You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August, 2008.
But as long as I can still sit on the grass and enjoy sweet, sweet Mexican corn, then it’s still summer, baby!
Choose your weapon!
Yes, I finally finally made it to the Red Hook ball fields in time to scarf down corn and Salvadoran papusas, and wash it down with some hibiscus juice. Best of all, since it’s Labor Day, it was almost like going to the RHBF back before it got covered in the NY Times, Gothamist, Curbed, blah blah blah and overrun with every hipster with a bicycle. Nope – now, everybody was out of town except the true locals and a handful of diehard supporters, so no lines and just pure eating enjoyment. God, I love long weekends in the city…
Thank you, Josh Marshall, for getting me to watch a speech I would have otherwise completely ignored.
What is it about the Democratic presidential candidates, that they only seem to find their soul and grow a pair after running Epic Fail presidential campaigns? First Al Gore, now John Kerry… shit, Gore did so little for me in 2000, I voted for Nader (yes, I know – but before you send letterbombs, please keep in mind that I lived in NYC, where it would have taken mass extinctions for Bush to win). Then, as penance, I actually phonebanked for Kerry in ‘04 – even as I continued to slap my head over the way he somnambulated through his campaign.
So yeah, this is heady and inspiring stuff – I especially like his Senator McCain vs. Candidate McCain riff – but please, no more Inspiring Former Presidential Candidates… please just fucking get it right when it matters, OK, Barack?
this purloined map does a piss-poor job of conveying how deserty and mountainy everything here is...
OK – here’s where things start to get complicated.
Apparently I gotta get up at some ungodly hour so that I can catch a bus that will then take approximately 12h to deliver me over the Andes and across the border to Chile, in the oasis town of San Pedro de Atacama. And they’re not fucking around when they say oasis – the Atacama Desert is notoriously arid and inhospitable. How inhospitable, you ask? Well let’s just say they use it to test Martian fucking landers, to see if they can find superscarce organic molecules cowering in fear somewhere amidst the bazillions of sand particles. MARS, BITCHES!
But you know what? I’m really psyched about this part – I’ve never been to a real desert before. Last time I tried was when I went to a wedding in Texas, and my friends and I bought a bunch of fireworks and kept driving west hoping to find a place where we could set them off without putting shit on fire. In the end we never made it to the desert, and ended up setting them off on the highway, which didn’t end as well as one might expect. That’s a story for another time. But I digress.
Apparently San Pedro is a bit of a tourist mecca, for those who are inclined to things desertish, and with good reason: lots of really cool stuff to be seen in a relatively small radius, including:
- El Tatio Geysers: apparently the largest geyser field in the southern hemisphere
- Salar de Atacama: more salt flats, because you know I can’t get enough of that shit. Apparently these are nigh-on overrun with flamingoes, giving them a bit of an edge over those off-brand salt flats.
- Volcanoes!: yes, apparently plenty of volcanoes ripe for the climbing, once I’ve gotten over my altitude sickness.
And beyond that, there’s just plenty of side rambles to be had… I’ll probably rent a bike for at least one of those days, and go Easy Rider for an afternoon…
So I’ll be high and dry for about five days, then I’m hopping to Santiago for a day – I don’t really have too many expectations about Santiago, except for a high level of air pollution. But I’m keeping an open mind, and it seems silly to skip it entirely when it is the freaking capital… but that’s really just a stopover for the final, most travel-intensive leg of the trip…
From BA to Salta and Jujuy
We shan’t dilly-dally in BA for long, after getting back from Iguazu. Just one night, and then it’s back to the airport so we can head off to Salta, in the northwestern sector of the country – supposedly a very lovely city, surrounded by all manner of natural beauty as well as some of the best opportunities to contract malaria in all of Argentina.
But it won’t all just be about catching exotic diseases while we’re there; in fact, we’ll be renting another car so that we can maximize our independence and really get out there and poke about in the heart of Salta and Jujuy provinces. Some of our potential stops include:
(via Wikipedia)
After completing our rambles in the countryside, it’s back to Salta, where I will part ways with my friends and erstwhile travel companions before continuing off on the solo adventure component of the trip…
Or, a defense of Microsoft.
Most people who know me are aware that I am DEEPLY, um, skeptical of the Apple Cultural Phenomenon. Which is kind of a shame, since I live in Brooklyn – probably the biggest hive of MacBook scum and villainy outside of the Bay Area. Not that I don’t love my iPod, and not that I don’t have Much Respect for the iPhone (even if I have zero desire to own one)… just that I get really tired of the smugness and proselytizing and evangelizing on behalf of an overpriced and overdesigned piece of hardware that – for my needs – isn’t particularly better than the $550 netbook I just picked up.
On the other hand, I’ve no great love for MS. Sure, XP has served me well – but part of my desperate, clinging loyalty comes from the urge to avoid Vista at all costs. I use Office, but because I have to – and I’m fairly confident that computers in Hell run nothing but Access and Powerpoint (on a Win98 or ME machine, natch).
On the other hand, the MS R&D team turns out the occasional wonder that makes me want to look at the Apple people and say, “This – this – is innovation.” One example is the World Wide Telescope project, which I first saw presented in the TED video series:
The other really fucking cool thing I saw from those lovely lads and ladies – also, not coincidentally, presented at TED – was this program:
It totally captures my fascination with digital photography, insanely cool image manipulation, and groovy 3D shit. So I was totally pleased to find that Photosynth is now open to the world at large.
