Everybody's talking about the drought and the possible measures that might be taken to palliate it. It's a big enough deal that La Vanguardia has a front-page editorial saying that something needs to be done; also, so much spouting off is already being done that rumors are beginning to fly. Somebody reported yesterday that reservoir capacity was already below 20%, which it isn't, at least not yet, but everybody panicked temporarily.

La Vangua's editorial points out that the Valencians are having fun criticizing the Catalan government for the plan to send Segre-Ebro River water to Barcelona, since Catalonia had fought so hard against Ebro water being sent to Valencia. Lleida province is indignant, too, at losing water to the city slickers in Can Fanga, and the Lleida PSC is in open revolt against Montilla (who wants to grab all water possible for Barcelona) and in line with Zapatero in Madrid (who has at least temporarily blocked the Segre transfer). La Vangua blames the Pujol administration for doing almost nothing about water supplies during its 23 years in power, but adds that everyone in both Catalan and Spanish politics is guilty. Funny: I don't remember La Vangua making too much noise about this issue before, either.

Right now there are several proposals being floated: the Segre-Llobregat aqueduct, an aqueduct connecting the Urgell irrigation canal with the Anoia River, an aqueduct bringing Ebro water straight to Barcelona, opening up old wells in the Baix Llobregat, and bringing water by ship from wells in the Tarragona plain, from the Rhone in Marseilles, and from the Almeria desalinizing plant. Desalinizing plants are currently being built at El Prat, Cunit, and Blanes, to come on line between 2009 and 2012.

Statistics: Residents of Peking use 670 liters of water a day, New York 500, Tokyo 320, Havana 270, Paris 160, Cairo 150, and Barcelona 110. Jeez. We're even dirtier than the French. That fetid cloud you see rising up over the city ain't just carbon monoxide from Seat tailpipes.

Economic news: bad. Unemployment has reached 9%, up from 8.1% this time last year, and higher than any other EU country except Slovakia. Meanwhile, new car sales are down 28% over this time last year, with 4x4 sales down more than 40%. The automobile sector claims it's because Semana Santa fell in March this year, and so there were three sales days less than in March 2007. Yeah, right.

The Independent headlines, "USA 2008: The Great Depression." Yeah, more wishful thinking from the British press: what pisses me off is that they want it to happen. They want Americans to be poor and suffer deprivation. It would please them no end if one-third of us were unemployed like in 1932. Of course, nothing of the sort is going to happen.

Check out their evidence: The number of Americans on food stamps has increased from 26.5 million to 28 million--still less than one-tenth of the population. That's all they've got to base their screamer front-page headline on. Wonder where the praise for the American system of feeding the poor went to? If, say, Venezuela or Cuba were passing out food stamps to its poor, they'd be praising it to the skies. Of course, in Venezuela and Cuba there's no food to pass out to anyone.

By the way, most Spaniards have no idea that poor Americans get food stamps and public housing and public schools and Medicare/Medicaid. They've been told that life in America consists of cutthroat competition, and he who falls by the wayside is left to starve, and they believe it.

Econ minister Pedro Solbes stuck his neck out and claimed that Spain's 2008 growth would be 3.1%, much higher than the Bank of Spain's estimate of 2.4%. Somebody's going to be wrong and I bet it's the politician rather than the institution.

The PP is replacing Eduardo Zaplana with Soraya Saenz de Santamaria as its spokeswoman in the Congress of Deputies, something they should have done like three years ago. Saenz de Santamaria is known as a Rajoy loyalist and comparatively moderate, as well as less personally obnoxious than attack-dog Zaplana.

ADSL Internet service is 25% more expensive and 26% slower in Spain than the EU average. Spanish ADSL speed is 3 megas, whatever that means, while in the UK and France it's 8 megas. Thanks a lot, Telefonica, for crap service at premium prices. Somebody needs to go all AT&T on that company.



Check out this Yankee-bashing cartoon from El Periodico's Ferreres, about as subtle as a dose of chloral hydrate. Uncle Sam says, "You should respect human rights more," while China replies, "Respect? Like at Guantanamo? Like in Palestine?" Simply pathetic.

Meanwhile, NATO is asking some of its members to provide more troops for Afghanistan; the Americans are sending 3000, and even the French will send 1000. Naturally, they're not even bothering to request additional troops from Zap's Spain, since none will be forthcoming.

Oh, guess what. Raul is beginning the liberalization of Cuba. From now on Cubans will be allowed to stay at hotels hitherto reserved only for foreigners. If they can pay a hundred bucks a night, that is. Of course, that silly freedom of speech stuff will take a little while longer, as will the democratic elections and the rule of law.

Yearly inflation in Spain hit 4.6% in March, the highest rate since 1997. Oil and food prices are to blame. The ECB's goal was a maximum of 2% inflation in 2008. Looks like that ain't gonna happen.

Get this. Clickair, Iberia's low-cost airline, forgot that we changed to daylight savings time last weekend, so a bunch of passengers missed their flights. Unfortunately, this kind of complete screwup (called a "chapuza" in Spanish) is all too common over here. One of the best things about Spain is that it's a low-stress, laid-back country, but sometimes we can get a little too laid-back around here.

Meanwhile, Clickair and Vueling, another low-cost airline, are planning a merger in order to reduce costs and competition; this will mean even fewer flights out of El Prat, since duplicates will obviously be eliminated. I think the antitrust authorities ought to look into this. This fad of adding an -ing on the end of a Spanish word to make it look more international or something (Vueling, Bicing, etc.) has got to stop now.

Alarmist Andy Robinson gets the first two pages of La Vanguardia's international section to wax nostalgic for the good old USSR. Says Andy:

Draconian drug prohibition and absolute permissiveness for all business and financial activities. This is a good summary of the global agenda of the United States and the G-7 in the '80s and '90s, accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union...Simultaneously, the Anglo-American model of financial liberalization, deregulating enormous capital flows, was exported, while teams of economists from Chicago landed in the former USSR and its satellites...Prohibitionism has helped the gangsters almost as much as laissez-faire...Because of all this, "it is not crazy to think that instead of prohibiting drugs and permitting the free circulation of capital, we should do just the opposite," said criminologist Michael Woodiwiss of the University of Bristop. "Strict regulations over the financial markets should be applied." The Americans should know this: "During Prohibition of alcohol and financial permissiveness, crime was endemic." What put an end to it was not Elliot (sic) Ness, but the regulation of the market, the creation of the FBI, and in general the social policies of Roosevelt's New Deal.

