Very Cold Today

It's FUCKING FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZING today.

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Blog.

I am now 30. I discovered that hiding your birthday on facebook renders you invisible to the world. For my birthday I got technology, and a yoga mat. I could be like an IBM commercial where I connect with monks in Nepal on top of a mountain. I'm reading Los Detectives Salvajes. Por Roberto Bolaño. The last novel that I can positively remember reading is Memorias de mis Putas Tristes, which I read in 2005. Anyway, Bolaño is Pimp Slice. Makes me want to write another novel. Makes it fun to hang out in cafes and it has rekindled my appreciation of cappuccinos. The comparison of his style with Rayuela is fairly apt, though there are lots of differences. I like the fact that he started writing for real in his 40s. I used to think that I had to write my famous stuff by 25. I was thinking of Keats and Camus. And I sort of did that, but since then I've changed my mind and I think I'll write when I'm older, assuming I'm still alive. I will also write philosophy and I will be a grouchy professor as well. This may be after I have saved the world from robots, or given up on doing so. Being back in Cambridge has made me think about college. I didn't like college a whole lot. I don't like institutions. That simple fact unites the entrepreneurship, the writing, in my mind. And it explains why you might like being a professor, provided that you can bypass the fuedal system. M. tells me that I was an explorer in a past life. This would certainly explain my interest in Indiana Jones as a child, not to mention my peregrinations around the world and into the jungle. It's a fundamentally inconsistent calling, born of restlessness and samsara. My parents revealed to me a couple years ago that they had thought, when I was graduating high school, that I was going to be an actor. I was surprised. I never thought I had what it took to cut it as an actor. As soon as they told me I sort of wished I had been an actor. I would certainly in that case have aspired to write my own movie and then star in it, like Rocky. I'd like to make a movie about a tai chi master who is over the hill. He's middle aged and constantly fighting much bigger, stronger, younger guys. The key thing about being older is that your body takes so long to bounce back from little (or big) injuries. You can function and sort of repair yourself, but it gets increasingly harder to feel at the top of your game. But you have lots of character. That's what I liked about Dr. Jones.

Body Odor

My gf has been making me use natural deodorant. Instead of being made with aluminum it uses bark or something.

Pro: doesn't have metal in it.
Con: doesn't work.

So now I have B.O. every day. I'm more ok with it than I would have guessed. I don't think people can smell it generally out in the world. Makes me feel more manly. Also makes me feel like I have this new barometer of my hormonal status (a natural hormonometer).

Wilderness

Went to northern New Hampshire, almost Maine, with M. over the weekend.

We hiked many miles with full pack, and slept two nights in the forest...in pouring rain, and night temperatures that must have approached freezing. One campsite was improvised due to vanishing light.

We saw a huge-ass bear, and a moose down by the lake where we camped the second night.

It was a prototypical camping experience - the worst experience you'll ever do again. :-)

Breakfast

I can't believe I have a girlfriend who gives me stuff like homemade shortbread! mmm. Plus assam tea, Pandora radio, a sense of organization and centeredness, fast internet connection, and I've got a perfect breakfast.

Confession

I like Enya.

I just hope that my love for NIN is offsetting.

Three Pumpkin Ale Reviews

I'll continue briefly in the seasonal beer reviewing tradition from my previous post.

Executive summary: I have recently extensively tasted three pumpkin ales. Dogfish Head was the best in class, but if you're leaning toward this area (fruity, sweetish but not a weiss bier) I would vastly recommend something else, like Dogfish Head Raison d'Etre or Magic Hat Aprihop.


Post Road Pumpkin Ale
Grade: C

This comes from the Brooklyn Brewing Co so I was excited, but I found it rather mediocre. Right off the bat it had an empty, carbonated taste, sort of like a Miller Lite. Not much pumpkin taste.


Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale
Grade: C/C+

This beer may have tasted better, but I was shocked at how similar it tasted to me. Maybe I'm down on pumpkin ales. But that suggestion doesn't really hold water for me. I was much more skeptical when I tasted Aprihop or Raison d'Etre, and those beers had me at hello. This one was sucko at hello.


Dogfish Head Punkin Ale
Grade: C+

I so wanted this beer to be good. I love Dogfish Head, but this is hands down the worst dogfish head I've tried. It's better than the others. But it's also the same price and comes in a four pack (with zero rationale vis a vis beer traditions, e.g., it's not an optimator style beer or an English longneck). It's just not that great.

Summary: Try These Beers Instead

If you want a seasonal-ish beer, get a Magic Hat Aprihop (A-), or a Dogfish Head Raison d'Etre (A-). Ok, maybe they aren't seasonal. I'm not strong on the seasonal patterns of apricots and raisins. You're also better off with a weiss beer, including Hoegaarden or Blue Moon (both B+). The pumpkin beers weren't a total waste of time, but they're not exactly worth it either.

sam adams: octoberfest

I spotted Sam Adams in the licky store today and it was the first sighting I've had this seen - it must have come out some time in the last week or so. Fortunately I had on hand a burrito from anna's taqueria so I decided to have a tasting.

Seasonal beers are great. My gf always complains that our eating has lost its seasonal rhythm. As she explains, we import foods from across the globe to eat them when we want, even when they are wildly out of season where we live or even on our continent... with the effect that we lose touch with a vital aspect of mother earth, which is seasonality (not to mention eating stuff that grows within 100 miles of you).

But beer comes to the rescue, as it so often does. Brewing companies create seasonal beers and then market them according to strict seasonal rules -- whereby you can get octoberfest only in autumn, summer ales only in summer, etc. -- and thereby imposing an artificial naturalness on us that we have otherwise artificially deprived ourselves of from mother earth.

My favorite seasonal beer of the summer was Totally Naked by New Glarus up in WI. That beer is seasonal. Last fall my dad went to buy some and was told "they're not making it anymore." We thought it had been discontinued until the next summer came. :-) Then like the Lady of the Lake, it arose from the waters in beautiful, radiant, nakedness.

I'm not so huge as many people about Sam Adams octoberfest (in my mind it may be the best known seasonal beer in America) but this beer it tough not to like. It tastes good. I spent a year in Germany. I even went to Oktoberfest. Here's proof:

possibly the only photo in existence of me with a beard

I can't say that this beer strikes me as unusually German. It's not a helles, weiss, dunkel weiss, not even a pils. But I taste it and the word "roasted" comes into my head. Meanwhile, it is very easy to drink even for poor souls whose palettes don't prefer that kind of thing. A rare combination that warrants recognition of the coming of fall... and the end of the roasting heat of summer.

the war against crack

i drove down to philly last weekend. i experience mild narcolepsy and on the road i was fighting it. my mint tea didn't seem to be helping.

a couple months ago i quit coffee. i had only been drinking one or two cups a day, but when i quit i noticed that i was sleeping way better, deeper, waking up without that feeling of grogginess that i had grown accustomed to as normal. (unless i had been drinking and then sometimes i felt a bit like ass.) so i was staying off coffee willingly despite the fact that i fucking LOVE coffee.

but on the way down to philly, i was a bit drowsy and i decided that i was not interested in dying. so i got a cup of coffee. it sorta helped. but something about the warmth of coffee soothes me and can make me drowsy (it was for this reason that before i tried quitting coffee i had not believed that it had any cracklike qualities.)

so i got a red bull, which from now on i am going to refer to as CRACK BULL. i've had red bull before, but always with vodka, amid smoke and lights and often already drunk and in a mind-altered kind of mood. this was the first time when i was ever kind of going along in life in a normal way and i cracked open a can of the good 'ole crack bull and drank it. the fact that wired had a one-pager on its cracky ingredients had captured my interest a bit.

boy, that stuff is crack like i didn't know. i was zooming in and out of traffic, pumping up the trance music and confusing the hell out of my shitty automatic transmission in my low-performance geekmobile.

today i made a pot of assam tea and forgot to take the tea leaves out, then i drank pretty much the whole pot. that stuff is pretty cracky too man! i worked for like 6 or 7 hours without eating anything. i had a sort of epiphany when i was jumping around on my mattress and blasting some electronica during a little break: who needs money, when crack bull and cracky assam tea are so cheap? we'll see how i sleep tonight relative to my rich colleagues: that is the acid test.

