plan to use it on every occasion. I hate "truthiness," though. Just awful.

Check out this paranoid crap from the Guardian. The headline should read, "Britons Who Choose to Visit the United States to Be Scanned for National Security Reasons." See, if you stay in Britain, none of this will happen to you!

Get this: Britons already have their credit card details and email accounts inspected by the American authorities following a deal between the EU and the Department of Homeland Security.

1. Only if they choose to visit the United States! 2. My understanding is that such transactions are merely monitored--that is, Homeland Security can easily find out if you sent an e-mail to Osama, or sent cash through your Visa card to Hamas, but they can't inspect the contents without a court order, just as they always could monitor your mail, but not open it without a judge's permission.

Look, people, if you choose to go visit another country you have to obey their laws. When I applied for Spanish residency, they fingerprinted me, and I had to have a medical checkup, which the government knows the results of. What's the problem? I have to carry my ID card at all times here. So what's the big deal? I have to inform the government every time I change address. Who cares? I'm not allowed to work for the civil service (which includes teaching in the public schools) because I'm not a Spanish citizen. I'm not complaining. These are the Spanish government's policies, and if I don't like it I can leave.

News update: The cops found sixty more kilos of explosives in the Basque Country all ready to be used, the third important find in two days. They're looking for a four-person ETA cell in that area, probably traveling together; the only one identified so far is one Asier Larrañaga. They searched a couple of apartments in Bilbao, but didn't find much.

The bomb scare at the Bilbao airport, fortunately, was just a scare.

They found the body of the second man killed in the airport bombing under tons of rubble this afternoon. He was an Ecuadorian immigrant who'd been sending $300 a month to his family back home; the TV crews went to his hometown to get his family's reaction. Those people are poor. Way to go, ETA.

Socialist party head honcho hack Jose Blanco admitted that the Zap administration had been a bit naive regarding its dealings with ETA, and promised they wouldn't do it again.

In case you were interested, TV3 made a big deal out of Keith Ellison's being sworn into the House of Representatives on a Koran; they let him use one from the National Archives that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. They emphasized that Ellison had been criticized for being "un-American." I think they erred in their emphasis, since it was one idiot Congressman who said that, and everyone else told him to shut up.

La Liga Loca has its predictions for next weekend up; it's back in business after the long Spanish winter break in league play.

Our picks:

Atletico Madrid-Nastic 1
Real Sociedad-Osasuna X
Zaragoza-Sevilla 2
Getafe-Barça 2
Betis-Celta X
Levante-Racing X
Mallorca-Athletic Bilbao 1
Espanyol-Recreativo X
Deportivo-Real Madrid 2
Villarreal-Valencia X

National Public Radio ran a debate the other day on Hollywood and anti-Americanism, and they've got it up on their website, so you can listen to the whole thing. Check it out. I haven't listened to it yet, because it's an hour and a half, but there are plenty of ideas here.

Arts and Letters Daily links to this piece from Commentary on the Robert Redeker affair, anti-Semitism, and just plain bad judgement in France. Check it out. Two key paragraphs:

The effect of these views on the wider political discussion in France is profound. The present generation of Orientalists is omnipresent in the French media, unavoidable on radio and television. They assure the country that the progressive Islamization of European suburbs, plain for all to see, poses no danger. They suggest that the problem with Israel is its very existence. They inspire the open sympathy with Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that can be found in newspapers like Le Monde and Libération. And they encourage the use of the term “Islamophobia” (a coinage of Iranian clerics) in order to delegitimize all those who might be tempted to disagree with them—individuals like Redeker.

I am neither an Orientalist nor any kind of expert on the issue of Islamism. But I have spent years in the Middle East, as well as in other Muslim countries, and I know that the situation in the Islamic world corresponds very little to the wishful thinking of so many French scholars, journalists, and political leaders. A quick look at a world map—from Chechnya to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Kashmir, southern Thailand, and the southern Philippines—reveals that the planet’s most devastating wars are now of the jihadist type. All are fueled by Islamism.

From the News-in-These-Here-Parts department: TV3 is reporting that there has been a bomb threat at the Bilbao airport, and it has been evacuated. We'll update this if it turns out to be important.