1) Iberian Notes completely agrees with Andy that the prohibition of drugs is the biggest mistake the American government is currently making. 2) Andy doesn't seem to understand that US foreign policy is not coherent over time; it depends greatly on who the president is, and so the US does not have a global agenda. Much less the G-7, made up of seven different elected governments including France and Italy. That lot can't agree on what's for dinner, much less a big secret global plan to let the Jewish-American financial powers that be run rampant.

3) He doesn't seem to understand, either, that today's Russian mafia is yesterday's KGB, and that the old USSR was an incredibly corrupt place. The Americans prohibit people from buying intoxicating drugs; the USSR prohibited people from buying most of the things they needed or wanted. Which form of prohibition is going to create a bigger black market? 4) Laissez-faire is a straw man. No government has ever pursued a complete laissez-faire policy; all governments have regulated the market ever since governments have existed. The question is not whether to regulate, but how much.

5) Andy doesn't know dick-squat about American history. The alcohol business was merely one of many that organized crime was involved in, the FBI didn't get into the struggle against organized crime until the '50s and it wasn't very effective until the late '70s, and the social policies of the New Deal had absolutely nothing to do with the Mafia. Duh.

In contrast to the usual wishful-thinking wet dream periodically published in the Spanish press about the decline of the "American Empire," to be replaced by Europe or China or even the Arab states, Joaquim Coello, billed as an engineer, writes in El Periodico:

The decline of the United States is not inevitable. It will be proven again that the principles of democracy, freedom, and equality of the citizens have power and strength, and despite their faults, they are superior to any other political system. The superiority of the United States's political structure, based on the principles of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, will be demonstrated one more time.

I've never seen anything like this in the Spanish press before.

Barça choked again big-time Saturday night, losing 3-2 to Betis after going ahead 0-2 on goals by Bojan and Eto'o. They played well in the first half and just horribly in the second, and as soon as Betis scored its first goal, everybody in the bar groaned because we knew the game was over and Barça was going to blow it again. Iniesta and Bojan were by far the best Barça players.

I think we need to stop speculating about who's going to be sold during the off-season, and start wondering who's going to stay. I'd keep Iniesta, Xavi, Messi, Bojan, Eto'o, Valdés, Jorquera, Giovani dos Santos, Touré, and Milito, and get rid of the rest of them, including Puyol, who is washed-up.

You may have noticed that I've changed the template. I'll be making more changes in the next few days.

The big news in Spain is the Mari Luz case. Down in Huelva some sex pervert kidnapped and murdered a little girl named Mari Luz back in January, and they just found her body a few days ago. The perv has been arrested, and here's the fun part: he had two prior convictions for child sexual abuse, once on his own daughter, and they never bothered actually putting him in jail.

The judiciary is being seriously questioned over this one, since the pervert never should have been anywhere near this child. Jail is made for sick bastards who go around sexually abusing kids, not for people who smoke pot or write bad checks. Spain, by the way, does not have a register of sex offenders, though it does have one of woman-beaters, and there is no law requiring that people be informed if a sex offender is living in their neighborhood, either.

Mari Luz was from a gypsy family that is integrated into society, while the perv seems to be a lower-class payo. The Huelva gypsies are understandably very angry, and they've tried to lynch both the perv and one of his brothers (who is almost certainly innocent, though the perv's wife might have helped him cover up the crime).

This guy would be a clear death penalty candidate in the US, and I'd have no problem voting for it if I were on the jury.

So the Zap government has blocked the proposed transfer of water from the Segre to the Llobregat, thereby showing who is really running things in Catalonia, and it ain't Montilla. Lleida province is happy, while the city of Barcelona is not.

I am not sure whether this is a good idea or not. Spanish teenagers, especially in the south, like to all get together in the street and drink till they puke; this is called "el botellón." So in Granada last night the city government cordoned off an area and told the kids to go to it. 12,000 teenagers showed up, and they're still there as I write. Four of them have been hospitalized for alcoholic poisoning so far. (By the way, the legal drinking age in Spain is 18, but nobody pays any attention.)

On the one hand, some consequences of drinking are kept under control, since there were 200 municipal cops there, and so there was no fighting, vandalism, or drunk driving, and anybody who got sick could receive medical attention. On the other hand, officially permitting botellones is effectively giving them society's approval, and it must cost the city an enormous amount of money both to pay the cops and clean up the mess.

By the way, these gatherings are almost always organized by Internet: some guy says, "Hey, let's have a big old botellón," and he e-mails and SMSs all his friends, and they do the same, and it snowballs, and next thing you know there are 12,000 drunken teenagers sprawled out all over the streets.

I do think Spain's attitude toward adolescent drinking is preferable to America's, since it's not treated as if it were a deadly sin here. There are a couple of complications in the US that don't exist here, though: 1) teenagers in the US usually have to drive home after drinking parties, while in Spain they don't; 2) many families in the US consider drinking to be sinful for religious reasons, meaning that kids have to hide their drinking, while this is not true in Spain; 3) there's a binge drinking tradition in the US that hasn't existed here until recently with these botellones.

However, the Spaniards can please stop bitching about tourists drinking in the streets, since their own kids are pretty good at it themselves.

So they got three hundred people out in Madrid to protest against Chinese repression in Tibet, just 0.005% of what they could have gotten if they were protesting Uncle Sam again.