Getting Grounded

i have found "the cafe" near my new place. this is the sign of having settled into a place (and also that it's a good place). hence i am currently writing from True Grounds, 717 Broadway, Somerville MA in Ball Square.



it takes me about 15 seconds to size up a cafe, and i'm happy to discover that this one is of superlative quality. it's good, real good.

it has old chairs and sofas, and the personality of a place other than a chain. it has good beverages. it has nice people working there, and maybe interesting patrons. it has free wifi, without any bullshit about codes or any such. (although not old school, wifi is a must these days. seriously, could you start a self-respecting cafe and not have wifi? how the fuck could i blog about it if there were no wifi here?)

there is food. i used to think that food was not essential. but i have come to believe that it's a great thing, for multiple reasons. having food lets me eat here and hence work uninterruptedly. also, if i'm going to buy a sandwich somewhere, it's good that it should be here, because then i feel ok about staying to work longer.

areas for improvement: 7am to 9pm is too short on both ends. closing at 7pm on friday is a huge what the fuck.

we're not too far from my first love in a cafe, which was the 1369 cafe in inman square. that joint will always have a place in my heart, though it was a bit small. in arlington, va, there was common grounds on wilson ave, which brought a soul to a fairly soul-less town. chicago had some contenders, but no really great ones. san francisco had lots of cafes that were excellent by every objective standard but had the wrong vibe (like pretty much everything there, to someone from philly).

it's interesting to be back here. when i visited during the years between leaving in 01 and now, i felt alienated by the city, like it was no longer home to me in any sense. but now i feel like it's about as homey is pretty much any place is to me (the presence of other people dear to me being held equal), which maybe is not all that homey but fine.

Panama 2005, Part 2: Isla Tigre

we're back in panama.

Last time I started us off on the Panama journey back in 2005. Here's a refresher on some of the salient points:

Timeline to Date
June 18 - arrived in Panama City
June 19 - Walking tour in Panama City. Casco Viejo (the old town), Bella Vista, shopping, excellent dinner in Casco Viejo.
June 20 - flight to Playon Chico, the crappy little island. Negotiations with ANAM. tour of community. hunting mangos. swimming on island and m's ass stung. crab dinner. hunting little crabs. camping in room with rat-dog climbing on pipe.
June 21 - black tongues and despair. negotiation for motor boat to get the hell out of dodge. boat ride to isla tigre. stopping on tierra firma community and meeting god bless new york old dude. the new boat and the intense boat ride on open sea. arriving at isla tigre. swim. dinner. discussion of robot future. efigenia and her food.

Isla Tigre Continued
Now, it's June 22. We're in Isla Tigre. Caribbean coast of Panama, native peoples named Kuna, first week of trip.



We're at the top left thumbtack at this point. I have tried to make an interactive map of the trip. Right now there is nothing there but I'm going to add thumbtacks as I go.

As you may recall, the primary virtue of Isla Tigre was that it was not Playon Chico. There was some cinderblock, but it was a bit more like the cool kind of native island that we were hoping for - thatched huts and stuff.


palm trees and soccer goal on the tiny island of isla tigre


hello, dinner

the bitchinest thing about this photo is the flipflops. those were I believe purchased in guatemala years earlier for one dollar. they are stylin. I think I lost them because now I have u.s. flag flipflops. I'm not sure where that crustacean came from. I think efigenia brought it to our tent for approval as something we were going to eat later. she consulted us carefully on meals and planned them hours in advance.

After an emotional talk, some time on the beach and slothlike in the hammock, we went for a walk in community and buying molas.

Molas are woven decorative items that look a little bit like placemats. I talked about this a bit in the last post. I bought the stupidest one, which involved Santa on a horse. 95% of them featured animals, a couple had abstract geometric shapes, and there was this one with the Santa. I felt obliged to get the Santa because it reminded me of 1997 when I was in Guatemala in a small sweltering town and came across a statue of Santa in a town square. I can't find the mola anymore. M. must have stolen it or hid it.

the weirdest thing about the molas was that everyone appeared to make them, with no one to buy them. there were two other people visiting the island when we were there (I think they were panamanian or columbian but we didn't talk) and we didn't get a feeling that people really went there. it wasn't as unvisited as playon chico but it seemed close. that was part of the reason we bought our molas i think, and with melissa's purchase of a hammock and woven handbag, we definitely contributed some moola in return for the molas.


Clothes drying on a thatched roof in Isla Tigre


wild pig jaws hanging outside a home in isla tigre

Only through inquiry did we learn that these suckers were pig jaws. We figured out gradually that one of the ways to stand out socially as a Panamanian native was to be a slayer of pigs. For tribes that had subsistence agriculture, the occasional pig was a feast. There were tigers, but they were very rare and who wants to eat a tiger. Anyway, whoever lived in this house must have been Captain Bad Arse.

The Pipe Dance
The thing to do when you are a native tribe and you have visitors is give them a dance with some music. As dusk approached, we were led into town to a small square, where we sat in front of something like a bar, in a large ring of people, and watched the men of the villages dance their asses off while playing instruments that were sort of like pan flutes. it was really cool. M. wanted to photograph it but I wouldn't let her because I thought it wasn't appropriate. We later decided I was wrong, which is too bad since we didn't get any pictures. But I have some great pictures of another tribal dance coming later in the trip.

That dance was the first really cool thing we saw on our trip. But we still left the San Blas region a bit shakey on how our trip was going. I was pretty happy, but M. was miserable and vocal about it.

So instead of sticking around the Caribbean coast we took a little plane back to Panama City the next day. We had to take a boat to a nearby island, Corazon de Jesus, that morning. Unfortunately, in our relaxation the day before, we had neglected to negotiate the price for this extremely short boat ride. The boat dude took us over to the planes (VERY LATE) and then gave us our price on arriving (VERY BIG). I was ready to kill him, but eager to make the plane, just paid him.

Review of Hoseries
This great hosiery encouraged me to begin compiling a List of Hoseries, a record of when we got hosed the worst. So far it read:

1. Boat ride to Corazon de Jesus to catch plane. $15, should have been $2.

2. Lunch for 4 (including our guide and Mundo) on Playon Chico during all-expenses-included town visit. $8, should have been $0.

3. Price of room at the ANAM building in Playon Chico. $30 for two, should have been $10 for two.

Ranking the hoseries was a difficult task. The boat ride was a petty, traditional, but perfectly executed hose job. The ANAM lodging price was kind of a boring one, because we were negotiating with Mahone from a weak position and we weren't sure if we were even going to be able to stay on the island (we should have known it was just about the dinero baby).