I’m generally not an early adopter, but I did rush over and install this and create an account, just so I could give it a whirl. Of course, those who had gone before me had already made some valiant efforts – the Taj Mahal, the canals of Venice, and so on. But how pedestrian, I thought. Technology of this caliber deserves a subject matter more enobling, something more magical – something timeless. Like Gowanus, for example.
The system definitely has its limitations – I feel like it made some odd choices in the way it arranged the various panels, and the navigation is a bit confusing at first – but it’s still really damn cool. My first few attempts were a bit on the remedial side, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it – hopefully I’ll have the chance to play around with this a bit more before I go…
Good show, gang – it’s almost enough to make me forgive you for Clippy.
The first leg of the trip...
So to get thing started right, I’m going with the extremes – a week and change in Buenos Aires, broken up by a three day trip to Misiones province for a visit to Iguazu Falls and the various Missions. Since I’m spending this part of the trip with two of my boys, we’re gonna be traveling in style for this part – kicking it in our luxurious apartment in the heart of San Telmo. Supposedly, it looks like this:
Yes, my friends, this is how we roll.
Hopefully the picture is actually representative. As a show of good faith, I’ll use this opportunity to plug the good people at ByT Argentina, who made this all possible. w00t!
So that’s where we’ll be through the first weekend.
Sadly, we won’t be making full use of the luxurious capabilities of this battlestation, as there’s just too much to see – so once we’re done living it up for a little while, the apartment’s mainly gonna be a storage locker for our stuff, ’cause it’s off to Iguazu Falls – our first internal flight.
The Falls are supposedly among the most badass natural wonders of South America, and teeming with cool shit like coatis and howler monkeys. Our accommodations are gonna be a bit more downscale here – it’s hostel time, yo – but that’s just so that we can save our money for all the gas we’ll be pouring into our luxurious Dodge Neon or whatever economy-size shitbox we’ve ended up renting. Supposedly, we don’t need no 4×4 action to get to the Falls – or to make our way to the Missions, which is the other Big Tourist Attraction ’round these parts:
San Ignacio Mini, the biggest and baddest mission 'round these parts
After all that’s done, it’s back to BA for another night, as we prepare for our next leg…
Since it’s always incredibly amusing to see how unrealistic my own imagination and expectations can be, I thought it might be fun to throw together a quick series of posts that will outline briefly what my itinerary for my upcoming trip is going to be. Then, when I come back in late October with my clothing in tatters and a car door handcuffed to my wrist, muttering random curse words in Quechua, we can all sit together and laugh, laugh, laugh about my benighted expectations of how smoothly everything was gonna go with my Really Awesome Plan.
Since v2.5 (roughly) of R.A.P. involves at least eight airplane trips and three car rentals, we can already see the potential for chaos to break through (as somewhere, Jeff Goldblum chuckles darkly). So mark ye the words in the posts ahead, that my chronicle of folly may serve to steer ye true…
That’s right. My sweet-ass ASUS 1000H has arrived, and I’m already feeling that unnatural love that can only exist between a piece of electronics and a really geeky guy. At 3 lbs, this little fella (who shall henceforth be known as ‘El Chico’) may seem like a lightweight compared to big brother Moses (at right), but rest assured he’s every bit as fast and powerful and hungry for a fight.
And more importantly, he’ll stow oh-so-conveniently in my backpack, making him the perfect travel companion. Ole!
…that visits to the travel clinic – and the vaccinations obtained therein – are generally not covered by standard health insurance? And by “standard” health insurance, I mean my health insurance. What. The. Fuck.
And did you also know that most of these vaccines fall under the umbra of what people of my financial standing would generally call “pretty goddamned expensive”? As in, up to a few hundred bucks a pop? I suppose that technically such luxuries as typhoid and yellow fever prevention could be considered “elective”; I mean, it’s not like I’ve caught them yet, right?
On the other hand, one might think that Oxford or BCBS shelling out a few hundred bucks toward my vaccinations might be a better investment than them banking that I won’t just simply go without, and then return to the US in the full flush of yellow-feverish glory and expect them to fund my protracted stay in the American hospital system. Dicks.
So the story so far. I’m leaving the full-time world behind as of the first week of September: the week of Labor Day, fittingly. Why? The short version is: no matter how good/bad, interesting/dull, important/mundane the job I’ve performed at any given moment in my working career, I’ve never felt cut out for the (any) office.
In exchange, I’m banking that my humble writing skills, scattershot work experiences, keen awareness of the scientific zeitgeist, and sheer reserves of gumption and elbow-grease will be enough to sustain me as a full-time freelance writer and editor. WIll it work? Check back in four months to find out.
In the meantime, I’m celebrating by taking my first non-work, non-wedding trip in several years, an extended vacation to South America that will consist of several weeks of rambling through Argentina and Chile, beginning in Buenos Aires and making my way through jungles, along canyons, across deserts and over glaciers before returning me (hopefully) safely back to Santiago. And that’s how this blog was born – I’m finally doing something I consider interesting enough to write about.
Where am I now? Enmeshed in the very least fun part of the process. I’ve planned my itinerary and mapped my route, and given notice at my job, so now it’s all the trivial boooolsheet… making and confirming various reservations, getting vaccinations, buying essential supplies, and of course, getting my house in order at my old job and making the initial preparations for having work waiting for me when I return.
On the plus side, in the past two weeks, I have:
* successfully navigated the Herculean trial that is purchasing tickets via LAN
* reserved the three cars and six internal flights I’ll be needing to make my way around in-country
* received the sweet-ass mini-laptop that I’m writing this blogpost from, and which will become my erstwhile companion in the many weeks ahead. w00t!
So bear with me through the dull shit and I’ll try to post as much good stuff as I can in the meantime.
