MundoFreaky.com is in full swing. We still have organizational stuff to do, but we've got content up and going, and "Liffey" is fixing our mistakes. I think it's pretty funny. It's not all hilarious, some of it is just curious, but we think there's a place for such a website in Spain. So go visit it and link to it and tell your friends about it.

By the way, please make suggestions if you have any.

Big news from around here: ETA again. They exploded a small bomb in front of the offices of the Bilbao newspaper El Correo, with no warning, at around 3 AM today while about 50 people were working inside. No one was hurt, fortunately.

Political stuff: Interior minister Rubalcaba told Basque premier Ibarretxe that it doesn't matter what the Basque nationalists do, "self-determination" for the Basque country is out of the question. Of course Ibarretxe is going to carry on with his plans for a referendum, and he's going to say it's binding, and the Spanish government is going to say it's not binding, and this will all end up signifying nothing.

PP founder Manuel Fraga said that Ruiz-Gallardon would make the best successor to Rajoy as head of the PP, and that Gallardon has a majority among the Madrid branch of the party. Gallardon, of course, has declared his support for Rajoy more than once, so the question is whether Fraga meant "now" or "after Rajoy loses us the 2012 election."

30% of the women murdered in domestic violence cases in Spain this year had already filed charges against their abusers. This is entirely unacceptable. A great deal more must be done in this country to protect people, especially women in abusive relationships, against violence. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I honestly don't know whether there's a battered women's shelter anywhere in Catalonia, and you'd think a guy like me who reads the paper (and filters through the Internet, and watches the news on TV) every day would have heard about it if there were one.

The shitbag truck drivers who are refusing to work because they don't like the price of gas went out and blocked up the highways near the Montmeló racetrack this afternoon, a race day, causing five kilometers of traffic jams and an uncountable quantity of irritation. I have no idea why the police don't haul all these shitbags off to jail for about seventeen felony traffic violations each, not to mention interfering with the citizens' right to travel, creating a public nuisance, and generally being assholes, and tow their trucks away to the vehicle pound, along with pulling their licenses.

Speaking of shitbags, four punk kids were arrested last night in Sant Feliu after smashing the windows, headlights, and mirrors of 50 parked cars, along with denting the metalwork with iron bars. They must have caused at least €100,000 of damage, figuring about two grand per car. When asked why they did it, they said, "Just for fun." I bet almost nothing happens to them.

We had some fun yesterday afternoon here in Gracia. The goddamn squatters had them a big old "Freedom for Franki" demo, which I went down to check out in the Plaza Virreina. They were pretty much what you'd have figured, dirty and drunk, swigging out of bottles of Xibeca and chanting "Prisoners on the streets, freedom and amnesty." That's a well-known ETA chant. They finished off their march by torching a few dozen paper Spanish flags in the Plaza Rius i Taulet. I was unimpressed. No discipline. These people are more of a poorly organized sub-lumpenproletariat than a social movement, and they could be scattered with just one firehose.

ETA again. This time it was a bomb at 2:30 this morning in Zarautz, Viscaya, a prosperous Bilbao suburb. They called in a warning first. The target was one of the companies that is working on the high-speed train line from Madrid to the Basque country. It wasn't a big bomb, about five kilos of explosives, small enough to be carried in a backpack. Not much damage was done; three people were slightly injured, but they're OK.

Zap promised he wouldn't let the companies raise electricity rates any higher than the rate of inflation, which is a problem because such a fixed price is well below what it costs them to produce the electricity.

Eto'o, in Cameroon, head-butted a local journalist in a fit of pique. That's assault and battery. Of course he's going to get away with it because he's God down there. Supposedly Milan wants to buy him. Barça is asking for €50 million and Milan says that's too much. They already bought Zambrotta, but the price hasn't been announced; it's probably about €8 million or so. It's pretty clear they want to get rid of Giovani dos Santos, probably to Tottenham. Bargain sale at the Camp Nou!

The Royals finally won a game after like twelve straight losses.

Yet another moral disaster for the UN. The NGO Save the Children has accused UN peacekeeping troops, and members of other "peace" and "humanitarian" groups, of routinely committing sexual abuse of children in the countries where they are stationed. The countries mentioned are Haiti, Liberia, Congo, and Ivory Coast. Some children are telling horrific stories. I know that charges of sexual abuse are often false--for an example, look at the wave of late '80s-early '90s false stories of Satanic child sex abuses at several US preschools, all of which were bogus--but Save the Children has so many independent accusations that at least some of them must be true.

I really think that when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are over, the US ought to consider pulling completely out of the UN, which is rotten to the core, and help set up an organization of established democratic states only, based on NATO. And I mean democratic; Turkey, Singapore, Thailand, and Russia don't qualify, much less Morocco and Pakistan and Angola and Venezuela and China. I would be willing to give such an organization, which would be very hard to get into and not very hard to get voted out of, veto power over American overseas use of the military.

