A former latin american exile writes about life..

Ok so I gave up a comfy boring life to go live in South America. Lots have suggested that I write about my experiences, so here it finally is.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

The purpose of advertising - to sell shit, right?

So I'm driving to a friend's house for Halloween festivities. As I'm making the turn from I-10 West onto I-17 North I see a big black billboard with white text.

"Are you as backed up as this traffic?"

There's a website listed but I'm not going to provide them with publicity. They setll a product that helps with constipation.

But yeah, after a fashion - they're really selling SHIT.

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Why buy a slice of ham when you can get the pig?

I had Mr. Right Now over the other night. His name is not important, I'm not sure if I even asked. But he asked that age-old question -

"Got any porn?"

Well I am not about to root around for porn just because the flavor of the day is requesting it. But the request planted a seed. (Yes, I see the pun in there...)

So a couple of nights ago I'm surfing through the higher numbered channels on Sky Mexico. How I have a Sky system installed in Phoenix must remain a mystery but suffice it to say there are hundreds if not thousands of them active in the southwest USA. I call their phone number in Mexico City and get the automated customer service, punch in my account number and the channel number as if to order it on pay-per-view. It tells me it cannot complete my request and I should call back during regular business hours.

No problem. It wasn't that urgent.

So this morning it occurs to me to call. I punch in Channel 924 on my Sky receiver and get the rep on the line. I tell him that I tried to buy a PPV on G-Channel the other night and got an error. Does my account need to be activated for the adult stuff?

The screen is displaying an error message that says "insufficient credit for this channel," or something to that effect. The guy starts explaining to me that the channel isn't really pay per view, it's about 20 bucks a month extra to add it.

Now I'm thinking... DVD recorder...

Add it.

The insufficient credit message goes away and there are three guys, well, I won't take you any further there than I already have.

Then I had to go to work. I like to leave the TV on for background noise for the dog - that would do...

I got home this evening and did about 4 hours worth of work. It's a nice distraction to have, just to look over and see whatever's going on... sorta like the TV at the bathhouse but with a better picture and without all those ooky guys moving around.

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Monday, October 29, 2007

Virtwual Weality gone Vewy, Vewy Wong

Not safe for work, really... I don't advocate the activities she speaks of. This is the logical result of spending an entire afternoon editing a flash template... some webvertising just SCREAMED "misuse me" so out came my DV-Cam and the MacBook... I wanted to see if/how much the webvertisers were editing her spoken words.

The result? Very little filtering, if any. This sick artistic expression (unfortunately not funded by the National Arts Foundation - any grant writers out there want to lend a hand?) was the result of spending the day generating some very plane-jane commercial pablum.

YES, there was a clip using the word "orange" but it landed on the virtual cutting room floor.

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Saturday, October 27, 2007

FEMA fakes a press conference

This is incredible. Granted, Katrina was a major fuckup (There was no business case for protecting black poor people who aren't likely to vote republican) - but TO STAGE A FAKE PRESS CONFERENCE? WTF?

The Bush administration keeps outdoing itself. The same party that spent millions of man-hours of federal government time about a semen-stained blue dress brings us fake press conferences with softball questions. Not a single one of the questions came from an actual reporter - note the lack of names being given nor media outlets spoken - these are all FEMA employees asking these bullshit questions that elicit self-aggrandizing answers.

If the disaster was in Compton or in Richmond, CA (bay area for the geographically challenged) FEMA wouldn't do a damn thing.

They are taking lots of credit for how organized the state of California already is with these fire situations. I would not be surprised, for example, if the evacuation zones and burnt out areas had visible signage as you drive back into them that say, "The State of California has determined that the smoke and fumes from wildfires are carcinogens." (If you've filled your car up at a gas station in cali you will recognize the wording ;) )

Want to be prepared for a disaster in the USA? Don't plan on FEMA helping out unless you're in a zipcode full of McMansions.

Regular folks: You're going to get a dose of "less government" in case of a disaster. Get your own flu shot in advance, stock your own first aid stuff, get your own doses of tamiflu, get your own dried food, stockpile plenty of fresh water... and for god's sake get a gun with plenty of ammo to protect that stuff from people who are dumb enough to believe bullshit like this press conference and then try to steal it from you. The federal government is not gonna do a goddamn thing to protect you.

