Yesterday
´this is pretty idyllic, we´re sitting on our balcony in a simple hotel outside the village. It´s actually Playa San Augustinillo, we meant to go to Mazunte 1km further on but decided to stop the taxi. We´re the only people in this big hotel, and the previous guests were a week ago. There is a constant stream of butterflies past us, yellowish white with a canary yellow to green one always visible somewhere and the odd orangey red one once in a while. I don´t know how many are visible at one time. 100? How do you count? If you look left and see 30 and in front 30 and to your right 50 but they´re the same ones travelling across in some kind of migration moving from somewhere upwind in an constant flow.
Just left the sea which is unlike any I have ever been in, Brónagh grazed her leg pinfully, dripping blood from being upended on a wave that I was happily bobbing on 10M out. 70M from where we are now sitting in the hotel they look terrifying - big walls of water curving over and crashing - the foam blowing off in doily sheets and a second ghost wave of a diaphanous sheet drifting down after the mighty crash. They look like they would pulverise a person trapped in the tube as it imploded, and in truth even when the subwave crashes closer to shore it can give you a fair battering. Even the waves 20-30M out, 2M higher than the swell they come from are brown from being loaded with exfoliant sand. If you could only tie things down here you could save a lot of hard work with sandpaper.
Coming here was a good idea, I think, there may even be a little nightlife - I saw a sign in Pochutle for a salsa bar with belly dancing. I might have a shower soon, it´s very humid here and I´ve been sweating all day long - in the plastic seat of the taxi, carrying my maleta? in the shade. The room is cool as there is a breeze flowing through it.
There seem to be many more butterflies than there were - if 100 were before me at all times before it must be 200 now. But the tumult of the waves is ceaseless and changeless except for when I try to photograph or video it when it goes tame for a few moments.´
Later we went to eat - fish in a spicy sauce and rice - while the waves crashed in Mazuntle in front of us. A serious and not very sane surfer, and I´ve seen manysurfers on the waves and their bored girlfriends on the shore basting and browning, like a collection of tennis player´s wives and surfers are not normally worth watching - but this guy was awesome, like the films, on a tiny board surfing into the pipes, and when he did fall off it was not because he couldn´t stay on (when he wanted to finish he rode a wave smoothly all the way to the beach) but that he wanted to try the impossible. He glided off the sea past us and I lifted my imaginary hat off for him.
The lightning started way out at sea and it was some time before you could tell the difference between the roar of the waves and that of the thunder, as the thunder drew in and in gaps between the waves their sound became more shrill in comparison. We walked out on the dark road, exotic birds, crickets, and frogs for noise - crabs scuttling away from us - illuminated like very lights with the lightning in the distance and the deep artillary report of the thunder shaking the sky to find some music but ended up escaping the torrential downpour (and I do mean that - nothing in halves here) and sat in a bar with the owner and chatted. He recommended hiking up the hills to see the flowers covered in hummingbirds and butterflies. Apparantly they were brown last week, they´re lush green now. The rains were a month late and they say they´ve had a month of them in the last week.
Today we slept in of course. And when we woke up we couldn´t believe that something unusual wasn´t happening - that tumult couldn´t be constant. But it is. Took a long breakfast and we are just off to see the turtle santuary now. It´s a bit grey (but not that it wasn´t lovely to lark about in the water this morning) so we will leave the hills for another day. And I really wouldn´t mind a bit of dancing later on. We´ll see - the crowd is younger than Puerto Angel but they all seem much as lazy as we are.
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Monday, June 13, 2005
marcos
... and this man in the same room together? I thought not. Bob was supposed to live in Equador I thought. Must have moved to the Chiapas. The thought popped into my head last night as we were toasting the revolution in a little cafe in Oaxaca. I know, I will burn in hell.
Or wherever it is that naughty subgeniuses go.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Leave of absence
I might not be writing too frequently in the next month as I am marrying my beloved tomorrow morning and then we are going to Mexico. Can't wait to do both. I'm a very lucky man.
Somebody put a comment on an earlier post and suggested I put some pictures into the next"A Day in the Life Of" on flickr. So I intend to do that and to put some pictures of Mexico up here on the blog.
Better not get to soppy here.
Somebody put a comment on an earlier post and suggested I put some pictures into the next"A Day in the Life Of" on flickr. So I intend to do that and to put some pictures of Mexico up here on the blog.
Better not get to soppy here.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Bookburning: a competitive sport for the noughties?
