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Don't forget that, ever. 20060929 01 The Washington Post is running an interesting article about Cuba and some of its woes.
Supporters of Castro blame the U.S. trade embargo for the transportation woes.... I suspect both of these are true. But how to find out? Very little written about Cuba isn't heavily slanted towards one point of view or another. 20060928 02 The US government aided the Taliban in 2001. For bad reasons, of course. Nothing surprising in the message, really. One word in particular is interesting, however: "homeland". I thought that was a propaganda term brought into use by the Bush administration more recently than 20010522. 20060928 01 Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.
Good for them, but I was saying that would happen since before
the invasion of Iraq happened. Believe it or not, I know some people
who actually - at the time - thought invading Iraq was a good idea.
Which is sort of a weird believe it or not, because the vast majority
of America was supposedly in favor of Which makes me wonder whether I should have broadened my horizons by severely narrowing my horizons by spending time in middle America. 20060927 01 After some pestering, and some help, it looks like I'll have an RSS feed going soon. This post is partly to test the impending buzzwordiness, or something. I might do this via feedburner. But a big part of me says that that would be a mistake. I don't think I've ever seen such an annoyingly cool kids web 2.0 vapid nonsense half inclusionary two thirds exclusionary blah blah blah site, ever. All for a site that republishes rss feeds, ffs! I might go with them anyway, as a path of least resistance. 20060926 04 I am so old skool.
<omar> you dont even CLOSE YOUR 'p' tags I need to update my not a blogging system, I guess. 20060926 03 Last weekend, Alma and I went to Monterrey. We were lucky, because it rained on Sunday, which killed the heat, which made the climate much more bearable. We flew with Interjet. Given a limited sample size of one round trip, it seems like a decent airline. They fly out of Toluca, not Mexico City, and have a relatively limited set of destinations. But their prices are - for the time that we booked our tickets - the best in Mexico. The planes are comfortable, for planes. It's a lot easier to get to Mexico City airport, but getting to Toluca isn't too bad; there's a regular bus service from Observatorio to Toluca airport ($80 MXN per person per direction), which takes about an hour if traffic is ok. Recommended. Monterrey is noticeably wealthier than Mexico City (or, for that matter, anywhere else I've visited in Mexico, with the possible exception of Guadalajara, where I haven't spent enough time to really be sure). Being attractive to foreign investors will do that. I'm told electricity service doesn't randomly stop all the time, even in wealthy areas. And, being close to the US border, shitty transportation infrastructure is less of a problem (although I think it's better anyway), because decent roads and rail are only two hours away. I can't see myself wanting to live there due to the heat and the car centricity, but in many ways it does seem more attractive than Mexico City. I don't think that central and southern Mexico will ever catch up to the north without a sea change. People here prefer to be poor. 20060926 02 I have a proposal. I own a wooden baseball bat. I propose to hit you on the head with it, minimum of once per day. (Sometimes upwards of a dozen times, but always at least once, without fail.) Usually not very hard or anything, but it will not feel good. It probably won't damage your brain, but you'll often have a sore cranium and neck. I won't tell you when I'm going to whack you, and sometimes I might miss, so it would be a good idea to spend your days, except when in a private, safe place that you know well (but not when entering your shower!), hunched over. You can obtain temporary, if inconsistent and unreliable, reprieve from the head whacking by doing this. It'll be uncomfortable to do this. It will hurt your neck and back. After a big meal, it will also be uncomfortable in the stomach. But it will probably be worth it to avoid being whacked on the head, which hurts even more. You also would be advised to never wear a hat, because I might hit you from above, and the visor or rim would block your view of the incoming baseball bat. But rest assured that, despite what precautions you take, you will be hit, and it will hurt. Oh, and when I hit you on the head with my baseball bat, there's a good chance that your friends will laugh at you. What say you? 20060926 01 Dear Lazyweb, I'm planning a trip from Mexico City to Boston in late November. If I bought today, I could get tickets for $293 with Northwest. Tickets with American Airlines, with whom I have a frequent flier account and a fair amount of miles racked up, would cost $364. I can someday use those miles to upgrade to first class or fly cheaply. The difference in cost is $71. Are the miles I would get from flying with AA worth $71? How can you figure this out? The details don't matter a lot. What matters is how I can work out the dollar value of frequent flier miles, especially without navigating AA's hopelessly shitty website. The question comes up every time I plan a trip that I will pay for (as opposed to traveling for work, where my employer pays). Update: my brother pointed me to this article which clears things up: I should almost certainly buy the cheaper tickets. Although the duration of the trip probably varies, and I'm willing to pay a bit more for a shorter flight, so that's a consideration too.3 20060919 Arr. Talk Like a Pirate Day gets old pretty fast. For next year, I suggest Talk Like a Pirate Hour. 20060917 I have started using the slowest website in the world. (It isn't really the slowest anymore, although I think for a while it used to be. It is kind of annoying to browse other people's photos on flickr, however.) 20060915 02
I've complained before about bookstores in Mexico. I'll try not to
complain today. I read Spanish a lot faster than I once did, I
guess. I also have a crapload of unread books in English, so I'm not
so desperate to buy new ones. Although that doesn't seem to stop me
from going a bit crazy whenever I'm in a bookstore north of the Rio
Some bookstores, such as El Sotano on Miguel Angel de Quevedo, organize books by publisher. This has a few interesting effects.