Vallfogona de Riucorb made TV3 and La Vanguardia! Says Victor-M. Amela:

Another televised revelation, yesterday morning. Josep Cuní went live to the cemetery in Vallfogona de Riucorb, in order to document a mass grave there in which dozens of unidentified young soldiers were buried during the Civil War. On screen, the gravedigger explained right there that during construction work, the power shovel dug up the dirt and "there were arm and leg bones, skulls, bones everywhere." Cuní asked what happened to those bones. The gravedigger answered, "We threw them with all the other stuff in the dump in the ravine over there. What were we going to do, Mr. Cuní?" Mr. Cuní's face was frozen in shock and he had no answer. The law is one thing, crude reality another, as TV reveals.

The gravedigger was almost certainly Ramon from Cal Matruqueu, the town's builder and odd-job man, who is 75 if he's a day. He buried Rosa: that is, he opened up the niche, removed Remei's father's coffin and bones, put Rosa's coffin inside, put a plastic bag with Remei's father's bones back in, and sealed up the niche again. He was a friend of Remei's father; they grew up together. As Remei says, they're country people around there and they're not squeamish about death.

I had no idea there was a Civil War mass grave in Vallfogona. The soldiers would have been Republicans, probably wounded brought to a makeshift hospital in one of the hotels at the spa during the Battle of the Ebro in late 1938. The Ebro was the fiercest battle of the war, and the only place anywhere near Vallfogona that saw serious fighting.

Actually, I don't know much about the Civil War in Vallfogona; they don't talk about it much. I do know: 1) the hotels at the spa served as a CNT officers' school, at least for a time 2) the priest was not murdered, he escaped with the help of some locals, supposedly including Remei's father's family 3) the medieval statue of Saint Peter atop the church was pulled down; Remei's grandfather saved the middle section in the basement, and Remei donated it to the county museum a while back 4) the local teacher was a CNT member and he fired up at least some townspeople; he somehow survived the war 5) Remei's father's family were conservative Catholics and Carlists, like many of the townspeople; most townspeople were landowning peasants, kulaks in Stalinist jargon 6) I have heard nothing about any executions in the town, whether by Republicans or Nationals.

I am going to have to investigate this. Also, I think something needs to be done in order to give these people a decent burial, and I'm going to find out what I can do.

Manuel Trallero says today, also in La Vanguardia, that commemorating the 70th anniversary of the 1938 Italian bombing of Barcelona and its victims is a good thing, but that other victims need to be commemorated too:

"We have a historical deficit and a debt to pay," declared counsellor Saura* at the Palau de la Generalitat. The victims of the bombing of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War were first hidden by Francoism and then completely ignored by democracy. Now, with the 70th anniversary of the famous bombing of the Coliseum cinema by Italian aircraft, which caused a massacre because it blew up a passing truck loaded with explosives--a fact conveniently hidden by the Republic--ceremonies are held, books are published, films are premiered.

It doesn't matter that there is no documentary evidence of Churchill's alleged words to the House of Commons ("I do not want to undervalue the severity of the damage falling on you, but I trust our citizens will be capable of resisting as bravely as the valient people of Barcelona.")

Barcelona also has "a historical deficit and a debt to pay" to the victims of the "checas."** Many of them, victims because they went to Mass or were anarchists. The reasons are varied. But victims of that axiom from Miguel Mir's "Diary of an Anarchist Gunman": "Our job is to kill and your duty is to die." Let nobody fool himself. It was not the work of mere rioters...All the Republican parties, in addition to the feared SIM,*** had such establishments. This is not an attempt at Fascist propaganda...We have a debt to these victims, just as much victims as those of the bombings of Barcelona.

*Joan Saura is the leader of the Catalan Communists, ICV.
**Secret Republican prisons where prisoners were tortured, interrogated, and killed. The Anarchist checa was at Gran Via and Paseo de Gracia, while the main Communist checa was on the Calle Sant Elies.
***Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, the Military Intelligence Service, the NKVD in Spain.

Trallero's wrong about one thing. Churchill said, "I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us; but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world," in his "Their Finest Hour" speech on June 18, 1940, to the House of Commons.

La Vanguardia has an article on what they call the Bologna process (what the goddamn university non-students were "striking" over), which is supposed to help make European universities competitive with American ones. According to La Vangua, of the 535 best universities in the world, 308 are in the US, 50 in the UK, 26 in Canada, 20 in Germany, 19 in Japan, and 1 in Spain, which is the University of Barcelona medical school.

Massive cognitive dissonance for Yankee-bashers: Americans are supposed to be ignorant, unintellectual, and uncultured. Yet the US has all the top universities and the most Nobel Prize winners, for whatever that's worth, and it attracts thousands of students from all over the world.

La Vangua claims that the US spends 3% of its gross national product on research and development, while the EU spends 1.2%, and that 5% of Americans between ages 30 and 50 are enrolled in university or post-graduate studies, while only 2% of EU citizens are. Therefore, the Bologna plan will devote more public spending to raising these percentages. The problem is that the majority of US R&D spending comes from the private sector, and that the 5% of Americans continuing their educations are doing so in order to reach personal, not public, goals.

Many Spaniards I've talked to are very critical of the Spanish university system; I've heard people say that it's based on memorization and regurgitation, that it discourages individual initiative, that it doesn't teach students how to think, that professors are distant and uninterested in students as individuals, that it's too bureaucratic and regimented, and that there is a lot of nepotism and patronage involved in choosing instructors. A personal observation of mine is that many Spaniards resort to invoking authority as evidence to back up their arguments--so-and-so said this so it must be true. I think they learned this at the university.

Poverty in Catalonia: 19% of Catalans live below the poverty line, which is a yearly income of €8276 (about $12,100) per person, up from 17.2% last year. Comparison with the US: About 12% of Americans live below the federal poverty line, which is $10,400 for an individual living alone and $21,200 for a family of four. In-kind benefits, such as food stamps, school lunches, and public housing, do not count as income in the US for purposes of measuring poverty. 46% of poor households in the US own their own home, 30% have two or more cars, 63% have cable or satellite TV, and 91% have a color television.