Maybe we can stop thinking too while we're at it? While some of this list are probably to be expected, like the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf I wonder how much relationship they had to do with the crimes they are being blamed for? Surely the urge to ban books has a strong relationship with the evil ideology of Mein Kampf and I imagine the mass media which didn't speak out against the bookburning has more to do with its rise than those that read the book. I think the far right's distrust of books has more to do with their totalitarian similarity to the Khmer Rouge's rejection of 'intellectuals' than it does to history.
Their approach to historicism can be gleaned from a quote on Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money "FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt." The blind ideology of the far right always makes me laugh. A Keynesian government (to some extend) left power with balanced books - a non-keynesian government took power and spends to death. The difference is that their spending is assumed to be sustainable as it seeks to acquire foreign wealth for America. No source other than imperial pillage will make the federal budget of the US sustainable. Never had that much time for Lenin, but he sure got that one right. Imperialism bolsters unsustainable capitalism. The anti-FDR attacks from the extreme right wing in America (that is, BTW the centre of the Republican party) are also beautifully ahistoric. FDR was a traitor to the world for signing the Yalta agreement? Well sure Yalta kind of sucked for Eastern Europe and we're all sorry about that. But what should he have done? Taken on the Red Army? That fantasy depends on non-examination of the second world war. The Western front was irrelevant, all the people that died there did not bring down the Nazi government. The Soviet Union did it. The sacrifices and battles on the Western front saved some of Europe, no more. If the allies had decided to take on the Red Army it would have rolled on to Calais and taken the whole of Europe with very little resistance. I suspect Stalin regretted not doing it while he had the chance. They had all the oil. They had the troops, airforce, and a frightening battery of artillery. They had many more tanks. Their tanks weren't rubbish (they did receive tanks as aid from the US but used to shoot themselves rather than drive them - the Soviets used rather risky tactics which was fine if you were driving one of their steel mostrosities, but not in one of the US suicide machines - I must do a footnote on US tanks in the second world war, the cynicism of their manufacturers [putting the magazine in the turret to ensure instant death if you got hit] and failure to rectify the design faults on the basis that they could produce more for cheaper without changing the factories, and they could, is markedly similar to car manufacturers. The failure of this economics is that it in cars it doesn't account for those maimed and requiring permanent care or support, in tanks it would have been demonstrated in fighting an economic base you should defeat which would roll over you by having built proper tanks). Western Europe has a lot to thank FDR's US for - they didn't save us from the Nazis; they saved us from the Soviets. And they saved as much of Europe as could have been expected: more than they could militarily have claimed.
Their approach to historicism can be gleaned from a quote on Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money "FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt." The blind ideology of the far right always makes me laugh. A Keynesian government (to some extend) left power with balanced books - a non-keynesian government took power and spends to death. The difference is that their spending is assumed to be sustainable as it seeks to acquire foreign wealth for America. No source other than imperial pillage will make the federal budget of the US sustainable. Never had that much time for Lenin, but he sure got that one right. Imperialism bolsters unsustainable capitalism. The anti-FDR attacks from the extreme right wing in America (that is, BTW the centre of the Republican party) are also beautifully ahistoric. FDR was a traitor to the world for signing the Yalta agreement? Well sure Yalta kind of sucked for Eastern Europe and we're all sorry about that. But what should he have done? Taken on the Red Army? That fantasy depends on non-examination of the second world war. The Western front was irrelevant, all the people that died there did not bring down the Nazi government. The Soviet Union did it. The sacrifices and battles on the Western front saved some of Europe, no more. If the allies had decided to take on the Red Army it would have rolled on to Calais and taken the whole of Europe with very little resistance. I suspect Stalin regretted not doing it while he had the chance. They had all the oil. They had the troops, airforce, and a frightening battery of artillery. They had many more tanks. Their tanks weren't rubbish (they did receive tanks as aid from the US but used to shoot themselves rather than drive them - the Soviets used rather risky tactics which was fine if you were driving one of their steel mostrosities, but not in one of the US suicide machines - I must do a footnote on US tanks in the second world war, the cynicism of their manufacturers [putting the magazine in the turret to ensure instant death if you got hit] and failure to rectify the design faults on the basis that they could produce more for cheaper without changing the factories, and they could, is markedly similar to car manufacturers. The failure of this economics is that it in cars it doesn't account for those maimed and requiring permanent care or support, in tanks it would have been demonstrated in fighting an economic base you should defeat which would roll over you by having built proper tanks). Western Europe has a lot to thank FDR's US for - they didn't save us from the Nazis; they saved us from the Soviets. And they saved as much of Europe as could have been expected: more than they could militarily have claimed.
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