Interior minister Perez Rubalcaba said yesterday that ETA has already reestablished a new leadership, just a few days after the capture of the bull goose etarra, Lopez Peña. He added that he was going to put 800 more cops on the terrorism beat.

More PP infighting: Gabriel Elorriaga, the PP's press secretary, has come out against Rajoy. Elorriaga is known as a moderate, which is a change from the others questioning Rajoy's leadership; the rest of them are all from the right / Spanish nationalist wing of the party.

Another near-disaster in Catalonia. Get this one. A truck driver ran his truck off a bridge near Solsona in Lleida province this morning, crashing partway through the guardrail. The truck is now hanging off the side of the bridge, with the driver still in the cab. Nobody died. So what's the big deal? The truck is full of explosives. The area has been evacuated, and the cops are waiting for a large crane to arrive so they can pull the truck and driver to safety. Let's hope it works.

What I want to know is exactly how a guy driving a truck full of explosives manages to drive it off a bridge. Shouldn't he be going like ten miles an hour?

The combination of high oil prices, crashing real estate prices, and Zap's social programs have cut the budget surplus by 56%. Government income has declined, due to lower VAT receipts caused by the construction slump, and lower gasoline tax receipts due to the high price and decreased consumption. Spain is still running an €9 billion surplus, so we don't need to worry yet, and a little deficit spending won't hurt. But let's not make the American mistake of borrowing to keep consumer spending high and keep the economy out of recession. A short sharp shock might well be salutary for the US, and it looks like it's coming here too.

Ana Obregon update: Ana Obregon is an aging Spanish slutty bimbo and sometime TV actress. She has had sex with at least one-eighth of the men in Spain. Her last program was the repulsive "Ana y los siete," in which her character was the nanny for a large family by day and a stripper by night; the most horrifying sight in the history of Spanish TV was la Obregon's seminude silicone-laden body. So she's in trouble now for offering to pay her bodyguard to beat up a TV host who had made fun of her. I say that's conspiracy to commit assault and battery, a violent crime, and that she ought to go to the slam for it. Obregon denies the story and is threatening to sue the magazine that published it. I bet she doesn't do it, that she's all hat and no cattle.

(Contrast: I wouldn't want to put Isabel Pantoja in jail, even though she's mixed up in this Marbella corruption case and is almost certainly guilty of tax fraud, at the very least. She's a nonviolent, economic criminal, who shouldn't suffer loss of her physical freedom, but rather of her economic freedom. Sentence her to five years in public housing, scrubbing floors and eating off food stamps.)

Oh, by the way, you know the urban legend in which a celebrity with mega-fake boobs is on an airplane that loses cabin pressure, and her juggernauts explode? Here in Spain that celebrity is Ana Obregon. I've heard it in the US about Dolly Parton and Pamela Anderson.

Dumbest controversy of the year: Catalan chef Santi Santamaria has accused Ferran Adria and other celebrity chefs of ruining Iberian cuisine by using artificial chemical ingredients in their fancy expensive avant-garde dishes. So everybody's all excited, and, get this, they're debating the question on TV and the radio, and taking sides on it. Who gives a crap? It's obvious that nothing interesting has happened yet this week.

The death toll of the construction accident at the new CF Valencia stadium has reached four. Three of the dead have been identified, an Ecuadorian, a Bolivian, and a Spaniard. They're arguing about the causes now, but it's obviously not the fault of the men who fell, it's the fault of whoever was in charge of putting up the scaffold.

Barça update: Keita has officially signed. Pique is coming for sure. Rumor has it they want to sign forward Dani Guiza, who led the league in goals last year, from Mallorca, Hleb from Arsenal, Villa from Valencia, and Alves from Sevilla. Villarreal (not Recreativo; he was merely on loan there last year) is demanding €20 million for Uruguayan defender Martin Caceres.

Meanwhile, the Royals are dashing our hopes yet again. The season started out so nicely, and now they've lost eight straight on a road trip to Boston and Toronto, including a no-hitter by Jon Lester, a guy who has just come back from having cancer. Congratulations to Lester, it's a great story, but you hate it when it happens to your team.

Here's the Royals' best possible lineup in my opinion. By the way, OPS (On-base average Plus Slugging percentage) is the best statistic that measures a batter's performance, I think. You want your guys at the power positions (3B, RF, LF, 1B) to have at least an 800 OPS, and your guys at the skill positions (C, SS, 2B, CF) to have at least 750. A weak-hitting shortstop might have a 700 OPS, while a top hitter like Manny Ramirez or Albert Pujols might be well over 1000. Barry Bonds used to rack up a steroid-fueled OPS of like 1300 every year. Under 700 and you're a marginal player, one step away from the minors, unless you're an exceptional fielder or a reliable catcher.