The cops found a hundred-kilo bomb apparently abandoned by ETA near the side of a road in the Basque Country, along with the timers and detonators and other stuff necessary to make it go boom. I think this means that ETA is on the offensive again.

I've seen several analyses recently backing the theory that there are two different factions within ETA. One is made up of people who haven't committed murder and those who have served their sentences, and they're broadly in favor of negotiations. The other is made up of current prisoners and others who have blood on their hands, and they want to keep killing until the government agrees to an amnesty. According to this theory, faction number 2 has won out in the internal struggle. All I can say is amnesty, over my dead body.

Here's Bill Buckley on the ethics of watching the Saddam hanging video. I watched it. I suppose what surprised me most was the effectiveness of hanging: Saddam was dead as a doornail five seconds after the trap dropped.

This, of course, is not the first death video on Internet; you'll remember that when Nick Berg was murdered, the killers released the video. I didn't watch it, nor do I have any plan to watch anything of the sort.

I had no problem watching Saddam hang, though. I suppose the difference is that I hated, feared, and despised Saddam, and I'm glad he's dead.

Those shocked by the execution of Saddam Hussein probably should not look at these photos.

The full video of Saddam's hanging is probably the first socially acceptable snuff film ever.

Blog roundup:

Our man Franco Aleman at Barcepundit takes a well-deserved whack at Robert Fisk.

Davids Medienkritik, in a must-read post, points out that the majority of Europeans are in favor of hanging Saddam; even in Zap's Spain, 51% are in favor.

Chicago Boyz reviews Mark Steyn's new book, America Alone, which somebody can send me through Amazon. Like maybe my dad. Hint. Hint.

Eursoc reports that the new EU passports are incredibly easy to forge.

Expat Yank comments on anti-Americanism in Europe, and kindly links to us.

Guirilandia links to a novella he wrote, set in Barcelona. I haven't had the chance to read it yet, but I will. If any of you have some spare time, check it out and give him some feedback. This is one for Jessica Harbour and Angie Schultz.

¡No Pasarán! links to this impressive example of French musical suckitude. They also beat the crap out of the New York Times.

Not much big news around here. The biggest story is that a member of a well-known family in the trucking business named Joan Alsina was murdered inside his luxurious Sant Cugat home a couple of days ago, and they just found the body. The question is whether this was an intentional hit, a settling of individual scores, or whether it was a home invasion robbery gone bad. People in Barcelona are becoming very concerned about crime, though it's still pretty low around here compared to most of the rest of Europe or the US. (Exception: Street crime against tourist victims in Barcelona. That's incredibly high.) There are people talking in the local cafés about how they'd like to have a gun, talk you wouldn't have heard a year ago.

More details on the ETA Madrid airport bombing: They found the body of one of the missing men. The bomb was bigger than previously announced, maybe as much as 600 or 700 kilos of explosive. It did some €35 million damage to the parking garage, which has been converted into thousands of tons of rubble. Hundreds of vehicles were destroyed. Interior minister Rubalcaba announced that the alleged peace process was definitely over, "liquidated," he said.

Five guys were arrested, three of them in Catalonia, for helping suspects in the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings to escape from Spain. No prize for guessing their ethnic and religious backgrounds.

Over the last few days I've been watching this game show on Catalan TV in which minor local TV celebrities, like a couple of sports reporters, a couple of actresses, and the like answer questions, most of which are fairly easy but a few of which are challenging. I was surprised how many questions related to the US the contestants blew, and these people are supposed to be at least media-savvy. One of them, Rosa Andreu, a stage actress and one-time talk-show hostess, was pretty sharp and obviously educated and cultured--and she was smart enough to make educated guesses when she wasn't able to think of the answer. The rest of them had rather low wattage, if you know what I mean.