Large corporations are their sole focus, not citizens - unless its April 15th. April 15th we have settle up with them so they can go spend it in Iraq and Israel.

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The dude who went down for going down - released

Genarlow Wilson was released from a Georgia prison yesterday. His crime? At age 17 he was busted for having consensual oral sex on/with a 15 year old girl. He was pictured on cnn.com this morning with a big grin that I will not characterize with any hyphenated adjective ending in -eating.

The event was documented on videotape at a wild party that included alcohol and weed.

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Thursday, October 25, 2007

S&M and your pet

This situation would probably not happen with a cat. A cat would lay there and think - my human is fighting with another human. Whatever. I have better things to do like groom myself, destroy something, or watch birds through the window.

Dogs are a different story. The pack mentality is wired in.

This is also a topic you'll never see on The Dog Whisperer.

So last night I had a guest. He wanted to do this thing that started outside my apartment but I draw the line at that. This shit stays in my house - oh and I guess on my blog now hmm...

On his arrival I was ready. Purple nitrile gloves and a wet towel to simulate chloroform. Never owned the real chemical, never will. I won't go into detail other than to say that quite the wrestling match ensued until I had him completely immobile.

Then I noticed my dog cowering in the corner absolutely terrified.

I took a few minutes to give her a treat that would keep her busy and calm her down, but she wasn't quite her usual self until 4 hours later I took my guest out to the parking lot to his car. I walked her for a little while longer then took her inside and I assumed my usual position propped up on my bed with the TV remote in one hand and the requisite two laptops open.

Obviously I lack for visual stimulation.

She hopped up on the bed, jumped in my lap, curled up and let loose a huge sigh.

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Sunday, October 21, 2007

"Put on your party hats!"

OMFG. California is advertising in Arizona to get snow skiing tourists. The slogan is, if you were snow, where yould you want to fall?

But there's a hidden message in the commercial. It's not even necessary to play it backwards. A woman says "Put on your party hats!"

In Chicago "she got her party hats on," is the way to say that a woman is visibly cold and you can see it through her shirt.

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Lost cat

Some neighborhood kids lost their kitty. I interviewed a likely suspect but she denied it - or rather licked at the page. Besides, I'm her alibi...

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Thursday, October 18, 2007

This sums up some days in my life


Go ahead, click the image. No, the words aren't in English. Relax, there's a translation here.

To put it in context, it came from this online newspaper from Peru. The article is entitled "Faucett Freeway or Crucifixion Way?"

How the hell did I land on this page? I was watching a show from the National Geographic channel - Locked up Abroad: Peru. I saw a road sign in a scene from the show and it occurred to me - that's a freeway in Lima. It's gotta be a toll road. In a lot of countries roads would not get built were it not for the existing right of way being ceded to a private company or a new government agency.

Where there are toll roads, there are scandals. The one in Illinois immediately comes to mind.

Yes, it's wikipedia, banned in many school districts as a source of information. However I have to point out that their reporting standards are as good as or better than those of Fox News!

I have special memories of the IL toll road - at one point in time I thought I'd gotten the biggest speeding ticket I would EVER receive along that highway. (I was wrong) A very close relative made a game for years of beating the tolls, (allegedly) skating through suddenly behind someone who'd thrown their coins in the basket but before the gate closed, they had it timed that well. There were lights and buzzers but no cameras. At rush hour the cops were busy with other stuff... so what's a few pennies missing? There were toll highway authority executives with reputations for paying off personal debts with change. Hm... Oh and when the roads were built in the 50's, the tolls were supposed to end in 2000. Nope.

Speaking of pennies it remains the only toll road in the USA that still accepts pennies as cash payment. In my younger years I'd accumulate pennies in plastic baggies that had perhaps seen some other previous use. The tolls were 40c, three times going downtown Chicago and three times going back. It took quite a bit of effort to empty out those baggies but with some help from my friends we did it. There was no shortage of them. Sometimes we'd miscount either 39c or 41c into a freshly-emptied baggie - the closer to the time the baggie got recycled, the more likely a discrepancy was to happen. What can I say... We fed lots of funny smelling (especially to a trained dog) coins into the baskets and allegedly weaved off along our merry way to go party.

