Specialized amusement

I came across something recently that amused me, and I imagine that a small number of the people I know will also find it amusing. I have to apologize in advance to the majority who won't know what in the hell it's about, but it would take way too long to explain, and wouldn't be funny any more.

The source is one of a collection of short stories by Joan Wickersham called The News From Spain. There are seven stories in all, and apart from all being sort-of love stories, the one thing they have in common is that the title phrase (which is also the title of each story) appears somewhere in each one, mostly in passing.

The sixth story is a kind of updating of two of the Mozart/da Ponte operas, in which two women named Rosina and Elvira become friends years after events analogous to those of Figaro and Don Giovanni respectively. In one scene, Elvira is recounting to Rosina a conversation she had years before with a friend of "Johnny"'s who took her out for a beer in order to tell her about all the other women Johnny had slept with:

"He gave me numbers," Elvira told Rosina years later... "Actual numbers. They kept a list, he and Johnny. This many women in Turkey, this many in Germany. It was statistical. But crazy too. The numbers were delusional. A hundred in France, six hundred and forty in Italy. 'Stop,' I said. 'This is too much for me.' And you know what he said?"

"What?"

"He said, 'And you haven't even heard the news from Spain yet.'"