• They didn't know that New England was a US region--they guessed Canada.
• They didn't know the Grand Canyon was in the US--they guessed Mexico.
• " " " that Hillary Clinton is senator from New York--they had no guess.
• When asked "What's George W. Bush's middle name, William or Walker?" they guessed "William."
• They didn't know that Coppola directed "Apocalypse Now" or that Woody Allen directed "Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex..."
• Didn't know that F. Scott Fitzgerald was American--they guessed Irish.
• They guessed that the Arkansas River was in Brazil.
• They didn't know that the longest land frontier is between the US and Canada--they guessed Russia and China.
• They didn't know that the MOMA is in New York.
• They didn't know that Omaha is in the US.

The only ones they got right were that Brooklyn is a neighborhood (actually a borough) in New York and that the secretary of defense who recently resigned is Donald Rumsfeld.

Two people, both Ecuadorians, are missing and presumed dead in yesterday's Madrid airport bombing. They were both apparently sleeping in their cars. What I'd like to know is how the cops missed them while they were evacuating the place.

So ETA has murdered again. Of course, the only thing to do is what we'd said all along, keep the police and the courts coming down hard on them. What's there to negotiate about?

By the way, a standard report on Spanish TV news is some ETA killer being tried for some murders he did back in the '80s; one of the most recent is "Txapote," for example. The ETA killer is always intransigent, arrogant, and contemptuous of both the court and society. It's hard to believe that anyone who sees these near-nightly television performances by unrepentant murderers can maintain the slightest sympathy for ETA and its political branch, Batasuna, yet many leftists who should know better, especially your ignorant foreigners (cf. Mark Kurlansky), still try to justify or at least comprehend their acts.

The bomb was enormous, around 200 kilos of explosives. It completely destroyed an entire section of the three-story parking garage.

Iberian Notes sends greetings to new EU members Romania and Bulgaria. Welcome to lots of free subsidies! Seriously, of course, it's good news for all concerned. Stability is a good thing down in those parts, and EU admission means those places are now officially stable--since, of course, you get kicked out of the EU if you do something like pull a military coup or nationalize the banks.

Those folks who got all joyous and celebratory when Pinochet died don't seem to be doing much jumping up-and-down at the news of Saddam's hanging. Saddam, of course, was about one million times as evil as Pinochet. Approximately.

Here's Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro's lead on his Page 3 report in the Vanguardia:

"We heard how his vertebrae broke. It was horrible," said Iraqi judge Munir Hadad, one of those present at the execution of ex-president Saddam Hussein.

Sounds to me like Saddam got a cleaner and quicker death than most of his victims. You remember the ones he ran through paper-shredders. Also, "ex-president"? How about "mass murderer," or at the very least, "ex-dictator"?

Now get this:

The character, energy, and calm that Saddam showed in the last moments of his life have made forgotten the humiliating images that were transmitted around the world when he was captured in the hole in Tikrit, broken, hirsute, opening his mouth to be examined by an American military doctor.

Huh? Praise and sympathy for Saddam? Now get this:

The Iraqi ex-president Saddam Hussein is the first ruler executed by a court in his country, under foreign domination, in this region of the Middle East. His humiliating burial, his burial as one of those defeated by history, will be moving for millions of Arabs.

Tikrit Tommy sure thinks "humiliation" is a big deal. I don't see why Arabs should be humiliated by the execution of Saddam, just as I don't feel humiliated when Westerners who commit crimes are punished for their wrongdoing.

Now the last sentence:

Some day, not now, history will judge him.

Oh, I think history's verdict was pretty well settled about 1965 or so when Saddam, as a Baath Party hitman (supposedly he committed his first murder in 1958), was one of the leaders of the coup d'etat that put that gang of murderous fascists in power.

From the Cataloony department: The Generalitat has decided not to punish the various airlines that operate out of Barcelona, including British Airways, Air France, and Alitalia, for--wait for this--not issuing passenger tickets, boarding cards, and baggage claimchecks in Catalan! Seems the airlines, by using Spanish or English or French or Italian or whatever, are breaking the Linguistic Policy Act. The Catalan Consumer Agency has been spending its time, instead of checking whether our food meets minimal standards--there's been a minor stink about pesticide residues in vegetables, especially peppers--investigating what language the airlines are issuing official documents in. Why the hell weren't they investigating whether Air Madrid was flying safe planes or not, or whether it was selling tickets on flights it knew would never leave the ground? This is just ridiculous.

