Barca - Madrid death match

Last night was a big night here in Spain: the latest Barcelona-Madrid soccer throwdown. I love these nights - it's all anyone talks about all day, and the whole country practically shuts down. Waiters sit down at their customer's tables for a few minutes to catch some action here and there, and good luck doing anything except plopping down at a pub and watching the game. The bars are humming with activity, and nervous fans smoke, drink and cuss their way through the 90-minute playing time.

Sports writer Bill Simmons said it this way: "Here's how I would describe Barca-Madrid: Imagine if the Mets and Yankees were the two best baseball teams by far, if they measured themselves only by each other, if they played six to eight series every year, and if they had many of the best players in the world. Then imagine if baseball was the only sport that anyone cared about in America, imagine if they were throwing at each other almost every game, and imagine if the players hated each other as much as the fans did. That's Barca-Madrid. And on top of that, Barca plays soccer at a higher level than any American sports team does anything AND it has the best athlete in the world (Messi, who's the closest thing to a sports genius that we've had since Michael Jordan)."

The Mister and I are Barca fans, and they won last night. Today at school the kids were wild, obsessed, breaking down every play. My fifth grade class was learning the grammatical construction "getting + comparative adjective" as in "it's getting darker" or "she's getting taller." I asked them to make up their own sentences.

One disgruntled little Madrid fan raised his hand.

"Barca is getting more annoying."