L DeJesus CF 694
R Grudzielanek 2B 710
L Gordon 3B 799
R Guillen LF 718
R Olivo C 911
L Teahen RF 681
R Butler 1B 669
S Callaspo SS 660
R Buck DH 690

That just blows. Only Olivo and Gordon are doing their jobs, and Guillen is hitting well now after a disastrous April. That's it. Everybody else is hitting far below average for his position. And both Callaspo at SS and Butler at 1B are below-average defensive players, to boot. (The rest of the team is average or above-average, at least.) The Royals have above-average defensive players at both those positions. The problem is that 1B Gload's OPS is 573, and SS Peña's OPS is 388, which might be the worst in the history of the major leagues--and they've already given him more than 140 at-bats.

ETA again: They set off a truck-bomb loaded with 60 kilos of explosives on the beachfront street in Guecho (Getxo), Vizcaya, at 1 AM today. They called in a warning an hour before the bomb went off, so nobody was hurt. For a big explosion--it left a crater a foot deep and six across--it did surprisingly little structural damage.

Constitutional Court confusion: Justice Roberto Garcia-Calvo, a conservative, died suddenly yesterday, leaving another vacancy among the court's twelve members. The Court had been divided six to six between "progressives" and "conservatives," with the progressive Chief Justice breaking ties. No one knows who's going to replace Garcia-Calvo, especially since four of the current Justices' terms expired in December and the PSOE and PP haven't been able to agree on who'll replace them, either.

Here in Catalonia the focus is, of course, on the controversial Catalan statute of autonomy (= regional constitution), which was passed by the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, but which has been held up by judicial appeals from both the opposition PP and from other Spanish regions. With Garcia-Calvo dead, the "progressives" would have an advantage if a decision on the statute were to be made now. Which is highly unlikely.

The Spanish construction sector's production was down 10% from a year ago as of March, the highest drop in the EU; the EU average is a mere 0.1% decline.

72% of Spanish soccer fans would rather watch soccer than have sex, which might have something to do with the birth rate around here.

ERC Catalunacy: Pepelu Carod-Rovira is going to Portugal to request support for Catalan independence. Why would he possibly think he's going to get any? Meanwhile, accused embezzler and influence-peddler Joan Puigcercos wants to be the party's candidate in the 2010 regional election so he can get Catalonia all ready for independence in 2014.

Defense Minister Carme Chacon said yesterday, "I am a pacifist woman, and the Army is pacifist too."

They had a big old demonstration in Amposta, a small Catalan city on the Ebro River, against sending any of their precious liquid to keep us clean and hydrated here in Barcelona. As usual in Spain, the organizers and the authorities claimed radically different turnouts; this time the organizers said 35,000 and the authorities said 6000. The selfishness is appalling, since the Ebro Valley towns and farms don't need the water to be sent to Barcelona through the new "mini-transfer" aqueduct supposedly already under construction. The whole point of sending this Ebro water to Barcelona is that Barcelona is buying the excess water that the Ebro Valley farmers aren't going to use.

I bet the murder in Reus becomes a big stink; the victim was a law-abiding citizen, a 37-year-old engineer from a nearby small town, while the alleged killer is a Spanish gypsy. That is not going to go over well around here, where gypsies are stereotyped as knife-wielding criminals. Which some of them are.

The Spanish First Division soccer season is over. Real Madrid is champion; other Champions League teams next year are Villarreal, Barça, and Atletico de Madrid; Racing, Sevilla, and Valencia (Cup champion) will play the UEFA Cup; and Levante, Murcia, and Zaragoza are relegated to Second. Just wait till next year. Meanwhile, this summer we'll have the Eurocup to keep us entertained.

Tragedy update: Now they're talking 20,000 dead in China and 100,000 dead in Burma, with 1.5 million people in danger of death from hunger, disease, and exposure. When are we going to start bombing Burma with parachute-loads of rice and medicines? To hell with the junta and what they want us to do. Slate has two pieces worth reading, an Anne Applebaum denunciation of the Burmese junta and an explanation of how disaster casualties are estimated.

Al Qaeda is making Internet threats to carry out bombings in Switzerland and Austria during this summer's soccer Eurocup. Let me point out that both Switzerland and Austria are constitutionally neutral nations, that neither has troops outside its borders, that neither is a member of NATO or an American ally, that neither is participating in the Iraq or Afghanistan occupations, and that neither is especially pro-Israeli. Many people in Spain still don't get the basic fact that Islamist terrorism wants to kill us all or force us to submit. Zap: Spain is still a target and don't forget it.

Spain news: Rajoy and Zap are making a show of unity in the wake of the ETA bombing in Alava. We'll see how long this lasts. Maria San Gil is not going to get on the bus: she had a meeting with Rajoy and told him that she has no confidence in his leadership. The price of rented flats in Spain increased by almost exactly the inflation rate, 4.2%, over the last year, so while sale prices are dropping, rental prices are holding.