Saddam Hussein is cold meat, as you undoubtedly know. The air is a little bit cleaner now that he's not breathing it.

This morning's big news in Spain, though, is that ETA planted a car bomb in the parking garage at Terminal 4 of Barajas international airport in Madrid. The explosion occurred at around 9 AM local time; the police evacuated the area, but one man, who was apparently asleep in his car, is missing and feared dead. About twenty more persons suffered non-serious injuries, several of them police officers.

The bombing is the end of their nine-month "permanent cease-fire," and certainly puts an end to the alleged peace process. It's definitely ETA, as Interior minister Perez Rubalcaba said at a press conference; they made two warning phone calls, one telling the cops to stay away since the bomb was a big one, and after the explosion they made another call claiming responsibility.

The airport is currently all snarled up, of course, on one of the year's biggest travel days, and thousands of people are stuck at Barajas. Hope you're not flying through there.

ETA has intentionally made Zap look like a complete moron, since last night he gave his year-end speech and said he was "convinced" that the negotiations with the terrorist gang "would be going better than now" within a year. To quote La Vangua on page 13 today, "Zapatero made a commitment to the citizenry that guaranteed the continuity and advance of the peace process, a continuity that did not seem so clear a few weeks ago."

This is going to mean a big hit to Zap's reelection chances; expect a several-point swing to the PP in the next surveys with only a year or so left before the next general election. I think he's a one-term accidental prime minister, a Spanish Jimmy Carter.

91,664 abortions were performed in Spain in 2005, 8% more than during 2004. That seems rather a lot when you consider that abortion on demand is technically against the law.

The Barcelona PP is calling for a ban on women wearing burkas in public. That's ridiculous. If somebody wants to wear a burka, it's that somebody's business. I would agree that police officers should have the right to demand that a burka-wearing woman uncover her face for identification purposes, but aside from such security concerns, keep the government's nose out of what people wear.

Irony: The Catalan Tripartite running the city of Barcelona, including the very Green and very Red Imma Mayol, is shipping off "organic urban residues," 50 tons a day, to somewhere in Murcia, nobody knows exactly where, to be "treated" and dumped in a landfill. The treatment plant, in Abanilla, has a lousy environmental record. Get this: the Metropolitan Environmental Authority, which is supposed to be in charge, had no idea this was going on. That's competence for you.

Tonight on TV 33, Catalunya TV's intellectual and avant-garde public channel, they're going to be showing two rock-pop-folk concerts at 11 PM and midnight that, one assumes, are supposed to appeal to a wide audience; this is a major TV-viewing night, one of the biggest of the year. So who's it going to be, maybe Dylan or Springsteen? U2 or Paul McCartney? How about Catalonia's most popular band, Estopa? Nope, it's old hack ultra-leftist Quico Pi de la Serra and then, get this, one of the guys from the mega-nationalist Electrica Dharma. I bet a total of 28 people tune in. If you have not yet seen total musical suckitude, here it is.

La Vangua says that Pau Gasol is going to demand a trade if Memphis doesn't get rid of him first; the article claims that Gasol's complaints were behind the firing of coach Mike Fratello, which if true makes the guy clubhouse poison, someone I wouldn't want on my team. This injury Gasol suffered in the national world championships has made him persona non grata, since he missed the first 22 games of this season, thereby immensely hurting the club that pays his high salary, and he's been playing lousy since he came back. I sure hope that world title was worth it, because this could be the beginning of a down-spiral that sees big Pau wearing blue and red stripes again.

Here's a New Year's roundup of links:

The Straight Dope message board has a very long and quite interesting thread explaining US popular culture and everyday life questions to foreigners, such as: What's the difference between "college" and "university"? What are those organizations with Greek letter names? Why do sports clubs move around from city to city? Is high school football really that important? What do the numbers 101, 411, and 911 refer to? Check it out.