The second hose job, in more ways than one, was really a stroke of genius of a hose job. Looking back, Mahone looked like the shrewdest kind of lex luther mastermind of a hoser. You could almost argue that he had hosed us so bad that we had gotten our money's worth, because he had given us a great lesson in how to hose the crap out of someone. If he had sat down with us and informed us that I was to pay for lunch for m. and myself, I would have objected, noting that it was an all-expenses paid visit to town. But no, he had us pay for lunch for ourselves AND FOR HIM... but no, also for his RANDOM FRIEND WHO WAS JUST SITTING THERE. As a further distraction, he asked more for lunch than was appropriate ($4 would have been more like it). Ah, what a bastard. Looking back I still can't figure out how I felt about him and Mundo, who were likeable in so many ways.


bye, thanks for having us
if we stay any longer my girlfriend may try to swim away

Was the Jungle Trip in Jeopardy?

We got back on a tiny plane, somehow took off, and we were headed back towards Panama City.

The status of the trip was precarious. M. had her ass stung, had eaten very poorly (including a black tongue), had slept poorly (think: dog-sized rat), and had not appreciated life in a cinderblock community at Playon Chico. She ventured to say that she was not having very much fun.

I was concerned. Our first leg of the trip was supposed to be a warm-up for the most intense part yet to come, our journey into the jungle of Darien. I would be damned if the jungle trip was aborted. Also, I wanted constant recognition along the way that this was the coolest trip ever and M.'s comments were getting in the way of that.

We needed to recuperate and build up M.'s morale before doing the jungle trip. Admittedly, I was not averse to a little break myself. But the problem was that M. did not like Panama City, which was where we were headed to recuperate. For some reason, the idea of relaxing for a couple of days in a dangerous slum did not appeal to her.

The solution I had in mind was a two-pronged attack. First, we would go to El Valle. El Valle was a frequent weekend destination of Panama City's wealthy. It was supposed to be a lush area with great hikes and horseback riding, and good restaurants. I would take M. there and bribe her into submission, to the extent my non-budget allowed it.

Second, we would return to Panama City and take a boat south to Isla Tortuga, a former pirate stronghold.

If anything could appease M. and bring her back to spirits, I thought, it would be a vacation destination, food, horses, and pirates.

To find out what actually happened, stay tuned for the next episode of Panama 2005: the Greatest Fucking Trip Ever.


next time: a horse adventure, "camping", and a pirate island

my ultimate dream in the universe has come true

before I was a tea aficionado, a wine connoisseur, even a coffee drinker, I was a beer guy. shortly after turning 21, nadia and forrest took me to Cambridge Commons in Cambridge MA, where I imbibed my first draught beer, which happened to be a Newcastle.

cambridge is a great place to drink beer. there are many pubs, and it is common to find 10 or 20 brews on tap at an establishment. unlike any other city I've experienced outside the U.K., you can walk into a random pub and, if it has any air of authenticity, you can expect a properly poured Guinness. there are many pubs, and many of them are located near each other, making for the best bar crawls on earth.

when I took a year off from college, I supplemented my laboratory job income by walking as a bouncer at the Thirsty Scholar (pronounced "Tersty Scholar").



I spent many an idle moment lying on my futon bed in my un-air-conditioned apartment pondering my appreciation of Guinness. (Guinness and Sierra Nevada are my long-standing faves.) and frequently, a davinci-like sketch of a brilliant invention occurred to me: imagined a draught tap in the wall next to me, over my bed, from which I could pour myself a cool heady guinness.

this vision, my ultimate dream in the universe, has come to pass. for me, it is confirmation that all the major problems of humanity will be smacked down by the march of technological progress, at costs accessible to the common man or humanoid robot. it is not quite a tap in the wall over the bed. but it is a good substitute in the short term.

Sup

No one reads this blog. Which is cool. If you think you can phase me just by that fact, consider that I spent five years writing a novel and then put it in my filing cabinet. No one has been breaking into that filing cabinet. Because no one cares! including me. except your momma.

This post has started off so excellent that I don't know where to head from here. Perhaps a unique piece of memorabilia from Mr Bungle will do?



What you are viewing is a photo of hefetz, the drummer. maffu, correct me if i'm wrong. anyway, it's from approximately 1995. i wrote them a letter and promised to pen an essay on the freudian significance of their song "berenice" if they wrote back. they did, and I didn't write that article. that would have made me an asshole, except they were a cool band and I was a highschool kid, so I think they forgave me. anyway, what I was going to write was inspired by the fact that I read several books by freud in high school.

freud had a theory, developed like all of his dream interpretation theories based anecdotally on interviews with patients, that the loss of teeth in a dream reflected one's own guilt about masturbation. sorry to drop the m word on you so late in this post I probably should have disclaimed it in the title. anyway, if I remember correctly from ten years ago he also had some campbell style theories about aboriginal punishment of masturbation by tooth removal or some such nonsensical but enticing factoidal whatever. in my own anecdotal experience (equally anecdotal, but standing on the SHOULDERS OF GIANTS) i have surmised that his theory doesn't make too much sense because the loss of a tooth is supposed to signify the loss of a wang, but women also have this dream element frequently, and they don't have wangs, either in the dream or in real life, and hence I smell a fish (a wangless and toothless fish).

whatever. fuck you. poe was a good guy. he was made into a genre later. people misinterpret that postfactually as a damnation, while it is actually the highest praise. the man was good, if a bit warpo.

mr bungle is a good band. that's why when I spent five years writing a book that was about a rock band fronting a cult about the ultimate secret of the universe, the band was loosely modeled (if only in superficial ways) after mr bungle. so even though I didn't write the freudian article they should not flame throw me.

The Finger

Back by unpopular demand, a story I wrote in 1996

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On Proper Suckiness

My girlfriend M. informs me that my last two posts sucked -- not in the sublime way that they are supposed to suck, but rather in a more normal and non-uplifting way. I think the problem was that I tried to write something interesting and that ruined it. This time around I am recalibrating and I promise I will not try to be interesting. In fact, I will begin by dragging this paragraph out to an unnecessarily long length. Guy Kawasaki would never write an intro paragraph this sucky. The grandeur of this level of suckiness is starting to exhaust me and I'm not sure if I'm up to it.

On the Future of Books

The question is how useful we can make something like this, the Sony ebook reader:



The Economist this week says:

The simplest difference [between iPods and ebooks] is that transferring one's old music CDs onto iPods is easy, whereas transferring one's old books onto an e-book is impossible.

Whenever anyone says that something is "impossible" it catches my attention. Is this really impossible?

You could buy new ebooks this way. First, buy the physical book at a bricks-and-mortar store. Then you can visit a website and enter a one-time code from your sales receipt. From that point forward, that book is always available to you online. Doesn't sound too hard does it now? All it takes is one major publisher and one major bookstore chain to get started.

How to transfer old books? If your book is out of print, scan your ISBN code and voila, you have it. If your book is in print, take it to a participating bricks and mortar store. They attach a big sticker that would completely destroy the cover if you removed it. Then they give you your one-time code. They can charge you at cost and I'm sure they'd be happy to have a reason for people to enter their stores.

Probably I'm wrong and maybe you don't want a permanent sticker on your book ... but IMPOSSIBLE?

Themes on Google Homepage

Yesterday I discovered a new feature added to the Google customizable homepage: the theme.



