Gitmo: "Soooo beautiful!"

Apparently Miss Universe toured Guantanamo Bay last week and just did not have enough good things to say about the place. Creepiest quote: "We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills." Geez. Someone please kill us all.

Related: it has come to my attention recently that many people have not seen Miss Teen USA 2007's rambling discussion of why we Americans don't technically know anything about where anything is in the whole entire world. Please watch this. Special guest appearance by AC Slater.



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In the wrong hands, the saxophone is an instrument of pure evil.

For some reasn I really loved this shirt. "Genesis," and a big gas pump. This shirt is a metaphor. Not sure what for.

Related to this, translated Phil Collins songs are huge here, sometimes with a techno beat, sometimes with extra saxophone solos. Hurl hurl hurl.

Also, I went to a place the other night to study with a friend, and there was a band that played what I recognized to be Coldplay songs, including saxophone lead-ins and solos.

Saxophoned Coldplay songs sound a lot like Disintegration-era Cure, and at some point before I realized what it was, I got sort of excited because I thought it was a weird version of "Plainsong."

It was not.

I'm working on the subjunctive this week.

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Post-Apocalyptic Guatemala Scenario

Went out a couple weeks ago to Nuevo Amanecer, which is a community of returned refugees who lived in Chiapas until the peace accords here were signed in 1996. It was an interesting trip: got to see rubber trees being bled for rubber, saw a honey-making business. Also toured a tortilleria where I had a revelation about machine-made tortillas. The reason that they are thin, limp, dry cardboard compared to handmade tortillas is the tortilla-making machine. The whole apparatus is a series of conveyors, and one conveyor is also a heating element. If the tortillas are paper thing, the machine can cook them in literally two seconds. And when they're still warm, they are really really good.

Anyway, on the way up we headed past the trash dump, which is maybe informal, maybe formal, not sure. All I know is that you can smell it coming, and it's a creepy half mile stretch of burning plastic and rusty mattress springs. Everything's on fire, to dispose of the burnable stuff, and the poorest people in the area pick through the rest for glass and other things of marginal value. Many of them are kids, and at any given time there seems to be maybe 20 people picking through it, all day.

And dozens of vultures circle, and it makes you feel bad about life.

I realize there are no people in the pictures, but really, I'm not exaggerating. It's just that it's incredibly tacky to take pictures of children picking through garbage.

Staples Center/LA Live Article from LA Times

I don't really have super strong opinions about the Staples Center, having only ventured into that general area once to check out Steely Dan. I don't feel like much of a real Angeleno, and the complex falls outside of the six block radius where I spend most of my time. But I ran across this LA Times opinion piece from last month, and thought this was the best quote I've maybe ever heard about it:

When you get right down to it, their architecture is fundamentally not really architecture at all but an extensive series of armatures on which the developer and its tenants can hang logos, video screens and a sophisticated range of lighting effects.

It's an interesting read for the Angelenos out there.

The problem . . . is that it actively discourages any of the activities we traditionally associate with the use of collective space in a city: talking, reading, sitting under a tree, even pausing with a friend for a cup of coffee.

Don Henley Wants Me Dead

After writing the last post I went home, where someone was working on putting a new door on a friend of the family's car. He was listening to the radio and I was dismayed to hear "Hotel California" in Spanish. I could not escape it anywhere I went in the house or, it seems, in the entire city of Xela. If I knew such a travesty had been recorded in Spanish I may have thought twice about learning the language.

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Don Henley Will Chase You Everywhere You Go For Your Entire Life

I heard a little bit of the ol' AutoTune on a song yesterday, it was like a weird reggaeton song with the singer doing T-Pain style AutoTune. I realized at this moment that for the first time in over a year, I have not heard T-Pain or Lil Wayne's voice for at least a week. I don't even hate Lil Wayne, but it's a welcome respite.

However, just as I was wrapping up here, "Hotel California" came on. I don't know what it is but there's something about the Eagles that just gets my will to live way way down.

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