The water wars continue: Aragon wants the Zap administration to halt construction of the aqueduct that is to carry water from the Ebro to Barcelona. The European Central Bank says the eurozone countries are going to go through "a prolonged period of inflation." Remember that Alan Greenspan said it might be necessary to sacrifice growth in order to hold inflation down. Fallout from the housing market: The Barcelona real estate agency Don Piso, which belongs to the developer Habitat, is going to close the 120 offices it owns and fire 350 people. They will keep their 140 franchised offices open. Habitat's yearly sales are down 66%, they lost €444 million in 2007, and they're expected to take further losses in 2008 and 2009.

Remember a few weeks ago when La Vanguardia ran a photo taken in the US of a joke sign reading "No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again," and everybody went wild about gun-nut Americans and their violent society? Well, today they ran a photo taken in Sant Boi of a sign reading "All dogs that shit here will be exterminated," that was then rectified to "The owners of all dogs that shit here will be exterminated." No one is going wild about how violent Catalan society is, though.

Speaking of violence, I came across this Wikipedia entry; it's a list of murder rates around the world, and it includes a color-coded illustrative map. According to Wikipedia, these are the most recently available national murder rates per 100,000 people; they're from between 2004 and 2006. I've selected a few of them:

El Salvador 55
Jamaica 49
Venezuela 45
South Africa 41
Colombia 37
Brazil 27
Russia 17
Mexico 13
Argentina 9.5
Thailand 8.5
United States 5.9
Spain 3.4
Switzerland 2.9
United Kingdom 2.0
Canada 1.9
France 1.6
Japan 1.1
Germany 1.0

So Spain is actually more violent than the UK, and not that far behind the US. By the way, many countries are not included in the list, including China and India, as well as most of Africa and a good part of Asia.

The homicide rate in the US is actually a good bit lower than it was in the "good old days." Except for an unusually peaceful period between 1947 and 1968, the American murder rate has always been high. In 1916 it was 6.5, in 1921 it was 8.1, in 1928 8.6, in 1933 9.7, in 1939 6.4, in 1946 6.4, in 1969 7.3, in 1974 9.8, and in 1980 10.2. It declined dramatically in the mid-1990s to more or less the current level.

ETA bombing update: They used a car bomb loaded with more thn 100 kilos of explosives. The explosion scattered debris in a radius of 100 meters. Serious damage was done to the barracks. The four wounded officers are in good condition at the hospital; one was trapped in the wreckage for two hours, and is currently in intensive care, but he's going to live. The cops found the car the terrorists escaped in; it was booby-trapped and the bomb squad deactivated a gasoline incendiary bomb. Can we please not negotiate with these terrorists ever again?

Electricity prices, which are regulated by the government in Spain, are going up; the National Energy Commission has approved an 11.3% rate hike to take effect in July. Econ minister Pedro Solbes says the administration will almost certainly sign off on the increase. The problem is that electricity rates are fixed by the government below the market price, and the utilities are €5 billion in the hole this year and €15 billion all totaled. It just doesn't work to force businesses to charge less than cost price for their goods. Looks like we're going to have to do a bit of belt-tightening around here, with higher mortgage rates, high food and gasoline prices, increased unemployment, and low economic growth. Every boom has its bust.

Speaking of which, Spanish GDP growth in the first trimester of 2008 was 2.7%; it was 3.5% in the last trimester of 2007. Solbes is calling it "rapid deceleration." Good news: Telefonica posted a €1.5 billion profit for the trimester, which will help out everybody's pension plan and mutual funds.

PP news: Maria San Gil has threatened to resign as PP president in the Basque Country if Rajoy doesn't move away from his new moderate position on regional nationalisms. Ms. San Gil, we all respect your courage and decency, but we've lost two elections in a row and something's got to change. Either get on the bus or get out of the way with as little fuss as possible. She has, by the way, ruled out challenging Rajoy for party leadership at the June convention.

Remember the Jose Couso case? He was the journalist killed in Baghdad when the Americans took the city back in 2003. He was pointing a camera out the window of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad and an American tank fired on him, thinking he was an enemy fighter or spotter. His family and the Spanish far left have never stopped trying to take the US Army, and specifically the three soldiers involved in Couso's death, to court in Spain for "murdering" him. So Spain's National Court has just thrown out their case for the second time. Maybe they'll get the message now: we're sorry he got killed, but bad things that are not crimes happen in battles.

Barça report: There's a movement taking shape to call a no-confidence motion against club president Joan Laporta. I bet it doesn't work. Supposedly they've already signed Alves from Sevilla, they're interested in Hleb and Drogba, they've offered Ronaldinho, Zambrotta, and €20 million to Milan for Kaká, and Puyol is mad and is talking about leaving.

Tragedy in Burma: 25,000 dead after a typhoon. I hope the US Navy is in action right now, bringing in food and medicine, no matter how awful and repressive the government is, and even though probably half the aid will get stolen by people by people who will profiteer off it.