It's a little feature, but its appearance is significant in at least a couple ways. First, it's damn cool. Previous attempts to add graphic design to a personalized homepage have led to overdone effects where you can't read what's on the screen. This one is beautifully minimalist, per Google style. Also per Google style, there is a minimalist twist: you can put in your location and the theme setting updates according to your local time of day. Maybe I'm crazy but I think that is just super sweet.

A second point of importance is that this represents another step away, in a sense, from the blank, famous, traditional Google home page. It's only a step away "in a sense" because if you go to www.google.com and you've never heard of this personalized home page, you get the traditional one. Moreover, Google does not push the customizable homepage very actively. And in fact, a very small percentage of people have experience with it or know what it is.

This is not helped by the fact that it has the unmeaningful URL of http://www.google.com/ig and the unmemorable title of "Personalized Homepage." And this brings us from a little feature to one of the top two or three issues on Google's plate these days: how to integrate and brand its products. This technology-driven and -inspired company is maturing into a realm where marketing management is increasingly relevant. Personalized Homepage Themes are not a technology development at all. My Yahoo! is a bazillion years old. They are sweet by virtue of product design that is 99% psychographic and 1% technological.

Depending on who at the company you ask, Google sometimes describes itself as a technology company, sometimes as a media company. I think you can use this new little feature to tell a story about how Google started with a technology model and is maturing, as the vast majority of technology companies do, into a marketing model. Not to say that Google won't be developing any new technologies, but rather that the sweetness of its new products will have a lot to do with their integration and design according to personal needs and psychologies, not new algorithms.

Travel Log: Panama 2005, Part One

Panama was a cool trip where we did what most tourists do - and also took a trip deep into the jungle.

The stuff written here covers only the very beginning of our trip. Hopefully I will write the rest soon.



August 30, 2005

Looking back on other trips I wish I had made a better record of them, especially of simple details of what it was like to visit those places. For that reason, I took notes throughout the trip that M. and I recently took to Panama. Fortunately for me, M. brought and made extensive use of a ditigal camera, and the pictures also jog a lot of memories. Here, I have tried to fill in the gaps to create a basic but detailed picture of what we saw and did. I think it adds up to a fairly interesting story. And since I bothered to write it, I might as well send make it available to the people who know me and might find it interesting. Let me know how you find it!



Andrew and M. in El Valle, Panama

Here is a little picture of our itinerary: first, to San Blas from Panama City. Then, the mountain town of El Valle. Then, Isla Taboga. Then, the jungle province Darién, and finally, the Bocas del Toro islands.

[having some trouble finding the picture]

From my journal:

Sunday, June 19, 2005.

Monday, June 20, 2005.

In Albrook Domestic Airport in Panama City. This is our second morning in Panama. Reaching airport was difficult because hotelman had not “called” taxi at 4:30 a.m. We walked and accosted two men standing outdoors. They assured us that we would be robbed if we proceeded in current direction into slum. We expressed urgent desire to go to airport. One man walked with us to a safe intersection. Three cabs came by in about two minutes. First was full, second one did not work out: I told M. to get in, while preparing to tip the random man. He asked her where to and she said Albrook before she got in and he sped away and I barked at her that I told her to get in, not tell him where we were going. Eventually a cab got us and we were at aiport by 5am to check in. M.’s $40 ticket to Playón Chico (island) carried a surcharge of $6 for being 15 lbs over the weight limit of 33 lbs. (My bag came in at 33.5 lbs, no surcharge levied.)

We are somewhat eager to leave Panama City. At the instructions of our budget travel literature we stayed in Casco Viejo, the old part of town (of the new town, after it was rebuilt following pirate destruction in 1500s.) Apparently the prime virtue of it’s being such an international metropolis is that we can stay in the slum for $10 / night.

Here is a photo of the plaza in which we stayed:



Part of Plaza Herrera, as viewed from our hotel room

Our room was a slendid chamber. We had a light bulb for the latter portion after the hotel man (different one from the one who didn’t call the cab, a better one) and his street henchman (who greeted us as we arrived Saturday night at 11:30pm, and was sort of like Kramer from Seinfeld) installed it with much ado and a gigantic ladder to reach the high ceiling. Like all of Casco Viejo, this building was old. All of the buildings were old and a few floors. The differentiator was the condition. We had a balcony on our second-floor window overlooking what were essentially inhabited ruins—a landscape of rubble and hanging laundry. When we arrived by taxi on Saturday night, the main road to our hotel’s plaza, Plaza Herrera, led through a gauntlet of nightlife … such as swaggering drunkards, prositutes,etc., which in a back alley of semi-hidden doorways and shadow was frankly a little intimidating. On Sunday morning, when we set out with the proposition of finding the domestic airport and buying a ticket to San Blas archipelago (for this morning), we found that we had to hike our way out of what was the heart of a little ghetto, up a peatonal (pedestrian street) where we were the only tourists, despite some variety among the people there, including tall and short, Caribbean and indigenous in appearance, with some Asians (ostensibly Japanese) and English-speaking Haitians. For a while “we” (M.) were too grossed out to eat but eventually we broke down and had $.75 chicken breasts at a restaurant-like establishment which boasted a rack of full chickens out front but would not sell us any due to some not really comprehensible excuse.

We hopped a bus that said “Albrook”’ to go buy a ticket. Since the airport is named Albrook this seemed like a pretty safe bet. The buses in Panama were vastly superior to anything I saw in Guatemala. Like the Guate cousins, they are run-down American schoolbuses, but pretty clean on the inside. The kitchy decorations on the Panamanian bus were more like sophisticated graffiti, e.g. with bubble letters, rather than what seemed like witchcraft in Guatemala (“God is my driver” so please let’s not fall off the cliff, etc). The bus we hopped was noteworthy for a relatively excellent stereo system, which pumped some pretty excellent salsa-like music. M. was repelled by Panama City (esp. by day), calling it the “pit of despair,” but with Guatemala City in mind I was struck by the non-despair of the city. Yes, it was something of a slum in places but people had it in them to be very nice to us (with no exception that I can think of), whereas I often had a pretty dour reception in Guatemala.

“Dios es mi conductor” could come in pretty handy now, though, because we just boarded an 18-person plane that is delayed due to storms at our destination. M. is (loudly) commenting that our pilot is the same individual that checked our bags. She also insisted on taking an extra seat for her things in the waiting area while 12+ people were sitting nearby. Which is off topic but I am writing to piss her off.

Here’s what Panama looked like outside of the airplane:



Aerial view en route from Panama City to San Blas archipelago, with Caribbean sea at top

Playón Chico...

…is an island that few people visit. Tourists visit to the San Blas archipelago, but there are 300+ islands and we picked one on purpose that no one goes to. The islands are incredibly small and we weren’t even sure that we were going to have a place to stay.

(By the way, if you look at the map of the itinerary we are at #1 now.)

And it turned out, in fact, that our fears were justified, because the Playón Chico community was small and there were no hotels exactly. Nearby (say a slow 5 min boat ride) there were expensive hotel resorts. But we were not about to shell out $60 or $100 per person for a night of sleep. We knew this flying in. Our basic game plan was to wander around and ask people if there was somewhere cheaper to say in the hope that maybe someone would put us up in their home, which would in fact be great for learning about the culture of the Kuna people. (the Kuna are the indians/indigenous who live on the eastern caribbean coast of panama.)

We got off the plane on a tiny airstrip near a couple of ugly concrete structures. One of the structures was a small building where a handful of locals were congregating. One of them was a policeman and he approached us and asked for our passports and our purpose of visiting the island.