Articles from recent issues of American Heritage that anyone interested in knowing more about the US might want to read:

A rather softball but interesting history of beer in America (June 2002)

A non-worshipful history of the FBI (August 2002)

A very disturbing history of eugenics in the US (February 2003)

US relations with France (by Richard Brookhiser of National Review--August 2003)

Presidential debates (August 2004)

An argument that slavery was much more economically important than often thought (February 2005)

This little bit, from Fametracker, is the funniest thing I've seen in months:

"Hi, I'm Tom Cruise. Good for you, Madonna. Adoption is great. I adopted my first two kids, but then when I met Kate, I just felt the time was right to try out biological procreation with a human female, and the feeling...I just can't put into words what it was like for me. And I've read lots of books about the sensations and mechanics of it, but even so, I still just find it indescribable. You know how, when you get into bed with a woman, and she's naked, and it's like...she has kind of an extra butt, but it's in the front?"

Blog roundup:

Expat Yank deals Agence France-Presse a good fisking.

Guirilandia comments on the Health Ministry, Burger King, and the Spanish diet.

Fausta opines on the Spanish surgeon who treated Fidel, among other things; as you know, she's prolific and wide-ranging.

Notes from Spain explains the concept of the chapuza, photo included.

Pave France looks back on the Chiraq administration.

The Euroserf is cynical about the EU's achievements in 2006.

Davids Medienkritik takes another well-deserved whack at Stern.

It's been a nice Christmas break here at Iberian Notes. On the 21st Murph and I went to the Camp Nou to see Barça play Atletico Madrid; they tied, 1-1. It was a pretty good game; the Barça players gave it all they had, and they were operating at about 80% since they'd just come back from Japan. We got to see Ronaldinho score on a free kick, which is pretty cool. I don't go out to the stadium very much, and I really should go more often, since it's not that expensive, €30 for the cheap seats. You can see what's happening on the whole field, while the TV cameras only follow the ball.

We had the annual Christmas dinner at my mother-in-law's apartment; fifteen people, among aunts and uncles and cousins, showed up. Remei did the cooking; she made escudella i carn d'olla, which is basically chicken noodle soup with meatballs, and then chicken and shrimp in romesco sauce, which is based on nuts and olive oil. As the local vegetarian, I had salad. Spaniards don't get vegetarianism at all, and if they do get it, they think you're a health-food nut. They can deal with the concept of someone who denies himself the pleasure of eating ham for health reasons; that seems more or less reasonable. What they don't get is someone who takes no pleasure out of eating ham, and wouldn't do it if you paid him. The concept that a person might find eating our fellow mammals a form of cannibalism goes way over their heads, too.

My mother-in-law was a pain in the ass as usual; she's a cranky old bat who has always been a bully, and she feels herself losing power as she gets older and can't get around as well as she used to. Her response to her decline is to get angry, and she's decided to pick on me about speaking Catalan. Now, I speak Catalan to her, since that's what she wants, but when actually trying to talk to other people about difficult or complicated subjects I almost unconsciously switch to Spanish, since I speak it better than Catalan. So dinner-table conversations with other people were salted and peppered with demands for linguistic normalization, and none of the rest of us killed her, since everyone else is as sick of the woman as I am.

Note: This behavior is a complete aberration. No one else I have ever met is this obnoxious about Catalan. The rest of the family and I are always glad to see one another and it doesn't matter which language is spoken.

Get this. The chief of surgery at Madrid's Gregorio Marañón hospital, which is publicly owned and operated, flew off to Cuba to treat Fidel. He says Fidel doesn't have cancer. I bet he's lying. His trip was paid for by the Cuban government, and was approved by Esperanza Aguirre's Madrid regional government. He brought "medicines and technological equipment that the island's heath service does not have." Doctor García Sabrido, at the press conference, applied his lips firmly to Castro's buttocks, saying that Fidel has "a fantastic, innate intellectual activity." Aguirre wondered publicly whether Cuban political prisoners get the same level of health care.

The alleged peace process with ETA is going nowhere in the wake of the discovery of an arms cache near Bilbao. The Zap government is claiming that the cache was an intentional setup by ETA so that the general public would know that the gang still has its weapons and is ready to at. I think the Zap government is nuts and that the discovery of the arms cache along with the robbery of the pistols in France shows that ETA is just waiting for its chance to strike again. Street violence continues in the Basque country, and Basque businessmen are still receiving extortion demands.

