Lovely very-early-spring weather this week in Barcelona. If you walk down to the plaza, all the old folks are out on the benches with all their little old dogs enjoying the sun. It's not quite nice enough for the café-bars to put out the sidewalk tables, though. Note to Barcelona tourist board: One thing all the Americans love when they come over here is sitting outside at café-bars. They think it's really European. Play this up in your advertising. No charge for the advice.

Another thing you must do is watch FC Barcelona play football. I've never seen them better. They play like a well-oiled machine, and Ronaldinho is spectacular. He's the most creative player I've seen play, and I've seen a lot of football. I know that even in the US you guys get soccer on TV, maybe on ESPN 8 or one of those obscure cable channels, but you get it. Last night's game against Alaves wasn't Barça at its best, but it was obvious from minute one that they were going to win. They just kept creating opportunities at goal and you knew that one was going to go in.

The Catalan love of scatology and general crudeness has been commented on frequently, and one example is the popular name for Barça fans, culés. Culé would translate to English as "a person whose identity is associated with his arse." An "arser," if you will. The name comes from Barcelona's 1910s soccer field. Fans sat on a brick wall surrounding the playing pitch and their arses hung over the street, so a passer-by saw an entire city block of people's bottoms. Only the Catalans would name themselves after their nether regions.

Other teams' followings have names like the merengues, Real Madrid fans, from the team's white uniforms. Colchoneros (from colchon, mattress) are Atletico de Madrid fans, since they wear red-and-white striped uniforms that look like the covering of a mattress. Espanyol fans are called pericos, parakeets, I don't know why. Maybe their blue-and-white shirts look like a popular type of pet parakeet often kept in Spain. Valencia fans are ches, because supposedly people from Valencia say "che" when they´re trying to get your attention.

Pointless youth violence has caused a lot of media noise lately. First there were the Barcelona teenagers who burned a homeless woman to death, then the "happy slapping" outbreak with kids filming themselves smacking around random pedestrians, and now another group of teenagers beating up homeless people in Huelva. It didn't take La Vanguardia long to blame it on the Americans, specifically the TV program and movie Jackass. Uh, the point of Jackass is that these people are jackasses who do very stupid things just for the hell of it. You're supposed to laugh at them, not emulate them.

Still, though, the murder rate in Spain is one-third that of the United States, which is a significant difference. Nota bene: the American murder rate is dropping quickly and is half of what it was in the late 80s and early 90s, while the Spanish murder rate is slowly but surely rising. I personally think this has something to do with the Americans' locking up bad guys and keeping them locked up. In Spain it's much too easy to get out of jail, or never to get in jail in the first place.

Currently reading:  The Command of the Ocean, by N.A.M. Rodger, a history of the British Navy from about 1660 to about 1815. Fascinating stuff, though I always have great difficulty with naval vocabulary, since I'm totally unfamiliar with ships and boats. This book has a complete and detailed glossary, and I still can't understand half the words. It doesn't impede me from understanding what's going on in the big picture, though.

What I've learned so far: "Rum, sodomy, and the lash" seems to be a historical myth. There wasn't that much drinking on British ships, while the food and the treatment for sailors were generally better than on merchant ships. Homosexuality was very strongly disapproved of by everyone, officers and sailors alike. The death rate was also low unless the ship went to West Africa or the Caribbean. The outdoors hard work and the comparatively good diet meant that sailors' health was actually quite good unless they were exposed to tropical diseases for which they had no antibodies. Officers were also generally quite careful about the well-being of the sailors, knowing that success in battle--or just not sinking, which happened a lot in the French Navy, which at one period was losing a ship a month--depended on healthy crews.

Currently listening to: A Billie Holiday greatest-hits compilation. Before that it was Robert Earl Keen's live album, and before that Randy Newman's 12 Songs.