Here in B-ville, the city government is all excited about the tacky souvenir shops that surround touristy places like the Sagrada Familia and the Ramblas. Indignation waxes, especially at the flamenco-dancing dolls and the big Mexican sombreros. I have to admit I'm surprised at how popular the Mexican hats are among the Dusseldorfers, Rotterdammers, and Liverpudlians. If you buy one and walk around town all the locals think you're a complete idiot, but I figure everybody who reads this blog already knows that.

Personally, I never buy stuff at souvenir shops; I always get something at the museum gift shop. I especially like little reproductions of animal statues; my favorite is the Egyptian cat-god from the British Museum. Here in Barcelona, the City History Museum's shop on Calle Llibreteria has nice stuff worth at least looking at. They sell little silver reproductions of a Visigothic (early medieval) horse that was found during an archaeological dig, which are a bit pricey but worth it.

The goddamn bus drivers voted to go on strike indefinitely beginning on April 15 if the city government doesn't give them what they want. So far more than 200 buses have been sabotaged by the strikers.

Latino gang fight in L'Hospitalet. Gunshots fired. One hospitalized, stabbed in arm and leg. Three arrested. Gang involved: Dominicans calling themselves the "Black Panthers," in English. This is getting a bit out of hand.

Value-added tax (IVA) receipts are down 8% since January 1 due to the halt in the construction sector. This is going to play hell with the budget.

Ronaldinho has burned his bridges: his manager (and brother) threatened to sign him up with Real Madrid, and claimed he could legally break Dinho's contract for a €16 million buyout, far less than the €125 million buyout clause in his contract. So don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Luis Fernandez, Dinho's coach at Paris-St. Germain, just came out with a book accusing him of being a selfish player and breaking all the team rules, especially those related to eating properly and staying home at night.

Anthony Daniels has a piece in the New Criterion comparing Ortega's The Revolt of the Masses and Freud's The Discontents of Civilization. Check it out. I've actually read Ortega in the Spanish original; he's a first-rate thinker, but I agree with Daniels in finding some of his thoughts rather sinister.

Foodies will be interested in this balanced (and rather long) piece from Slate on avant-garde Spanish cooking. I've never eaten any of the avant-garde stuff, and I'm a vegetarian anyway, so I have no personal opinion on fish-blood foam.

Not much news today, either. The biggest story this morning is that the goddamn bus drivers are on strike again, just like every Thursday. They sabotaged ten buses today, breaking windows and puncturing tires. At least this time three arrests were made; the strikers had been destroying city property and endangering the passengers with complete impunity until now. The only striker arrested so far had been one who punched a cop.

Archaeology news: They found proto-human remains (specifically, a jawbone including teeth) dating back 1.2 million years at the Atapuerca site in Burgos province; they believe the hominid jawbone belonged to a Homo antecessor, which scientists think was a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. These are the oldest proto-human remains discovered in Europe.

Get this: TV3's story says in the very first paragraph: ..."the scientists who discovered (the remains) included Catalan researchers." Local pride is great, but I'm not too sure that the region where a few of the archaeologists were born is worthy of inclusion in the lead. By the way, they also repeatedly spelled Homo antecessor wrong, using a single S instead of the correct double letter.

Cultural news: Eduardo Mendoza, my favorite living Spanish (and Catalan) author, has a new book out called "El asombroso viaje de Pomponio Flato." Pomponio is a Roman who investigates murder charges against a fellow named Joseph (who has a very gifted child) in a town called Nazareth. I plan to check it out soon.

I have to admit that Barcelona's "Bicing" scheme, despite its ridiculous pseudo-English name and my repeated predictions of total failure, is working out pretty well. They've got 130,000 people signed up, and you see people riding the bikes all over downtown. The service is currently being extended to my neighborhood, Gracia, and I guess I'm going to sign up, though I have a bike of my own. I'm still wondering how many inexperienced riders are going to get killed in Barcelona's hellacious traffic.

If we don't get some rain around here pretty soon we're headed for water rationing, despite the multiple denials we had been hearing from the authorities for months. When total reservoir capacity goes under 20% (right now it's at 20.5%), we'll be rationed to 230 liters/person/day, half of what New Yorkers use. If it drops to 15%, they'll reduce water pressure. If it goes down to 10% there will be a complete water cutoff one day a week, and if it goes below 5% that means two days a week of complete cutoffs. Smells to me like we're all going to stink this summer; oh, well, plenty of folks around here only shower once a week anyway.

In February Spain's budget surplus fell by 27% compared to last year, since tax receipts are down due to slower growth than expected along with the rise in oil prices. Zap's balanced budgets are great, but current projections for the future are based on overly optimistic economic growth estimates of more than three percent. But growth may be as low as 2% in 2009. I bet if he tries to keep all those campaign promises he made, good-bye budget surplus.

Here's a fascinating attempt at dealing with unavoidable cross-cultural conflict: it's a US Army booklet from late 1945 called "112 Gripes about the French." It then lists typical complaints heard from GIs stationed in France, and debunks most of them. Great stuff. Go read it; you need to click on "Next Gripe" at the bottom of the page.

I've got a book called "Wartime Britain 1939-1945" by Juliet Gardiner, and it says that both the US army and British authorities issued similar guides for, respectively, American troops and British civilians, while the Americans were stationed over there.

Slow news day. This is good news since it means no domestic violence, Latino gang fights, terrorist bombs, or attempts by Zap to renationalize the phone company.

Economics stuff: The Ibex 35 market index rose 3.6% yesterday, led by the blue chips Telefonica and Banco Santander. It reached 13,430 points, which is still 11.5% off since January 1, when the index was over 15,000. La Vanguardia credits the recovery on Wall Street, the bailout of Bear Stearns, and the increase in second-hand housing sales in the US. The general feeling of impotence and dependence among Spanish investors on the American market must have a lot to do with free-floating anti-Americanism, even among people who should know better.

Second-hand housing sales in January were down 42% in Catalonia and 27% in Spain as a whole compared with one year ago. Pop goes the bubble.