Anyway this private Peruvian corporation - whose owners were no doubt great friends with those in power at the time - have created this public work that's a route to their airport. This road in the picture spans only 1 1/2 km. That's .93 miles - not much. To travel those .93 miles they charge anywhere from 33c to 49c each way. For a bit less than a mile that's steep even by USA standards - but now consider that a semi-skilled peruvian laborer might take home US$330.00 per month - assuming his job is legally registered with the government. It's a huge toll.

To pay lip-service to the idea of how insanely expensive this road is for the average person, they provided "free" traffic lanes on either side of the highway. However, the architecture of the whole thing STRONGLY pushes the user to pay this big price.

Yes, now I am finally arriving at the translation for the captions in the picture.
From top to bottom:
Caption: Too many obstacles in a kilometer and a half - the Faucett expressway seen via satellite.
Immediately below that they show the legend (referencias).
Puente peatonal = Pedestrian bridge
Rompemuelles = speed bump. In Mexican Spanish this is called a "tope"
Semaforo = Traffic light.
First picture with the red car going over the speedbump: Too many speedbumps... and stoplights. The alternate free route that goes from Morales Duarez (it's the bridge over the river at the lower right side of the picture) has 14. Why so many?
Off to the left below that the caption is:
Unsafe pedestrian bridges. A pedestrian has to descend on the side of the freeway and cross the "free" street to get to the opposite side.
Across from there it shows a picture of a bus on the freeway. The caption says "Empty freeway. The "free" route is jammed. The toll scares off all the traffic.
Lastly, showing the tollbooth where the drivers are being relieved of their Sols (Peruvian currency) - "The most expensive tollbooth in Peru for such a short trip. A microbus driver that makes 8 trips a day has to pay 16 Sols (US$5.32!) daily."

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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Welcoming new hires in Bangalore



The audio from this is loud. This particular video is office-safe although you're gonna get looked at a little weird if someone sees your screen.

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You know you've lived a little fast...

I just bought a radar detector. It speaks. So as I'm driving around town it says..

"X alert"
"Ka alert"
or the dreaded, "Laser alert."

But sometimes it says "K alert," and that makes me nostalgic for the rave scene in the early 90's.

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Dick Cheney and Barack Obama... related?

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Go back far enough, the saying goes, and everyone's related.

But could it be possible that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Vice President Dick Cheney share a common ancestor?

Cheney's wife Lynne says yes.

In an interview on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Cheney said that in the course of researching her husband's genealogy for her new book, "Blue Skies, No Fences," she discovered that the two public figures share an ancestor eight generations ago.

"Think about this," Mrs. Cheney said. "This is such an amazing American story that one ancestor, a man that came to Maryland, could be responsible down the family line for lives that have taken such different and varied paths as Dick's and Barack Obama's."

But is blood thicker than the partisan waters of Washington? Apparently not.

Even though Obama is related to her husband, Mrs. Cheney said she is not supporting the Illinois Democrat's White House bid.

Reacting to the news, Obama's campaign spokesman Bill Burton told CNN's Dana Bash with tongue in cheek, "Obviously, Dick Cheney is sort of the black sheep of the family."

But Obama's family ties to the Bush administration don't stop with Cheney. According to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times last September, Obama is also an 11th cousin of the president himself. The two share a 17th century Massachusetts relative.

The article didn't mention any direct comment from Cheney, but I'm sure he dropped the f-bomb as he tends to do.

Advace to Senator Obama: decline any invitation from Cheney to go hunting.

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Wednesday, October 10, 2007

I missed an opportunity in Chicago

I should have gone to the American Girl store and checked stock on something.

Surf to this page and search the page for the word "Fitzwilliam"

(If you don't know how to use your browser's search function within the current page - you were probably in front of me at the drive through ATM at the BofA in Phoenix. Please kill yourself.)

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Monday, October 08, 2007

did I hear you correctly? was that Billion with a B?