Note the difference between Burma and Louisiana. In Louisiana, even though the city and state governments completely bungled the whole operation, from evacuation to relief, only about a thousand people died. Media hysteria didn't help, of course. But at least Louisiana, admittedly America's little corner of the Third World, had the infrastructure and organization to do something. Burma doesn't, largely because its government is corrupt, tyrannical, and xenophobic. So the country had no warning system or evacuation plan or, apparently, anything else.

Nobody's blamed global warming for this yet, though I'm sure it'll happen soon.

Food prices: Oils are up 41% over the past year, wheat flour up 28%, sterilized milk 24%, and dried pasta up 20%. Canary Islands bananas are up 19%, oranges up 15%, fresh chicken 13%, and eggs 11%. Prices that have dropped: fresh tomatoes down 17%, potatoes down 7%, onions down 7%, carrots down 5%, and lettuce down 4%. So this is good news for us salad-eating vegetarians. The cost of the official food of Spain, the tortilla de patatas, stays about the same, with eggs up but potatoes and onions down.

Note: Spanish people say Canary Islands bananas taste better than Latin American bananas. I can't tell the difference, myself.

Get this. Spanish judges have handed down 270,000 penal sentences that have not been carried out. That means there are a hell of a lot of people out there who ought to be in prison but are just walking around free, and quite possibly committing more crimes. One of the reasons for the delay is that there was a strike by the judicial civil servants, which balled things up for a while, but the two main reasons are 1) the wheels of justice grind far too slow and 2) they don't have enough prison space.

What I would do is imprison only violent criminals, and I would imprison them for a good long time. The rest of society needs to be protected from these people. There are other ways to punish non-violent criminals. What I'd do to economic criminals, from bad-check writers to fraudsters to corrupt politicians, is sentence them to poverty for a term of years. They wanted to get rich by breaking the rules? Force them to be poor, make them live in public housing and work at McDonalds. This punishment would allow these lawbreakers to keep their physical freedom, but lose their economic freedom.

Here's some guys I'm all in favor of putting in jail: They busted five pro-ETA punks who'd been committing street terrorism in and around Baracaldo. Among other things, they completely wrecked a commuter train station, torched a couple of city buses, and firebombed local PNV headquarters.

Former Barça star midfielderJosep Guardiola will be FC Barcelona's next coach, according to TV3. I think it's a good hire; I like the idea of hiring young coaches with recent playing experience. Let's just hope Guardiola can discipline these guys, because the clubhouse got out of control in Rijkaard's two last years. Rumor has it that Liverpool will make an offer for Abidal, that Edmilson will go to Newcastle, and that Ronaldinho may wind up at Manchester City, of all places.

There's a story in La Vanguardia saying that Ronaldinho failed a physical, supposedly for AC Milan, and that he's so badly out of shape that he can't play at all. This may be why Berlusconi announced that Milan was no longer interested in him. Right now the question is whether to let him play the last home game of the season as a last hurrah, and the answer will probably be no.

TV3's Washington correspondent has set up an election blog. Today he reports that he challenged a Republican voter in Indiana who said that Obama didn't have enough experience with, "And what experience did Ronald Reagan have?" Well, he'd been governor of California for eight years, the corporate spokesman for General Electric, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, one of the leaders of the anti-Communist backlash in Hollywood, a successful movie actor, and a pioneer radio announcer, and he came from a much poorer family than Obama did. Reagan is the only US president to have been the president of a labor union. Obama, on the other hand, is a professional politician who's been in the US Senate for two years, and before that was in the Illinois state senate. He's done nothing else but write self-justifying books and hang out with Chicago black nationalists and sixties-leftover ex-terrorists.

Quick news brief before we take off for Vallfogona for the four-day weekend. It's International Commie Day. They had the usual union marches this morning, and a few thousand people came out: I remember twenty years ago they really managed to pull off mass demos, but now it's all rather perfunctory, as if it were more an obligation than something people get all excited about.

Everybody's talking about the pervert in Austria who imprisoned and violated his own daughter. The general tone down at the café this morning was pro-death penalty, and some discussion ensued over which precise method should be used.

ETA exploded three small bombs at labor ministry buildings in the Basque country; nobody was hurt, fortunately. They called in warnings for two of them, but not for the third. Speculation is that the bombings are a response to the jailing (on charges of membership in a terrorist organization) of the pro-ETA mayoress of Mondragon, the town where ETA's last victim, Isaías Carrasco, was murdered in March. By the way, Carrasco's killers have not yet been caught.

La Vanguardia reports that Angel Acebes is being demoted from his position in the PP leadership. Good. About time his head rolled.

Efficient management: The estimated cost for line 9 of the Barcelona metro, which will run from El Prat to Badalona looping around Barcelona on the northwest, has multiplied by more than three to €6.5 million. Apparently much of the extra cost is due to improvised, ad hoc changes to the original plan. Not to mention the three percent kickback from the construction companies to the political parties in power.