So after literally years of whining about the PP's water plan to transfer Ebro River water to Valencia and Murcia, the Catalan government has come up with its very own redistribution of water resources, supposedly to be ready for late summer or early fall. They're going to build an emergency aqueduct between the headwaters of the Segre River, which flows into the Ebro, and the headwaters of the Llobregat, which supplies Barcelona with much of its water supply. Naturally, Lleida province is furious: "Those goddamn city slickers are stealing our water!" So Catalonia as a whole gets angry if water is to be sent to another Spanish region, but Barcelona doesn't think twice if water is to be taken from another Catalan province.

Talk about crazy contradictions: There is an association up in the Pyrenees that is trying to conserve the traditional Catalan breed of donkey. Great, I'm all for it. So last weekend they got 400 people together for a big old donkey fiesta. Great, sounds like fun. Except those dumbasses KILLED some donkeys and then ATE them, as the main event of the fiesta. Naturally, the animal-rights groups are angry enough to kick the barn door down. Bonus: They did the same thing last year and received so many protests that they naturally had to do it again.

Rafael Poch, La Vanguardia's man in Peking covering the Tibet crisis from half a continent away, reiterates that "The international media ignored the Tibetan pogrom against the Chinese in Lhasa," and "Official sources attacked foreign media manipulation of information."

Nancy Pelosi was in town yesterday for a stopover on the way home from visiting the Dalai Lama in India. She met with regional premier Montilla and Barcelona mayor Jordi Hereu, supposedly about ecology. God only knows why. Aren't there about two hundred more important people in Europe to meet with? Oh, well, it can't hurt anything.

The Spanish press didn't pay too much attention to the Obama and Reverend Wright fooferaw, nor have they even mentioned McCain's gaffe when he confused the Sunnis and the Shiites, but they're all over the Hillary-lied-about-Bosnia story. Reason? There's a good image, the film of Hillary and Chelsea at the airport receiving a state welcome and receiving a gift from a little girl with no sniper fire anywhere.

You know, I can actually see giving Hillary a break over this one. We all have the tendency to remember things in a way that puts us in the best possible light. She probably really did believe that she was facing danger there in Sarajevo, and has built it up in her mind to the point that she falsely remembers snipers being there. I doubt she was deliberately, premeditatedly lying.

As for Obama and Reverend Wright, this is only going to get worse as more of Wright's crack-brained crap comes out on video. Obama has not successfully distanced himself from this guy, and I'm not sure if he can. He's way in too tight with Wright, taking the title of his book from one of Wright's sermons and everything, Now, I doubt Obama really believes Wright's "The government invented crack and AIDS in order to genocide the blacks" stuff, but what I think it shows is that Obama really doesn't believe anything in particular. He's willing to go along with anyone and any idea that he thinks will help his career, and if that means sucking up to radical black racists in South Chicago, he's happy to do so if it will get him elected to the state senate.

McCain is already ahead of both Hillary and Obama in the surveys. The Democrats are going to blow this election.

Check this out. Kansas City outfielder Joey Gathright hurdles the pitcher on his way to first base. In a spring training game, no less. This guy must be tremendous fun to watch; he's supposedly the best pure athlete in the league. He has absolutely no power--he's a Mickey Rivers-type slap-hitter who gets a lot of infield singles, and he doesn't walk enough for a good on-base percentage. But he's a fine fourth outfielder, since he's good in the field and can handle playing center, and he shows every sign of improving, since he's still young. They also say he's getting better at stealing bases, and having even one scary-fast guy on your team can create a lot of havoc.

Here's the famous video of Gathright jumping over cars.

I came across this interesting journal article called "The Ghost Battalion: Spaniards in the Waffen-SS, 1944-45." Check it out. Basically, what happened was, when Franco withdrew the Blue Division from the Leningrad front in 1943 under Allied pressure, some of them, convinced Nazis, stayed behind and joined the Waffen-SS. Other recruits came from Spaniards who had volunteered to work in Germany, Spanish Republican exiles held in prison camps, and from Spanish Nazis who crossed the border into France to volunteer. The author estimates there were at least one thousand of them. What's interesting about these guys is that they all joined super-Nazi organizations, either the Waffen-SS, the SD, or the Gestapo, and they joined up very late, many of them after the Normandy invasion made it clear to everyone that the Nazis were doomed. Many of them wound up in Leon Degrelle's Belgian SS battalion, and most of those guys got killed in the battle of Berlin. A lot of them served as anti-partisan troops in France and Yugoslavia, and a lot of them worked against the Anglo-Americans in France with the Gestapo; they didn't all serve on the Eastern Front, as the Blue Division did.

I wonder if this might not be the case with Enric Marco, the impostor who claimed to have been an inmate at Mauthausen and fooled everyone, to the point of being elected president of the association of Spanish ex-concentration camp inmates. Marco was forced to admit that he had actually volunteered to work in Germany, and he didn't get much more specific. Could he have been one of these guys, and his whole imposture an attempt at covering up his SS or Gestapo service?

We spent the four-day Easter weekend out in Vallfogona, where we did what we usually do: go walking/hiking/trudging with the dog and sit around the fire. It's cold in that old stone house. (By the way, an architecture student is going to do his project on our house, I suppose as an example of architectural folkways. He paid his first visit over the weekend, and his first comment was, "You don't have to worry about this place falling down," since the walls are two feet thick.)

One thing I notice every spring is the first day that the leaves on the trees are thick enough to obscure the bare branches: it's today in Barcelona, and the weather couldn't be prettier, with the sun out and the sky brilliant blue because a cold front from the northwest blew all the pollution away.

The cold front brought a pretty good snowfall up in the Pyrenees, six or eight inches, which is unusual this late in March. It won't alleviate the drought much, though, since it'll only provide enough water to supply Catalonia for a week. Still, every little bit helps, and normal rainfall is predicted for this spring.

The biggest news over the weekend was that ETA set off a car bomb in Calahorra, La Rioja. They called in a warning first, so the area was evacuated and nobody got hurt. It was a big bomb, sixty or seventy kilos of explosives, and it blew the crap out of the street where it exploded.

The PSOE has made its post-election, pre-seating of the Congress plans pretty clear: they're trying to reach an agreement with the PNV and CiU to form a centrist coalition. No more Catalan Tripartite in Madrid, no more power for the Commies and ERC. Good. I much prefer it when Zap has to bargain with parties that are more conservative than he is rather than parties that are farther left than he is.