An entrepreneurial lad inspects his mango haul on the airstrip at Playon Chico

After we settled the documents and signed something and paid a visitation fee to the community, we asked the policeman if there was anywhere to stay in town. We explained that we were students and we couldn’t afford either of the island resorts nearby. The policeman, who was young, took a few steps and started consulting some older chaps. On the drizzily morning, we found ourselves waiting on the concrete porch while a few men discussed our fate in Kuna. They occasionally looked at us. One man, who we would later learn is named Mahone (see photo below), asked about the purposes of our trip. (“Mahone” sounds the same as the Irish name. ) In groveling Spanish I explained that we were poor students and that we were interested in experiencing the culture of Playón Chico, not staying at mini resort islands.



Sr. Mundo, M., and Sr. Mahone, on a hill with Playón Chico community in the background


Sr. Mahone concluded by welcolming us warmly and taking his back to an office building that was away from the community, on the mainland, near the airstrip. It was a regional office building of ANAM, which is Panama’s nature conservation organization (the Autoridad Nacional del Ambiente, http://www.anam.gob.pa). ANAM appeared to be worth something, because we encountered its offices nearly everywhere we went. Anyway, Mahone took us into an office and sat us at his desk and claimed to be the regional director of ANAM in the San Blas province. We were pretty impressed. He offered that we could stay in a guest room in the ANAM building for $15 each a night. Our ultimate conclusion about this price is that we were getting tremendously hosed, since for example we could stay in hotels in Panama City that had water and stuff for like $10 for the both of us. But possibly the good Sr. was mindful of the fact that he was offering a price at one quarter of the nearby hotel resort. There was also a kitchen and Sr. Mundo explained that he and his staff would cook our meals for us. So we accepted the room.

Then we were conducted on a tour of the island community and the nearby mainland by Sr. Mahone and Mundo, the town’s postmaster. Here are some images of the village, which is referred to as la comunidad in Spanish:





It was frankly a pretty dreary place, despite being on the Caribbean sea. It had impressively tiny streets. As you can see in the pictures, the homes were partly concrete, partly palm roof. All around the island, outhouses jutted out on docks hanging over the water. Smiling children flung themselves off the docks into the water to swim, often landing in the water virtually under the outhouses. It was pretty damn gross. Since the water was clear you could often see poop floating around, looking like orange sponges. Despite the fact that they were swimming in shit, the kids on the island were some of the happiest children I have ever seen. The island was packed with naked little dudes and dudettes, in very close quarters, yet we never heard any kids crying.

The kids jumping in the water by the outhouses would have made a great photograph, but we were rather cautious about taking photographs in Playón Chico. We had read that the Kuna sometimes object to being photographed, and Playón Chico did not get a lot of tourists. For that reason, the photos that we took on the island, as you can see here, were either generally empty of people or they included Kuna whom we had already met and could amicably ask for a photo of. The more time we spent there, the more it appeared that our concerns were unfounded and that the advice had been a little off.

Sr. Mahone sped us through the tiny streets. We we occasionally pop into a house or somewhere to greet someone. There were one or two restaurants on the island, a general store, and a post office near the main dock. Sr. Mahone seemed to know a lot of people and we sort of felt like we were getting a royal tour. At the post office we met “Sr. Mundo,” the postman, pictured above. The name was actually Raymond or Raimundo, but he went by Mundo, which also means “world” and hence makes for an awesome nickname. Mundo was an easy-going guy. Later, after we felt that Sr. Mahone was trying to rob us blind, we maintained a pretty good opinion of Mundo. He was never without baseball cap and sunglasses. Later on, we would meet his son and visit his house.

We went mango-hunting. Our departure was observed by a small group of mostly women and children. A couple people asked us smilingly if we were going to sell mangoes. This was a joke, because mangoes were so plentiful they were free.

Mahone and Mundo took us to the mainland and up a bit slightly into the jungle. Mahone stopped us at a section of mango trees and explained that the plot belonged to his family, and that other families had plots nearby as well.

Mundo taught us our first jungle survival skill: throw a rock at a cluster of mangoes to down them and get some fruit. We chomped on mangoes the likes of which you don’t see in the states! We applied this tactic very successfully later.

Continuing up the hill, we came to a cemetary for the community:





Playon Chico Cemetery

So far as we learned, the community’s attitudes and actions toward the buried were traditional rather than Christian, despite the appearance of a cross in the picture above. A few women were at the cemetary when we got there and it is usual to visit the cemetary on a daily basis. The dead were spoken of with reverence, much as when Sr. Mahone was talking about his family plot. Generally people were able to describe a bit of history about their grandfather, and, in some cases, great-grandfather. Somewhere past the grandfather stage, history became fuzzy and then did not exist. It is generally not known how long the Kuna people have inhabited the San Blas islands and some people theorizethat they are a relatively recent arrival in the last hundred years or two, and that they were kicked out of the jungle by the much tougher Embera people, which M. and I would get to know later in the trip.

We came down from the cemetary and then M. and I took some time alone to visit the community and rest in our squalid chambers. M. and I were feeling a bit suffocated by Sr. Mahone’s micro-planning of our day, but this break helped out.

Playón Chico was a tiny island, somewhere in the ballpark of the size of a football field. Out a bit from it, behind some sort of reef, was an even smaller island, somewhere near the border of the minimum size of what you could call an island. It only took around ten minutes to walk its circumference. We decided to go out there for a swim on a “private island.” We were rowed out there by Ray, Raimundo’s son, who was incredibly strong and moved us at an amazing rate. He hunted crabs by day so he spent many hours a day rowing around.



M., on the way to get her ass stung; Ray in background

We reached the private island. We opted to cross to swim on the far side, because we saw waves on the other side and we wanted to swim in some waves and also feel more removed from the Playón Chico community. This decision turned out to be a catastrophic error!

On the other side we discovered that the water was shallow and filled with rocks and strange coral structures. They were a bit sharp on the foot. But we had swim shoes (plastic webby shoes) so we threw those out and plunked out into the waves in search of deeper water. The rocks were hard to walk on and the waves knocked us around for a bit. It was fun for about thirty seconds. The peak of the fun was getting knocked over and stumbling in the rocks and falling in the shallow water, where we lolled around like idiots. M. fell and sat on a rock and yiped and it was pretty funny because she got up and fell on it again.

As we waddled into shore, M. complained that her ass hurt and she had been stung. I replied that she had simply fallen on a rock. But then she complained that her ass really hurt and it became quickly clear that she had sat on no ordinary rock, but rather some kind of stinging rock or anenome or animal.

M. was in a bad state because she could neither exactly walk nor lie down, due to the major pain on her butt. I took a peek and was secretly terrified by what I saw: a huge red blotch that was blistering almost before my eyes. It looked poisonous to me. The question was, how poisonous? And how poisonous was a double dose, since she had been stung twice in the same place?

It was nearly 3:00pm. We had arranged for Ray to row back and get us around 4:00pm. We had no way of reaching Ray or anyone else in the village, and it would have taken me an hour at least to swim back to the community. That meant that we had an hour to wait before we were picked up – if we were on time.

M. complained that the pain in her ass was spreading down her leg. I imagined posion circulating slowly through her blood in a slow but unstoppable course to kill her within the hour.