I think the second two outweigh the first in importance if not in length describing them. One new bookstore has a surprisingly large selection of books in French. Supposedly, a comparable selection of books in English and in German and/or Italian (reports vary) is coming. If true, it'll be awesome. Already, the place gives Gandhi a run for its money; when polyglottic, it will 0wn.
[0]
Editorial Diana's editions of García Márquez' books are
unusual. They're printed on nice paper, in big, attractive fonts, and
are generally a pleasure to read. However, the covers of the books
often contain no information other than the author and the title, and
are butt ugly to boot! Published by a different publisher,
the back of a GGM book might look like this: "Esta obra - la más
famosa de García Márquez - cuenta la historia de una
familia durante un siglo de isolación. 'la neta del pinche
planeta güey !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' - El Naco
Times". Published by Diana, the back cover of a GGM book looks like
this: "".
I guess that what happens when an author's reputation precedes him to
to such a large extent, but it's still strange. I've never seen it
with any other publisher / author combination.
20060915 01 There's this article in The Atlantic with the following paragraph:
There are two things wrong with this conclusion. First, even if a gap between America and Europe exists, it is not the United States that is idiosyncratic. After all, the rest of the world?Asia, Africa, the Middle East?is not exactly filled with hard-core atheists. If one is to talk about exceptionalism, it applies to Europe, not the United States. No. The United States is the exception, because it's the only modern, industrialized country that is full of crazies who believe in god. They don't in Europe. They don't in Japan. They don't in the Antipodes. Also:
Consider Iceland. To judge by rates of churchgoing, Iceland is the most secular country on earth, with a pathetic two percent weekly attendance. They should change "pathetic" to "outstanding, but still with room for improvement". The rest of the article is wishy washy (and often insulting) garbage. It is not worth picking it apart sentence by sentence. As usual, The Atlantic does not fail to irritate me. As I once wrote about it before, it feels like it's written for soccer moms in wealthy suburbs who vaguely remember that they were once sophisticated, interesting, and perhaps even liberal, and would like to recapture that somehow, without giving up their Expeditions. 20060914 <omar> what do you think of jon stewart? Funny he asks that, because it's a question I've been thinking about lately. I think he's funny, but I don't think he's that funny. (Although I think Colbert just might be that funny. But I only watch his - and Stewart's - stuff on youtube, so maybe I just see the good stuff.) As I understand it, Stewart wasn't especially well known or popular until four or five years ago - certainly he hadn't achieved the fame he has today. That's not a coincidence. Basically, I think he made his name by being one of the first people on mainstream American television to say that the Bush administration is batshit fucking insane. Remember that, for a long time, the Bush administration got the freest of passes from the American media. Stewart was in the right place in the right time and absolutely made the most of it. Good for him, and good for everybody else, because somebody had to start saying the things he says. 20060913 Alma and I made a flash trip to Puebla on Sunday, to eat mole and chiles en nogada and tacos árabes. Delicious. When we were wandering around the Zócalo, I was reminded of an exhibition I saw in a museum there, all about banned books. And I thought, "hey, wouldn't it be cool to make a web site listing as many formerly and currently banned books as possible?" It would be cool. But Google beat me to it. Doh. 20060909 Más sobre los acentos. Imaginemos que quisieramos escribir una palabra hipotética que se pronuncie así: NA u fra go, con na con el emfásis. No hay un diptongo. La podemos escribir en dos maneras: náhufrago, o la manera que yo sugeriría, náüfrago. ¿Cuál es lo más elegante? 20060908 El mes pasado, escribí sobre algunos cambios que haría si fuera la RAE. Como sospechaba que iba a pasar, mucha gente no me entendió. (Para clarificar: Sé qué son los usos actuales de los acentos. Sé que no son ambiguous ni es difícil aprenderlos.) Por ejemplo. Escribí que el acento se usa para A, B y C, pero quiero que se use sólo para A, y que usemos otras cosas para B y C. Una profesora de español respondió que el acento se usa para A, B y C. No hay mierda, Sherlock. Triste. 20060907 You can buy things that the government steals from you. If the government weren't crooks, they would at least tag your stuff so you could pick it up later. That's a big if. Sort of like this one: if. I wrote to the Globe about it. 20060906 Mexicana updated their webpage recently. It's ajaxey now, but they chose to outsource it to some real incompetent developers. It's obvious that it was only tested in IE on Windows. 20060904 I was working on an entry whose short version was this: "With today's communication's technology, why can't I watch television from anywhere in the world? Is it because the people who decide these things for me don't know that there's an audience? Or are insane 'intellectual property' laws holding things back?" For some reason, it was very hard to write. I finished it, but it felt all wrong, much like how that inbred lady who worked at the financial aid office at RPI and whose face was more to the side of her head than in front of it and would ask people for their "social" as though we spent all our days asking students their "socials" and therefore knew what it meant - oops, no, we didn't - and basically looked like a living, breathing work of Picasso looked all wrong. Asymmetrical, and not in a good way. 20060901 Nuts grabbing, ball hogging, and bad shooting does not win basketball games. What a surprise.
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