Zap is still talking about reshuffling the cabinet. Apparently Moratinos stays on at Foreign Affairs, and despite asking to be moved, Rubalcaba stays on at Interior. Alonso moves from Defense to PSOE leader in the Congress, Jauregui becomes party secretary general, De la Vega stays on as the Cabinet's spokeswoman, Miguel Sebastian gets a new Research and Development ministry, and Carmen Chacon gets a new Social Affairs ministry. At least so go the rumors.

Pepelu Carod-Rovira says he's stepping down as president of Esquerra Republicana, which we were all expecting sometime pretty soon; he won't rule out running as the party's chief candidate during the next regional elections, though. First they have a party convention in June to get through, featuring a Carod-Puigcercos power struggle. I hope the party splits and both fractions crash and burn.

63 people were killed on the Spanish highways over Semana Santa, 40% fewer than last year, but still far too many. Our roads are three and a half times more dangerous than those in the UK. So far 460 people have been killed in traffic accidents in Spain this year.

Get this. The average Spanish wedding costs €20,800, more than $30,000, and one-third of Spanish couples go into debt to pay for it. Seems like somebody's got his priorities misplaced.

Economics minister Pedro Solbes has again reduced his prediction for Spain's 2008 GDP growth to 2.6%, while the savings bank association says it will be 2.5%. Long-term predictions for 2009 are hovering around a mere 2%. It seems that a rule of Spanish economics is that if growth is less than 3%, unemployment increases, and everyone is expecting a steep rise in the number of jobless. This will reduce Social Security payments in, and increase unemployment insurance payments out, putting Zap's balanced budget in danger. (No matter how much I love slamming Zap, at least he hasn't unleashed government spending and endangered economic stability.)

Average apartment rent in Barcelona: €1040 a month. Not many people can afford that. Gracia, by the way, is the most expensive neighborhood in town per square meter rented, since everything here is miniature-sized, little toy streets and buildings. You have to buy tiny appliances to fit them in your tiny apartment. Americans don't believe it when I tell them that the bar where I watch the Barça games is maybe 400 square feet, and we can fit about 35 people in there. 400 square feet is an average-sized bedroom in Kansas City.

There are 1,130,000 Muslims living in Spain, about 2.5% of the population; for comparative purposes, that's about the percentage of Jews in America. Fears of Eurabia in Spain are a paranoid fallacy.

Barça stomped a weak Valladolid on Sunday, and Real Madrid lost to no-longer slumping Valencia, leaving Barça four points back with nine games to go. Nobody seems to want to win the League. Ronaldinho was benched again, and Barça fans are united on the need to get rid of him over the summer. Bojan, who is still only 17, scored two goals. I still think Villarreal and Sevilla are playing the best football in the league. Racing Santander is this year's surprise team, currently sitting in fifth place and qualifying for the UEFA Cup next year.

It's Semana Santa (which PC touchy-feely education types have renamed "Spring Vacation") and so there's no news since everybody's on vacation already, even though the official Catalan four-day weekend doesn't begin until tomorrow.

Turns out one of the people killed in the gas explosion was the crazy woman who set it off.

They found two containers filled with ten kilos of explosives and a timer in a rural area in Ciudad Real: it was apparently an ETA drop-off for a traveling cell to pick up that fell through. The cops suspect it's just been lying there since 2006.

TV3's top story this morning, and La Vanguardia's second international story on pages 4 and 5, was the Communist-organized anti-war demonstration in Washington. I checked CNN and Fox News, and had to search for the story; it wasn't on their websites' front page. Interesting how much weight the Catalan media puts on such a minor story. The article doesn't mention how many demonstrators there were, but a few thousand at most showed up, so it was no big deal at all.

So how does La Vanguardia's Eusebio Val report the minuscule turnout? "Despite wide opposition to the war among the citizens, the people who act out these feelings of protest in the street are always few. The accelerated lifestyle and the great distances in American cities are not favorable to these demonstrations on a working day...The immense majority of the Americans who reject the war prefer to express it in private and with certain resignation."

If we don't get some rain around here sometime soon, water stocks will be virtually zero by the end of the summer, and there will have to be rationing and cutoffs. Tankers will begin coming in from Marseille and Tarragona in May, and old wells on the Barcelona plain are being opened up. Barcelona citizens use only 110 liters of water a day, while New Yorkers use 500; if people weren't already pretty frugal with water (because it's expensive), we'd have run out a long time ago. La Vanguardia says that the future lies in desalinizing plants, but the problem is that the process requires a good deal of energy.

In case you hadn't already figured it out, all those "authentic" Dalí and Miró lithographs being sold on Ebay are fake. The FBI and the Mossos busted an art forgery gang based in Barcelona and Chicago; eight persons were arrested here. By the way, I think Dalí is clever but not an artist of the first category, and I don't get Miró's stuff at all. I wouldn't walk across the street to see a Miró. I think other Catalan and Spanish painters like Sorolla, Casas, Nonell, Rusiñol, Fortuny, Utrillo, and Gris, along with architects like Domenech i Muntaner, are much more interesting.

The goddamn bus drivers are on strike again today.

Barça plays at Valencia tonight in the second leg of the Copa del Rey semifinal; in the first leg Valencia earned a 1-1 draw in the Camp Nou, so they win in case the second leg goes 0-0. Ronaldinho is on the shit list big-time; he's being kept out of this game as well. Other players high on the shit list are Deco and Marquez. If Valencia gets eliminated coach Ronald Koeman will likely be fired.

Slow news day, always a good thing. New construction starts are down 8% in Spain since January 2007, the largest decline in the EU-27. The stock market is down just a little, two-tenths of one percent or so. British Airways increased its share of Iberia to 13%, but they're not going to take over the airline, since it would lose its valuable semi-monopoly of Spain-Latin America flights if it passed to non-Spanish hands. Meanwhile, the airlines have reduced the number of Barcelona-Madrid flights because of competition from the new high-speed train, meaning there are plenty of slots at El Prat for any company that wants to fly in and out of here. Now let's see if Barcelona's market can support more traffic.