Massive Barça firestorm after the elimination from the Champions League. New coach: either Guardiola or Mourinho. I'd go with Guardiola. 80% of the fans want president Joan Laporta to resign, but he's not going to. Players whose contracts expire who won't be back: Edmilson, Thuram, Ezquerro, Pinto. Players on the shit list, to be sold or given away: Ronaldinho, Deco, Henry, Marquez, Zambrotta. Player on thin ice: Eto'o.

Meanwhile, Ronaldo is in big trouble after his little escapade with the transvestites: his girlfriend has left him, and Nike is talking about breaking his contract--presumably there's a morals clause, and the cops are investigating his possible cocaine use. But baseball pitcher Roger Clemens is in bigger trouble: he's been having an affair with drug-addled country singer Mindy McCready. So what? you may ask. Well, they met when she was fifteen. In addition to the steroids charges, he's looking at Statue Tory Rape. I would say at this point there are several players whose reputations are permanently trashed. In order: Clemens, Canseco, Bonds, Palmeiro, McGwire. I will bet these guys all get blackballed from the Hall of Fame, except Canseco, who would never have gotten close anyway.

PP infighting news: Last weekend Mariano Rajoy announced that anybody who didn't like the way he's running the party can leave, which has been universally interpreted as a challenge to Esperanza Aguirre to make a decision. The expectation is that she'll make some kind of announcement today. Rajoy feels confident because he's got the regional party bosses behind him; he and Camps and Valcarcel and Feijoo want to make a move toward the center, while Aguirre's position is farther to the right.

The only thing I can say is it's about time the PP distanced itself from everyone involved in the 3-11 conspiracy theory; Aguirre was not one of them, but she's got the support of the Acebes-Zaplana hard-line wing.

The problem here is when Aznar was running the party, he kept everyone else in line and on message. Rajoy appears to have lost that near-dictatorial power. One advantage the right has had in Spain is that it's united; there's no other national party to the left of the Socialists, while the Socialists have always had to share their support with the Communists. If the PP splinters, though, that's a major advantage they're losing.

Get this: Somali pirates off the east African coast captured a Spanish fishing boat, and they are holding the 26 crew members hostages. They've said they just want money and that they are not political. The defense ministry is sending a ship to the area. This is the second episode this month of pirates taking a Western ship in the area. Piracy is a genuinely serious international problem, and of course those who are hurt most are the poor, since pirates are much warier of Western ships than of small Third World boats. I vote in favor of an armed response by Western navies; if we can't suppress piracy on the high seas, then what do we have a navy for?

Somebody called in a bomb threat against an Air Europa plane just before it was supposed to take off from Caracas for Madrid; they had to evacuate it, and a fifteen-hour delay proceeded.

They're starting another mass trial of members of ETA-front organizations; this time it's Gestoras Pro Amnistia, which supported amnesty for ETA terrorists before Judge Garzon banned it in 2001. 27 of them are facing sentences of up to ten years for membership in a terrorist organization. They are, of course, guilty as hell, and most of them are going to be convicted.

The rains last weekend filled up the reservoirs a bit, and now they're at 22.6% of capacity. Some more would be nice.

One good piece of economic news: 10.6 million tourists visited Spain over the first quarter of 2008, up 5.3% over last year. Tourism is such a huge industry in this country. Just a guess: Lots of Europeans are feeling slightly pinched and are downscaling their vacations from the Seychelles or the Caribbean to the Costa Brava, which is still very cheap compared to most other Euro vacation spots, and easy to reach as well.

I probably dislike Pepe Rubianes as much as I do anyone. He's announced he's taking six months off to recuperate from lung cancer. Unlike Rubianes, I don't wish death on anyone who's not going around killing other people, and I hope Rubianes recovers. And shuts the hell up instead of spewing poison, as he so often does.

Hey, everybody, look at this! La Vanguardia has another reader photo! This time it's a sign in a Barcelona shop window reading "Sale. New electric chairs starting at €3200." Says La Vangua, "The author of the photograph noticed this unusual sale in a shop on Calle Córsega in Barcelona that sells orthopedic products for handicapped people, and he wondered whether the electric chairs are imported from overseas. "Do they come from the United States? No to the death penalty."

Paul Hollander defined anti-Americanism as "a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic, and political institutions, traditions, and values."

Our friends in ETA exploded a bomb at 3:25 this morning at Socialist party headquarters in Elgoibar, Guipúzcoa. They called in a warning, and the cops were able to evacuate the area, so fortunately no one was injured, but serious property damage was done. Three kilos of explosives were used. This was the second bombing of a Socialist headquarters in three days.

Nasty incident in Málaga: a drunk driver passing illegally ran a bus full of Finnish tourists off the road, where it rolled over. Nine were killed and fifteen seriously injured. The drunk survived, thereby pointing out a flaw in the Darwinian model.