We waddled over to the non-rocky, non-wavey side of the island with the objective of washing off her patook. We got in the water but moving around was simply too painful, so we beached her. I pondered the worst-case scenario. She had not been bitten, so there didn’t appear to be any way of sucking the poison out of her body. The best was to keep her calm with the objective of keeping her pulse low and slowing the spread of the poison.

M. was concerned about the state of medical care in Playón Chico. There would be no way to get her to Panama City any earlier than the following day. She was also adamant that she did not want to receive an injection of any kind.

I tried to convince her to lie down and relax, but this was tough for her to due with her soreness. Then she started complaining about our relationship. Apparently we had not been “connecting” adequately recently. It was about as rough as circumstances can be on a private Caribbean island – a little bit like one of those old Got Milk? commercials where you go to heaven and you have 1,000 chocolate chip cookies but then you realize there is no milk and you’re actually in hell.

Ray came – our savior! As he rowed us back, we spun our yarn and queried him about whether M. was going to die. He seemed unconcerned. Trusting the authority of local experience, we were largely consoled.

The local diagnosis for what had happened was called mala agua or agua mala – “bad water.” Despite some questioning, we couldn’t exactly figure out what this was, but we surmised it was an animal, probably a jellyfish. Later research suggested that the term mala agua sometimes is used to refer to sea lice, but that definitely wasn’t what we were dealing with in this case.

There was, in fact, a clinic on the island, and Sr. Mahone assured us that they could give M. a shot to take down the pain, but for some reason M. wasn’t interested.

Soon thereafter it was time for dinner, served by Mahone and Mundo: crabs.



Mahone, Big Crabs, and Big Yuca

Mahone went to great pains to prepare us a feast. We had huge crabs and bowls full of boiled yuca (tastes sort of like potato). There were mangos and copious quantities of fruits and vegetables, all washed with the foul brown stuff that the people of Playón Chico know as “water.” M. had been starving for days due to a massive apetite coupled with high culinary standards. She proceded to eat the entire table. Mundo helped her get meat from the little crab claws and whatnot by slapping them on the concrete sink and smashing them with a knife. Occasionally she’d drop a piece on the floor as she handed it to him and he’d wash it off in the brown swill water before giving it back to her.

We ate interminably and it began to get dark. We found ourselves eaten alive by bugs. Mahone and Mundo got bored and went outside to hunt crabs. It was a full moon that gave plenty of light to hunt the crabs that came out at night. The crabs were about as wide as your foot (much smaller than what we had just eaten, but still good eating, they assured us). This was convenient because the two gents hunted a crab by stepping on it gently, then extracting it by hand from under the flip flop and tossing it into a bag – without getting chomped by the massive claws. M. and I were not exactly catching any crabs but it was still fun to be out there and witnessing the process.

When crab hunting was over, Mahone invited us into the community to hang for a bit. We were slightly shocked, because Mahone had impressed upon us earlier in the day that when night came we were to say in the ANAM building and not bother the community, which preferred its privacy at night. We were excited that apparently Mahone had grown fond of us and was extending us a somewhat personal offer. Also, we saw lights in the town and heard some music. So, despite the fact that M. was in tremendous pain from the mala agua, we forayed into town with Mahone and Mundo.

We went to Mundo’s house. The Kuna practice of walking freely into other people’s houses remained intact in the evening. By virtue of this practice, the island seemed like one big family. At Mundo’s house, we saw Ray and greeted him like a buddy. We also met the rest of Mundo’s family and if I recall Mundo’s wife was interested in selling us something but we were not interested.

Then we sat outside with Mundo and Mahone and we had a bonding session that was at once totally ordinary and also impossible to believe. We had cans of beer (the Panama brand, I think it was) and some other guys showed up and had a beer or two. Then Mahone produced a guitar and started playing and singing some of the most heartfelt music I have encountered in a while. He knew a variety of long songs from around Latin America and sang them somewhat above his vocal range but as if the love of his life was sitting there right in front of him. (I don’t think it was M. though! Despite a somewhat deified status that she had throughout the trip.) Occasionally neighbors would chime in, either from next door or as they were walking by or passing through the house.

M. finally couldn’t function any more due to pain. Mahone made us have another beer and then we went back and locked ourselves in the ANAM building.

It was a pretty grim night of sleep. The stage had been set at dinner: while we were eating, a rat the size of a household pet scurried up a pipe in the kitchen, and then followed the pipe as it ran directly over the room in which we were staying. So we knew that a huge rat had free access to our room at any time. A lamentable fact, given that we had food in our room. Moreover, there was no electricity in the building, so we had to spot our rat buddy by flashlight.

For better or worse, we had opted to pitch a tent in our room over sleeping in the bunk beds that were in there. This helped to provide an enclosure in which we could hide from bugs and the rat. We had a harrowing experience washing ourselves in the bathroom. There was a problem with the shower such that it would only drip water. So all day had been devoted to filling a barrel of water from the dripping shower, and we bathed a bit by splashing the water over ourselves using a coconut shell.

Afraid of rats and rat-like things, we eventually made our way from the bathroom to the room and into the tent. Our rat fears seemed childish but it turned out that they were most justified, because soon into the night and then for the rest of the evening we heard sounds from the kitchen, where quite a bit of food was stored. It sounded like a small pony had been placed among the pots and food and it was thrashing around and kicking everything. It was a really big rat.

M. was sweaty and in major pain. That evening was a low point for her on the trip, though there were several other contenders.

Getting off the island the next morning was a bit of a challenge. Sr. Mahone was intent on keeping us around as long as he could. The only standard way off the island was by plane, but the planes would take us only to Panama City and we wanted to go to a different island, Isla Tigre. Sr. Mahone was willing to arrange for a motor boat to take us to Isla Tigre, but at a price of $68, at least double the reasonable price. And the town was so small that we weren’t sure that we would be able to get any other price, due to collusion. So we were a bit freaked out and trapped.

From the journal:

We woke up in Playón Chico at 7:30 or so—about when the one plane of the day was passing through. By the time we had packed and dressed we realized that our morale was low and perhaps we would have been better off catching that plane. But now we faced another day in San Blas. House arrest by Sr. Mahone, the dog-sized rat in our overpriced “rooms,” our mysterious blackened tongues, the imperative to negotiate over every price we paid—and especially the urchin sting on M.’s ass—various factors had beaten us down.

The best plan we had was to try to hire a motor boat to get to La Isla Tigre. That island had the primary virtue of not being Playón Chico, being more used to tourists and hence probably more comfortable.

Isla Tigre was supposedly 1-2 hrs away by motor boat. Sr. Mahone had quoted us the price of $68, citing gas prices of $4/gallon. Yet we had been told that this ride could be done for $20-30, by our book and a guy at the expensive hotel nearby – although he also said we might pay $50 if we were hiring a boat that wasn’t already going, as in fact we ended up doing.