La Vanguardia ran a special culture section on the changes the city has experienced since the late ´80s, when I came here. It's mostly pomo-critical theory architecture--design--urban planning stuff, and it seems like there are several overriding themes: 1) Barcelona is the most wonderful place in the world 2) the city took advantage of its Olympic Games more effectively than most other cities have 3) government urban planning works in Barcelona and other cities should follow our example 4) there are too many damn tourists spoiling things for us Barcelonese 5) America sucks.

(My reaction: 1) they have a good point. Barcelona is probably one of the ten most desirable cities in the world to live in 2) they really did use the Olympics to put the city on the world map: Barcelona used to be a fourth division city and now it's near the top of the second division 3) government urban planning in Barcelona has been fairly successful, but there have also been some very serious errors 4) Shut up already about the tourists. We live off them. And they're a natural consequence of getting on the world map, which Barcelona is so proud of 5) Yeah, around here they can't even run a culture supplement about their own city without slagging off the Yankees.)

So check out this piece (of crap) by one Josep Oliva, billed as "an architect and urban planner":

USA: the urban anti-model

With a few honorable and notable exceptions, the typical American city is the urban anti-model. Though I would call it the domestic city, conceptually speaking it is a human settlement that does not reach the category of a city as it is correctly defined. The most representative example is Los Angeles, which is the paradigm of unsustainability and the absence of urban values.

Yeah, I hate L.A. too, but a lot of people like it, so many that it's America's second largest metro area. Are all of those folks lacking in proper urban values? And where does this joker get off telling us that Kansas City, say, is not really a city? What is it, a vat of Crisco?

Various factors explain the existence of these non-cities. According to V. Verdu*, the preeminence of the home over the street, the private over the public, utilitarian individualism and distant communication, all this is genuinely American. To these characteristics of privacy, individualism, and a certain dehumanization, one must add the omnipresent liberalism** and the suburban mentality typical of the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic countries as a consequence of climactic determinism, Besides, there is the role of the economy, which impregnates everything.

*Verdú wrote the notorious Yankee-bashing screed The American Planet.
**Remember, in Spain "liberal" means "capitalist," more or less.

Note the stereotyping of Americans as private, selfish, distant people, a common cliché among all Mediterranean Europeans. However, most Europeans don't straignt out call Americans dehumanized like this guy does. One comment: Americans don't hang out on the streets much because they have spacious, attractive homes with yards rather than cramped, overcrowded apartments, and instead of meeting at the local bar they actually invite one another over to their houses. Americans often (mistakenly) consider Spaniards as cold and unfriendly because they never invite you over to their place. And does the economy not impregnate everything in Barcelona too, or do people here not have jobs or anything?

For years, the US has exercised great influence in the whole world and in every aspect of life, including the construction of cities.

Yep, here's the problem. The United States is more influential than Catalonia, and therefore one must whine and complain about it.

Verdu points out that such a cruel and intense phenomenon of colonization, so absolute and devastating, has never received so little opposition, and that it does not operate in the crude manner of oppression, but rather with the refined strategy of seduction. It's not exploitation, but "modernizing." And so we copy them, uncritically adopting their way of life, and we are fascinated by the "modernity" of their images.

Cruel? Devastating? Colonization? What? Suburbs are cruel? Note that our author admits that the European stereotype of the American city is, despite its devastating colonization, seductive. It's American, so it's no good, but those clever Yankees trick people into thinking it's attractive. And note what's really bothering him: some people around here aren't totally anti-American and think living in a suburb might be kind of nice. Also note that he's judging America on images again, just like other bigots from over here who don't know crap about anything outside their own little pond.

Why should we copy a model with no future, because it's unsustainable, the product of unbridled liberalism, which ignores public space and scorns the added value of enjoying the city in itself?

In this sentence I count two straw men, the alleged stereotype (model) of the hypothetical American city and the traitorous Catalan seduced by Yankeeism; one case of begging the question, saying that this stereotype (model) has no future because it is unsustainable when those things are synonyms; one use of a scare phrase, unbridled liberalism; and two unsupported and unfalsifiable hypotheses, that Americans ignore public space (like Central Park or the Mall or Boston Common?) and make cities unenjoyable (like Boston or Chicago or New York or San Francisco?).

They talk about modernizing our urban tradition and projecting it into the future, but banal novelties are one thing and solid modernity destined to establish itself in atemporality is another.

I have a big solid turd destined to establish itself in the Barcelona sewer system in about an hour or so.

Diagonal Mar, the courthouse complex, the autistic shopping malls, and the business parks are examples of the application of American non-urban criteria. It is strange, because it is incoherent, that the compulsively anti-American left follows the dictates of this domestic city in major urban interventions that reflect urban planning from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Among others, this is the case of Caufec in Esplugues.

So this guy is annoyed at the Catalan left wing because it's not anti-American enough? And why are shopping malls so awful? It's not like hundreds of thousands of people don't go to them here in Catalonia every weekend. And when did shopping malls become politically conservative? Finally, note that our author has gone through this entire rant because he wants to denounce some construction project out in Esplugues. Jesus.

So the stock market continues its yo-yo ride, up 3% at closing time and above the psychological line of 13,000 points again. The banks came back, with BBVA up 5%, Santander up 4%, and the other blue chips up between 2% and 3.5%. Smaller banks like Popular and Bankinter were up 5%. London, Paris, and Frankfurt were all up about 3.5%. La Vanguardia credits the recovery on Wall Street, the drop in the price of oil to $102, and the slight improvement of the dollar to $1.57/€. They pretty clearly think that the fate of the Spanish economy is riding on what happens in New York and Washington.

The gas explosion here in Barcelona yesterday was caused intentionally by the woman who lived in the apartment; she was to have been evicted that very day--get this, by her own sister, who was the landlord. So she poured gasoline all over the place, and then turned on the gas and struck a light, with predictable consequences. They don't know whether she is one of the three dead bodies discovered, all of which were charred to a crisp.