Drivers from other European countries might want to be extra-careful in Spain, which has pretty near the most dangerous highways in Western Europe. All the drinking doesn't help, and the dreadful road signs don't help much either, nor does all the speeding that goes on. There really is more machismo among the Latins than the Nordics, and it comes out in the way some of them drive.

Check out this nonsense by Bru Rovira in La Vanguardia today:

Hunger is a structural problem of the globalized world today. A tragedy that demands collective solutions to the shared responsibility of the chief actors on the new scene of politics, and transnational markets, especially the rich countries, which have dictated the rules and exercise political and economic control of globalization.

Looks like the Jew-American conspiracy against the world is poisoning the wells again. We wouldn't want to imply that many poor countries are poor because of their own social structure or corruption or thieving dictatorial governments, would we?

(According to the UN) technical progress applied to agriculture "has produced very unjust profits." In order to correct it, the Unesco recommends fostering sustainable agriculture that respects the fragility of natural resources and protects the local production of food, bringing the producer closer to the consumer.

Sounds like protectionism to me. By the way, the corrupt thieving dictatorial governments that impoverish their own people are well represented at the UN. I'm not surprised that they're trying to blame the situation they created on the Jew-American conspiracy and its "unjust profits." I also note that our author has no concept of competitive advantage: the countries that are best at producing food should do so. Other countries should concentrate on producing other goods that they can produce more efficiently and trade those goods for food. In that way everybody takes the fullest advantage of its economic potential.

As can be seen now, although production has increased, distribution is unequal, and the poorest countries have not only gotten poorer because of the difficulties of reaching the markets and unfair competition against their products exercised by rich countries slashing prices with subsidized products (dumping), but they now see that having lost their food sovereignty, self-sufficiency within the poverty in which they lived has directly become hunger, because they now depend only on the markets and the prices that the large producers set, with whom they cannot compete

.

Our author is absolutely right that agricultural subsidies in First World countries need to be stopped now; these subsidies are genuine unfair competition to Third World farmers. However, I was not aware that "slashed" food prices caused hunger; I figured the lower the price the consumer pays, the better. Guess I was wrong. Our author also believes that prices are set by the producers rather than the market, by the way. Finally, he does not understand that the way to make Third World countries wealthier is by improving farming technology to increase production there, along with hanging their corrupt dictators.

ETA exploded a bomb at around 6 AM today outside a Socialist headquarters in Bilbao. They called in a warning first, so the cops were able to evacuate the neighborhood. Serious material damage was done, as the bomb contained five kilos of explosives. Good thing nobody was killed, but seven Basque police officers were slightly injured.

A lot of Spaniards get very indignant when the English-speaking press calls ETA a "Basque separatist group," when it is in reality a gang of terrorists who have killed more than 800 people. They have a point.

We finally had a good rain today, both in the morning and the afternoon, including a thunderstorm, which are comparatively rare in Spain. The cats and the dog don't like thunderstorms at all, and there was some yelping and cowering going on here. It rained all over Spain, since there's a low-pressure system over the Bay of Biscay bringing in counterclockwise moist Atlantic winds. It's supposed to be rainy all weekend; they said it already rained more than an inch in the Pyrenees, and this should fill up the reservoirs a couple of percent. The stinky season has been put off for another couple of weeks.

The incompetent lying greenie-Communist Catalan environmental counselor, Francesc Baltasar, now says we won't need to go into the "drought pre-emergency stage" until May, as the recent rains have increased reservoir contents by a percent or two.

Good news: The cops carried out a mass raid in Madrid, arresting 87 Nigerians for running the well-known Internet e-mail fraud. They may have scored upward of €170 million; the cops have evidence that they took in at least €20 million. Most of the 1200 victims defrauded were foreigners in Europe and the US, and they got taken for an average of €18,000 each. More than 200 computers were confiscated, along with reams of other documents.

Archaeological update: In Constantí, near Tarragona, a ruinous medieval building collapsed and the remains of a Roman aqueduct, later renovated during the medieval era, was found under it. The arcade is 60 meters long, and the aqueduct seems to have been for irrigation. They're taking this seriously enough to change the plan to build a new train line between Barcelona and Valencia, which would have passed right by the site.

Check out this headline on La Vanguardia's website today: "Hundreds of Palestinians mourn cameraman murdered in Gaza." Neutral. Objective. Unbiased. I like that in a newspaper. Naturally, the usual gang of idiots showed up to post anti-Semitic comments, which I won't bother to quote.

Economics update: The Spanish savings banks association predicts GDP growth for 2008 to be 2.0%, and to be 0.9% in 2009. Unemployment will top 11% in mid-2009, housing starts will drop 7% this year and 15% next year, and there will be an 0.6% budget surplus this year and a 1.2% budget deficit next year. Household consumption will rise 2% this year, down from a 3.2% increase last year. Even Pedro Solbes had to admit that his ministry's forecast for this year was outrageously optimistic.