For better or worse, Mahone was occupied in what he claimed were meetings with the governor of the province. Which in fact we learned to be people from the Ministry of Tourism. Perhaps we should have lodged a compliant or two. Perhaps uncoincidentally, we bumped into Mundo a couple of times as we were preparing our departure. In his usual shades and baseball cap he greeted us warmly. He did not object to our plans and said he would keep a lookout for ships going our way. Eventually we went and found him at the police station by the dock. We left our bags there and he led us through the thicket of streets and we popped into half a dozen houses until we found an available boatman. He offered us a trip for $35 and assured us the price was all inclusive. He wandered away to get his boat after I explained that $20 was a reasonable price, $30 was our maximum, but Mundo was a friend so we’d pay $35 on his recommendation. Mundo took us back to the dock/police station and we waited while the dude put gas in his boat and brough it around. One the way there Mundo explained that ordinarily someone might have charged us $50, but Mundo had hooked us up with a fair price. I reflected that Sr. Mahone was an asshole. The ultimate irony was that while we were waiting some henchman of the boat guy came up by foot and said he forgot about the ride back and the ride would be $50. I told him to screw, despite the fact that we had no options and there was a slight air of intimidation, with a policeman telling us to take the expensive option. M. and I sat there confused but with poker faces. A dangerous-looking Colombian trade boat posed a non-option. A dude came up out of nowhere and offered $40 just as M. and I were beginning to despair. Somehow I commanded $35 and we were in. Sometimes I think that the trick to haggling is not caring about the outcome. When you care your opponent can tell and you’re lost. But in this case we cared deeply in at least some sense and yet we somehow avoided hosiery.

We went with the boatman to dock and get gas and I gave gas money. The rest would be payable on arrival. We made a mysterious stop to trade a boat boy for a boat girl.

The boat man, Juan, informed me that we would stop off on the mainland coast to change the boat for a lighter one. He said with a warm smile that we could meet his family. I wan’t positive that I understood what he was saying so I didn’t mention it to M. somewhat later. Plus since he had given us our price I thought it would be stiff not to let him do the job as he wanted it.

We cruised out into fairly open sea. The shore was always well within sight but it was a huge swim away. Our boat, like all the Kuna boats we had seen, was constructed by hand from coconut tree wood. It looked rather old, and the fact that we were taking it on semi-open sea was somewhat sketchy to us, although it made the ride exciting.

The coast was devoid of any sign of civilization; it looked a lot like the coastline shown on the aerial view photograph above. Basically there was a short beach that gave way abruptly to full jungle. There was usually very little beach and sometimes the ocean waves crashed on rocks that had jungle right on top of them.

After about an hour, nowhere close to anything and just when I was starting to think that maybe we weren’t changing boats, we approached a slightly clearer beach with a few huts visible, as well as a few boats pulled up on the shore. There was no dock. We steered directly for the coast and it was clear that we were goiing to meet Juan’s family after all. Juan called from the boat and a strapping young lad appeared on the beach and started fighting the waves to come out to meet us. He was about chest deep when he met us and helped pull the boat onto the shore. Juan told us he’d get the new boat ready and instructed us to follow the folks into town to wait with the family.

The family on the beach was among the most remote, isolated human life I’ve ever seen. [though Playa de Muerto, which came later, is a decent contender.] This community, which may not have had a name and was not obviously greater than one family, had an impenetrable jungle behind it, making the open-sea, long and expensive motor boat trip the only obvious way to reach the rest of mankind.

The village had huts of the Kuna variety, but minus the concrete that we had seen in Playón Chico. The place was clean and exuded rustic and wholesome qualities. We were led into a beautiful, rather expansive, sand-floored hut where there was a crowd of a family, including an old man, women of various ages, and a flock of children. People stood around and watched us. We sat in two lone chairs that had been prepared for us. As we walked in, a teenage girl was breast-feeding a baby.

How big was the community? Where was the rest of the community? Kuna always seemed to hide in their houses, but kids were always playing everywhere, at least back on Playón Chico. There were few kids roaming the streets here, giving the impression that there was little village to speak of.

The old man, who spoke a few English phrases and some Spanish, entertained us. A couple times he asked us how many days we would be staying and it took a while to convey to him that we would be gone in a jiffy. He asked his wife (?) to fetch us some cold water but it turned out that there was none available. He had learned his English working in the canal zone long ago, and he asked me if I was military (not a crazy question from my clothing and short hair).

Eventually the boat was ready and the entire family came out with us to the beach. The boat had a hole in the bottom and just before we got in Juan and his brother were plugging the hole with a piece of styrofoam.

The old man asked us when we would be coming back. I gave a pretty noncommittal answer. He asked us not to forget his home, and as the motor boat launched out through the breaking waves, the whole family waved us away, and the old man shouted from the shore, “God bless New York!”

The ride from the beach to Isla Tigre, which lasted maybe an hour and a half, ended up being the first hairbrained thing that we got ourselves into on the trip (unless you count showing up at Playón Chico itself, maybe). The lighter, styrofoam-plugged boat turned out to be considerably faster than the other boat. As we sat in the front of the boat, we had been perplexed to notice that two young girls, who had gotten on behind us at the beach as passengers, were holding small umbrellas. We could not discern the purpose of the umbrellas. The umbrellas, it turned out, were to be held forwards as protection from the ocean spray breaking over the boat. And, as a matter of fact, we were thoroughly drenched within roughly ten seconds of leaving the shore. As we whipped over the waves, they broke over the edge of the boat directly onto us. When waves slapped up against the side of the boat, a considerable amount of water crashed through a large horizontal leak in the side directly onto my lap. M. and I were unable to stop laughing for about half an hour. The spray was so intense that I had I hide my eyes under the brim of my hat and I almost lost my contact lenses a couple of times. By the time we got to Isla Tigre, we had very sore asses, we were drenched, and we had enjoyed an hour or so to contemplate our mortality and our swimming ability.

Isla Tigre

We reached Isla Tigre, another puny island, and we were greeted by the master of ceremonies, a wonderful, warm-hearted lady named Efigenia. As soon as climbed out of the canoe and she took us, we knew that Isla Tigre would be a considerably more relaxed and enjoyable destination than Playón Chico.



Efigenia, M., and other fair damsels at Isla Tigre the morning we left

Efigenia was an excellent cook. She cooked a lot of pollo guisado (stewed chicken), which had an orange sauce to it and was something of a staple throughout Panama. Upon our arrival she made preparations for an excellent soup and we were extremely appreciative of her no-nonsense attitude about the meals, which involved asking at the termination of each meal what we wanted for the next one.

Compared to Playón Chico, Isla Tigre was a booming tourist center, since there were two other visitors! My guess was that they were from Columbia but we never got around to talking. The second day we were there, a couple of boats pulled up and they yielded some Americans who were on a permanent cruise around the world, not unlike some form of modern-day semi-legal pirates.

We paid $10 a night for our cabin. It was on the beach, equipped with a charming oil lamp and an awesome hammock out back on the water. The first day we swam a bit in the water – though there wasn’t much real beach and we were wary of stinging creatures – and we ate and we rested and debriefed on the horrors of Playón Chico. For a while we lay in one of the hammocks and I argued that networked artificial intelligence would become a reality in the 21st century and that it might pose a threat to human society.

Our cabins and Efigenia’s restaurant were on opposite coasts of the island, facing each other from the sidelines of a soccer field. (That gives you an idea of how narrow the island was!) Altogether it comprised a tourist area that was set apart from the Isla Tigre community itself. After a night of rest and a morning of emotional conversations about our relationship, we were ready to experience the community.

Walking in was like entering a town in the Wild West where everyone knew we were coming and was waiting for us at each corner – only, rather than shooting us, they were hanging molas to sell to us. Molas look sort of like cloth placemats with animals or geometric patterns woven on them. There were various sublime aspects to our shopping trip. We were the only people buying, and hence the only reason anyone was out on the street selling. We cruised down the street a bit fast at first, but as we retraced, more and more houses pulled out their molas and hung them for us. Later, as we lingered a bit long and had rejected people too many times, they began putting their wares away and we had to scramble to make our purchases without crying wolf too many times.