This woman was apparently a major pain in the ass and general weirdo; she didn't get along with anybody, wouldn't let even meter readers enter her apartment, practiced traditional magic (oil and salt smeared on the front door, etc.), held grudges, and had a persecution complex. She wrote a letter to El Periodico on Friday saying that her apartment was being stolen from her, and had appeared on--get this--"Patricia's Diary" and the Ana Rosa Quintana show, Spain's Oprah, with various complaints. Most memorably, she went on once to claim that the airlines were discriminating against her, because she was so fat she took up two seats, and so they made her pay for two.

The Free Tibet people, who mostly looked like actual Tibetans rather than transferred nationalists, had a demonstration outside the Chinese consulate here in Barcelona. They got about 300 people; compare that with the "No to the war!" demos five years ago, with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. You can bring out one-third of the city against the Americans, but virtually no one to protest the Communist Chinese dictatorship.

Rafael Poch, in Peking, continues with his particular perspective in his reports on Tibet. He says the revolts amounted to anti-Chinese lynch mobs, calls them "pogroms" again, and leads off with a quote from the governor of Tibet claiming a total of 16 deaths, Chinese killed by Tibetans, and declaring that Chinese police did not open fire on Tibetan demonstrators / rioters. Poch adds that the "Tibetan lobby in exile" claims as many as one hundred dead Tibetans, and quotes Chinese TV as saying, "The Dalai Lama's gang (camarilla) has been telling the world that it no longer wants Tibetan independence, but this is an enormous lie. It wants the world to link the Tibetan question to the Olympic Games in Peking."

It seems to me that the Chinese government is extremely sensitive about its Olympic Games, and perhaps the best thing to do is not watch them on TV. Would you have watched the Berlin Olympics?

Speaking of sports and nationalism, Spain gets very excited whenever one of them actually wins something, no matter how unimportant the sport. The Americans generally don't; the only sports events I remember a big deal being made about nationalistically were the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey team, which famously upset the Russians, and Lance Armstrong's reign over the Tour de France to a lesser degree. In Spain, though, individual sports stars like Rafael Nadal and Fernando Alonso are considered representatives of the whole society, and their success is believed to reflect upon all Spaniards.

(By the way, it makes many Spaniards really mad when you criticize one of their national heroes. To start a barfight in Spain, just say: "Nadal can't play on any surface but clay, and he's not good enough even at that to beat Federer." Or "Gasol's a wimp who can't play defense, and scoring lots of points when Kobe Bryant's getting triple-teamed doesn't make you an All-Star." Or, "Alonso's a pussy, listen to him whine. Waah, waah, waah." Or, "The American golfers can't stand Sergio Garcia's cute little boy act and enjoy whipping his skinny ass." Or, "Why does your football team even bother showing up to international competitions? They always get eliminated in the quarterfinals anyway.")

So the synchronized swimming team won four gold medals at the European championships in Eindhoven. Who the hell watches synchronized swimming? It's one of those dull, regimented sports like rhythmic gymnastics and team handball that the Communists invented during the Cold War. It made the front page of La Vanguardia, and led off the TV3 news last night because one of the girls is Catalan.

Football news: The Barça doctors say Ronaldinho isn't injured, and the rumor is that he was kept off the team in the Almeria game because he's been dicking off in practice. He's not going to be here next year. The Fantastic Four have been a fiasco: Eto'o and Messi have been playing well when they're not injured, which is often, Ronaldinho has been playing below his ability when he plays, which isn't often, and Henry just has not been very good. His latest excuse is that he's all bent out of shape because of his expensive divorce which limits his custody over his daughter, so he can't score any goals, you see.

Oh, Lordy, the Spanish stock market's sliding again; it was down 2.5% at 10:30 this morning, and it's expected to fall further, as the other European markets are also down: London, Frankfurt, Paris, and Milan are all down between 2.5% and 3.5% this morning. In Spain, the biggest losses are in the banking sector, with Santander and BBVA both down more than 3.5%. La Vanguardia blames the decline on the Federal Reserve's interest-rate cut, the fall of the dollar to $1.60/€, and the collapse of Bear Stearns.

El Pais reported yesterday that Esperanza Aguirre was planning a coup the Monday after the election, but she discovered herself with no support outside of the Madrid branch of the party. Key support for Rajoy came from PP bosses Javier Arenas in Andalusia and Francisco Camps in Valencia. With typical Spanish media glee at being able to slam other media outlets, El Pais says that El Mundo, Cope Radio, and Telemadrid were all backing an Aguirre takeover of the party, and that Rajoy's media support came from ABC. Now, since El Pais is notoriously pro-Socialist, one might want to take this with a couple shakers full of salt.

This morning a gas explosion in the La Verneda district of Barcelona killed three people and injured thirteen. Firemen had to rescue 37 people from the apartment building. Another gas explosion in Alcala killed one person. This happens entirely too often in Spain.

Abba's former drummer, Brunkert Ola, was found dead in slightly suspicious circumstances at his house in Mallorca; his throat was cut and he bled to death. He apparently fell headfirst through a window and cut his throat on the broken glass. The Guardia Civil is investigating.

Last weekend eighteen people were killed on the Spanish highways, which are three-and-a-half times more dangerous than British highways. Get this: Eighteen deaths in a weekend is considered a very good sign in Spain, since the death toll last year during the weekend before Semana Santa was double that.

So Tikrit Tommy Alcoverro went to Teheran. He has a hot breaking news flash scoop: The university of Teheran is offering Catalan classes. There are 17 students. The students are reading a Josep Pla book from 1918. Exciting.

Barça choked last night in Almeria, giving up two goals on corner kicks, and they got out with a 2-2 draw. They played lousy against a team that's not very good, and they're seven points back of Real Madrid with ten games to go. Meanwhile, Villarreal has closed within two points of Barcelona. It's clear that Levante and Murcia will be two of the three clubs to be demoted to Second; the third spot is still up for grabs. Somebody will play badly enough to clinch it pretty soon.