I was talking to a sales prospect after being part of a panel discussion and this guy cornered me because he was really interested in the product we were flogging. We really didn't mean for it to turn into a total 2 hour long sales pitch but the audience ate it up. He was wondering about scalability and security (that I won't bore you with) and something jumped out that he said to me... "I want to use this to manage a seven billion dollar project."

OMFG.

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more Chicago craziness

So this woman we're sharing the elevator is talking with her friends and she says quite bluntly, "Tomorrow I'm going all the way. Both ways."

Somehow my friend and I found that quite funny and we burst out laughing.

Oh, and the definition of Web 2.0 has now changed. Stay tuned.

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Sunday, October 07, 2007

adventure in Chicago

My typical adventure in Chicago used to be pretty formulaic. Go to the bar, get smashed, go to another bar, get more smashed, wake up in some stranger's apartment. Or a variation on that would be to wake up at Steamworks. The second of the two is actually sometimes preferable because then you know what side of town you're on, that your wallet and cellphone got locked up in their safe deposit box, and you don't have to snoop around for the odd piece of mail and hope you're not calling Mr. Right Now by his roommate's name - in a joint like Steamworks you just don't need to exchange names, y'all just get busy.

I made some new friends very quickly here - I will be deliberately vague about how this came to pass - and we wound up watching a DVD compilation of Family Guy episodes and eating pizza in one of their VERY high-buck super-decorated loft condo apartments up in Andersonville. We shared a couple of youtube videos we each liked - funny how everyone busts out a laptop these days... And in this particular gathering we all laughed like hell and remained clothed. Seriously. Not even any dry-humping.

These are the ones I liked the best.

This one is not safe for work.



This one is not very PC (but little on this blog IS). It's a clip from a Helen Keller play. Watch the woman in the middle overdoing her role as HK.

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Thursday, October 04, 2007

Senator Craig finds out that guilty really means guilty in MN

Accurate and voluntary, I can go along with. Intelligent, not so much. Oh sure, he's probably a smart guy to get elected to the Senate. But he's stupid if he thinks that people actually buy his story about his foot "accidentally" tapping the foot of an undercover cop in the adjoining bathroom stall.

Oh and if one reads into this that all gay men meet sexual partners that way - get real. Lowlifes like Craig and a certain Anthony Fortunato (see next post) meet people this way. Gay has come a long way... we just ask the friendly girl in the office directly - "So which church does HE go to?" Then we either ask him out or not...

I can only hope that the last person to have sucked off Senator Craig in the Mpls. airport bathroom leaves the comfort of his 978 anime dolls and action figures (still in the box naturally), turns off whatever hentai porn video (or videogame) he has on and tells the world how long it took the senator to shoot and any other pertinent information that would be relevant to this writer's salacious interest in the whole thing.

"A Minnesota judge today rejected Sen. Larry Craig's bid to withdraw his guilty plea in an airport sex sting, a major setback in Craig's effort to clear his name and hang onto his Senate seat.

"Because the defendant's plea was accurate, voluntary and intelligent, and because the conviction is supported by the evidence ... the Defendant's motion to withdraw his guilty plea is denied,'' Hennepin County Judge Charles Porter wrote.

Craig can appeal Porter's ruling, but it wasn't immediately clear if he would.

When the charges first surfaced he said he would resign by Sept. 30. But then he decided to attempt to reopen his legal case, and said he would stay at least until he found out whether he could withdraw his plea.

Craig has maintained his innocence and said that his actions in the airport bathroom were misconstrued by the police officer who arrested him."

Gay bashing suspect reveals his double life...

Big shock here. Those who shout "fag" the quickest and the loudest have probably had a dick in their mouth already and loved it.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Michael Sandy's killing had all the hallmarks of a hate crime: a gay man ambushed by a group of men, then chased into the path of a speeding car.

But the murder trial has produced a surprise twist: The man who first suggested going after a gay target says he may be gay too.

Taking the stand in his own defense, Anthony Fortunato testified about having a series of one-night stands with men he met online. He said he'd been having homosexual impulses since he was around 13, although he kept that hidden from friends.

"I was living two complete double lives," said Fortunato, 21. But he waffled when asked directly about his sexual orientation.

"I don't know," he said. "I could be homosexual. A homosexual. Bisexual."