...That's all I've written so far. It was about the first 4 days of our trip, which lasted a month. Some of the later parts are much more intense, so I will surely include them at some point.

Google's Partnerships Faltering?

It has been a tough week for Google partnerships, with Viacom suing for $1B over YouTube--and now, Comcast talking to MSN about possibly switching to that search service on its portal.

Google has been known for keeping its partners happy and for being able to negotiate. Examples: the three-year deal they cut to advertise on MySpace, and also their acquisition of YouTube. What's going on?

One of Comcast's beefs is that it thinks it should be pulling down $100M on ads, rather than $70M, for the ad clicks occurring on its site. Although they have a custom deal set up, this gripe is reminiscent of the classic and mysterious feature of AdSense publishing that publishers don't exactly know how big the pie is - they just get a check in the mail. Publishers have remarkably incomplete information about what's going on, how big the pie is, and how much of the pie they are getting.

Since the "How big is the pie?" issue is a huge one, evidently Google is flexing its market power, which derives strictly from the presence of its ad network (once you're away from www.google.com). It's an uncompetitive scenario that is likely to change. Ad networks are hard to build, but Yahoo! and MSN have them and are building them. I think you can expect to see this offering become increasingly a commodity, with shrinking margins and a shrinking presence of whether you can even tell who's providing the search or ads on any site that isn't yahoo.com, msn.com or google.com. The differentiator for these sites will be getting people to visit their domains and search on them. "Powered by Google" won't help Google much. It will boil down to what it started with -- the attractiveness and quality of the pristine www.google.com.

Time to Create a Blog

I have created blogs before, and in general they suck. So this time I'm setting a goal that I can achieve: creating a sucky blog. But I want it to be a stretch goal, so I am attempting to create a blog that is sublime in its terribleness, uplifting in its emptyness, and inspiring in its attention to irrelevance and aggrandizement of worthlessness. So far, it is off to an encouraging start.

Finals are over. B school is supposed to be easy, but I feel like Red at the end of the Shawshank Redemption when he finds Andy DuFrane on the beach. I feel very liberated. My apartment looks like the Sex Pistols have been hiding out there for a week. Cranberry juice is spilled all over the kitchen floor, giving the illusion that a violent crime was recently committed. My head feels like it was just the set for Innerspace bloopers stunt double out-takes.

What shall I do with my newfound freedom? I shall create a blog, the InsanoBlog.

Here are some of the things I would like to write about over the lifetime of InsanoBlog: coffee, tea, computers, Wittgenstein, strategy, marketing, finance, the Wall Street Journal, yoga, tantra, email, Gmail, Bmail, qmail, xmail, , Business School and the curse of the MBA, entrepreneurship, writing an unpublished novel, the Toyota ECHO, the future of human civilization, artificial intelligence, robots, computer programs that write computer programs, the most efficient procrastination machine ever constructed, social networks, joggging, martial arts, Chicago, Lake Michigan, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, bars, cafes, being a bouncer at a bar despite being 5'10" and 175 lbs., tai chi, kundalini, my wonderful girlfriend, my wonderful family, my wonderful friends, Julio Cortazar and Rayuela aka Hopscotch as well as El Perseguidor, living in Germany for a year, interning at Google, working at Booz Allen, risking my career on a startup that is about as well planned as this blog posting, the art of creating lists, the art of studying for finals, how classes should really be taught, the experience I had of teaching electronics to better that were smarter than me and better at electronics, the best classes I've taken at B school, the worst classes I've taken at B School, cartoons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Harvey Birdman - Attorney at Law, Sealab, other cartoons on and off Adult Swim, the Simpsons, Family Guy, how much I like cartoons, why I like cartoons, the art of creating lists and remembering whether or not you already listed something, how to learn a language in two weeks, the art of the hangover, the Internet Porn Equivalence theorem, Ricardian equivalence and the destiny of economics, what it was like to interview President Clinton, meeting Barack Obama, whether Barack Obama will be elected for President, what it was like writing for a travel guide, what it was like venturing into the jungle of Panama and having machine guns pointed at me by barefoot Embera natives, what it was like getting lost in a jungle at night, how great my girlfriend is, meeting one of the twelve principal Columbian witchdoctors currently living in the jungle of Panama, the future of movies and whether they will evolve or devolve into YouTubery, the future of YouTube and whether Viacom's affront will work, strategy and how to know whether you should merge with another cyborg, The Force, open source code, taking a poetry class, the pros and cons of an undergraduate education at Harvard (aka they were the best of professors, they were the worst of professors), what is the fate of literature?, why I don't think about the past and whether I should think about starting, how much should you think about things, the Tao Te Ching, how I tried to write the ultimate truth of the universe into a novel about a cult hidden behind a rock band uncovered by a philanderous love triangle pushed to the breaking point, stereotypes examined and gotten to the bottom of about venture capital, lawyers, Vanilla Ice, viral marketing, Esperanto, postmodern stream of crappiness, how the quality of TV and movies really have improved and what it says about our society and our evolution as a species and the fallacy of mistaking exponential development for linear development, "Was Charles Dickens a Blogger? Dragging Shit out Chapter by Chapter" -- a movie starring Angela Lansbury, how I preempted Britney Spears by shaving my head back in high school, the implications of head shaving and whether you are a Zen dude or a rascist mofo, racism in Germany, Dachau and the great past, failure to confront the past, a Random Walk Down Wall Street, the implications that a cat can walk on a treadmill if you can sever its spinal cord, the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto and the great paradox of arguing inductively for induction and deductively for deduction, how obnoxious I am, how obnoxious you are, how fartnoxious you are, how a blog without profanity is like a David Mamet play without profanity - what is the fucking point?, why you should never hold punches, how fun it is to pretend you know everything, "Clash of the Titans - Technology vs. Marketing..." Rated R! starring Guy Kawasaki! and narrated by Meatwad!, how people feel about you when you punctuate everything with a !, what it's like to begin every paragraph with "I", the total irrelevance of copying other people's styles, influences, the art of drinking, the art of dancing, whether or not you should drink, the supreme art of seduction, how I first won over my wonderful gf (OMG!) starring the robot from Short Circuit, hanging out in cafes, blurring the boundaries between work and play, blurring the boundaries between foolishness and wisdom, I have created a monument more lasting than bronze, blurring the boundaries between art and everything else. Also how sweet it was that I had a top secret security clearance and what it was like working for the pentagon and interviewing with the cia. what it was like interviewing for google. "Google or CIA or McKinsey - which is more obnoxious? melting your mind with elitism" Rated G, starring Bruce Willis. how great it was creating this list and how hard it was to stop. the mysterious transition from a comma-separated list to a period-separated list. how bad I suck at computer programming. how awesome I am at computer programming. the great mystery of why computer programmers don't commit suicide aka the secret to happiness, starring Juliette Binoche.

The recommended way for you to stay in contact with this blog would simply be to make it your homepage. Another option would be to buy a dedicated terminal and keep the monitor open to this page 24 x 7. Another route would be to get tight with the people at Apple Store and have them keep one of the demo computers always fixated to this page. Another would be to create a robot that looked just like Steve Jobs programmed to follow you around and show you this blog every ten minutes on an iPod. Another option would be to add the rss feed for this blog, which is http://insanoblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml to your google home page or google reader.

Comments are welcome, including hatred of this blog but preferably excluding hatred of other people, except specific individuals.