James Brown and Gerald Ford died. May they both rest in peace. Congratulations to those who picked them in this year's Dead Pool.

Meanwhile, the Zap government's health ministry is still trying to crush Burger King's ad campaign calling on consumers to pig out on a half-kilo monsterburger. La Vanguardia referred to the product in question as a "Doble Whooper," which sounds to me like somebody who is going to break out a family-size can of whoop-ass. Seems to me that people ought to have enough common sense to decide what they want to eat, and if they want to eat crap they have every right to eat crap.

The local cause celebre for the last ten days or so has been the manslaughter charge slapped on a man who shot a Romanian armed robber in a town near Manresa. From what I've pieced together, a group of suspicious people had been casing out the luxury house belonging to the Tous family, a well-known clan who own a chain of jewelry shops. Then, one night, the family's security director, also a son-in-law of the patriarch, got a robbery call. Two men were inside the wall surrounding the family property. The security guy drove up to the Tous house, where two guys were waiting out front in a car. He opened fire, killing one and wounding the other. They were Romanians equipped with burglar kits.

The security guy was charged with manslaughter and jailed without bail. He will presumably come up for trial in about three years, as the slow wheels of Spanish justice turn. I assume they will eventually grant him bail. In Texas they would have given him a public service medal. You need to remember that traditionally the first question a Texas jury asks itself is, "Should the deceased have departed?"

Our man Franco Aleman at Barcepundit links to this Heritage Foundation piece demolishing Zap's brainchild "Alliance of Civilizations." Definitely check it out. Here's a good paragraph:

The Alliance of Civilizations is a disappointment. Far from offering a "bridge" to cross the divide, the Alliance of Civilizations report offers little more than platitudes and wishful thinking, one-sided analysis, justification for constraining freedom of expression and religion, and repackaged calls for increased assistance from Western countries. The lack of substance and originality in the report—the report itself acknowledges several times that many of its recommendations and initiatives are already in place or being pursued—explains the lack of interest in the report since its release in November.

Somebody asked about rent control in Spain, so I thought I'd look it up. And whaddaya know, there's a monograph in English on the subject available on the Net. It's not well-translated and is written in a highly legalistic style, but this is what I gleaned:

Only about 11% of Spanish households rent their dwellings. One-third of new dwelling units are purchased for investment purposes. In places with little government regulation, a person who buys a place for investment purposes (what the left calls "speculation") rents it out, in order to receive a steady income, until he decides to sell.

In Spain, however, the minimum lease on a dwelling unit is five years, and the rent can only be raised annually by the rate of inflation. So if the housing market is gaining, say, 10% a year in value, and you're the landlord and you can only raise the rent, say, 4% a year, you're losing money. And you can't sell the place until the five years is up. Meanwhile, there are lots of persnickety little clauses regulating what the landlord can do.

These laws, of course, make it unattractive for people who own vacant dwellings to rent them out. So there aren't many places to rent, and the ones out there are pricey.

By the way, if you were lucky enough to rent your place before 1985, you can stay there forever and they can't raise your rent more than the rate of inflation. No tenants ever give up these rental contracts, and this of course keeps a good chunk of rental housing off the market.

In last Sunday's issue of the Vanguardia, which is the big classified-ads day, there is only one page of flats for rent (compared to about 30 of flats for sale) in the whole Barcelona metro area, Here are a few of the flats on offer here in Gràcia:

75 square meters, €1200
3 bedrooms, €950
4 bedrooms, €900
80 square meters, 3 bedrooms, €1080
2 bedrooms, €800
Studio, €700
60 square meters loft, €900
Studio, €800
4 bedrooms, €1000
3 bedrooms, €900
2 bedrooms, €850

Not awful by London or New York standards, but this is Barcelona, and lots of middle-class white-collar people only earn €1000 a month.

Anne Applebaum has an article in Slate on the EU, the US, and Iraq. Check it out. Also read Ms. Applebaum's book Gulag as soon as you get the chance.