Not much other news, as is common on Saturdays. ETA set two booby-trap bombs at a telephone relay station in Navarra, hoping to blow up some cops, but the second bomb didn't work. Fortunately, nobody got hurt.

El País says that 800 Spaniards have contracted Creutzfelt-Jakob disease (of which one cause is eating "mad cows") since 2000, which means that there most likely is something strange going on. I'm glad I'm a vegetarian.

More than one-third of Spanish university graduates are working at jobs for which they are overqualified, a higher percentage than in any other EU country but Ireland and Estonia.

The mini-aqueduct between Tarragona and Barcelona, to carry unneeded water destined for irrigation from the Ebro to the thirsty metro area, will be finished in six months and cost €150 million ($225 million). So let's see: it ought to come on line by the first of November, assuming that they get started now and everything goes according to plan. That means about four months of showering once a week here in Can Fanga, during what will become known as the Stinky Summer of 2008.

Milan general manager Adriano Galliani is coming next week to buy Ronaldinho. Supposedly the offer is €8 million a year for Ronaldinho and €16 million to the Barça for his contract. Barça wants €30 million, and the story is they've already got a €25 million offer from Inter. I say make them bid against one another and see how much the club can get.

So La Vangua has an article marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. No problems here except for a very common Spanish media error: They don't suss that when an American has three names, 99% of the time the second name is what we call a middle name, and not the first surname as it would be in Spanish. So they habitually refer to Martin Luther King as Luther King rather than King, and to James Earl Ray as Earl Ray rather than Ray.

By the way, the Spanish National Health thinks my middle name, Stuart, is my first surname, and so every time I have any business with them I have to make sure they check the files under both names. Also, people from phone companies who call me up trying to sell me their cellular plan always ask for Señor Stuart; I know right off the bat if a caller is "roast leg of insurance salesman," or, like, somebody from the office or the bank.

The "Maradona of the Rambla," who's been doing stunts with a soccer ball and passing the hat among the tourists on the Rambla near Plaza Catalunya for as long as I can remember, is retiring because he's reached 65. He claims the world record for keeping a soccer ball in the air the longest, and he's a well-known local character. Another Barcelona icon saddles up and rides off into the sunset.

The Zap government is definitely not going to send any water from the Segre-Ebro to Barcelona. Now Zap claims he'd never heard about the idea before he read about it in the papers. The Catalan Socialist environment counselor, Francesc Baltasar, looks like a liar: before the election he publicly denied, not once but twice, that the Generalitat was considering an aqueduct to transfer water from the Segre to the Llobregat. Then he got into a moronic semantic argument over the meaning of "transfer water." Turns out now they were considering precisely that the whole time; on November 29 they held a meeting at the environmental ministry in Madrid to discuss what to do about the drought, and decided to hold back any public announcements until after the election. Most likely head to roll: Environment minister Cristina Narbona.

The words "transfer water" are politically loaded, since the PP's goddamn water plan to transfer Ebro water to Valencia, Murcia, and Almeria, was shot down by a Catalan-Aragonese Socialist intransigent opposition to sending any Ebro water anywhere else. Now the PP is in position to embarrass the Socialists with their plan to transfer Ebro water to Barcelona, since the Socialists had argued that any water transfer would create an ecological tragedy.

The forecasters are predicting a rainy spring, which would be a very good thing. There are some dark clouds coming out of the northwest today.

Coverage of the American elections over here centers on the Democratic race. Al Gore has managed to make himself into a figure beloved among the Catalan enviroleft and the rest of the Do-Gooders International, and Obama's proposal to make Al some kind of environmental czar has gone over big here. Chelsea and her difficulties with people asking her about her dad and Monica has also been big news. Obama and Reverend Wrong didn't get nearly as much coverage, and Hillary's Bosnia thing has pretty much blown over. Notice that Spanish coverage focuses on personalities rather than issues, but a lot of American coverage does too.

Updates: The ETA killers of Isaías Carrasco have not been caught yet, and I have heard virtually nothing about the case since the election. I also haven't heard anything recently about the Islamist terrorist cell rounded up in January--remember, the ones who were going to plant bombs in the subway. Zap never got his meeting with Bush at the Bucharest summit, the meeting that the PSOE had made such a big deal about; Spain's still in the freezer as far as the American administration is concerned. And the goddamn bus drivers aren't striking today or next Thursday, but they're going on an indefinite strike starting April 15.

The goddamn Jehovah's Witnesses, who in Barcelona are a bunch of Brits, came around today wanting to leave some literature. I was polite but told them firmly I wasn't interested. What they do is target people with English names; they rang at my doorbell and asked over the intercom if I spoke English. The Mormons, who are a bunch of Americans, don't come around to your house, but they target English-speakers on the city streets. I respect their right to their beliefs, but I also have the right to be left alone.

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.