This weekend I was struck by a text I should have read at 13. Ring W. Lardner's " You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters as has been established in the logs as the definitive tract on the American. The master anthropologist already posted on this text, but his headcase is not mine and my exposure to this text has absolutely dominated my weekend. Lardner, a man with the benefit of great exposure tells the story of Jack, a hayseed of little exposure through Jack's epistles to his buddy Al back home. (more...)
Archive for the ‘Midwestern Rube’ Category
Ring Lardner And Confronting My Own Inner Hayseed
Monday, February 4th, 2019Reading Two English Language Publications On Uruguay
Thursday, January 31st, 2019Our first publication comes from the "Winter 2019" issue of Dissent Magazine. It is an English language translation of a piece by a "professor of history at the Universidad de la República" who has side gigs as "a researcher at the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores del Uruguay" and "president of the Superior Council of the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales."1 Let us begin with the title block: (more...)
- The awful trend of presenting history as a "social science" rather than a humanity lives here as well. [↩]
More Lessons Learned - Pizarro Entering 2019
Friday, January 11th, 2019Spending 2018 in Uruguay has not been the easiest thing, but it beats the US. Aloe flowers here. Qntra lives having avoided final disposal during the 2017 to 2018 transition, but life goes on. I failed early in the year to carry what would become Pizarro into a going concern. A river of blood was avoided when the Republic came forth to invest coin and time into bringing Pizarro out of what was left.
mircea_popescu: so : as far as i know, bingoBoingo is working on qntra and on pizarro. he's doing a very fine job with the former ; i'm nonplussed with recently discovering just how broken the latter's mp-wp offering actually was ; moreover it seems to me from a distance pizarro's still financially and customer-wise entirely dependent, ie as close to failure as you can possibly get without spelling it out.
Pizarro is still dependent. The conversion engine escapes me, and the difficulties this presents are compounded by Pizarro's lack of available hardware in the rack to be selling. As it stands there's one currently vacant Rockchip, a machine hosting DNS and Qntra which could be made available by moving the services to another machine, and an S.NSA cold spare ready to be put into use supporting Phuctor when it gets big spinning rust disks. Barring an infusion of hardware, we have shared hosting.1
Combing through alt-alt and anti-Pantsuit heathens there is a curious and oddly persistent belief that Trump is going to put forth some sort of "Internet Freedom" initiative which will apparently break the Silicon Valley Pantsuits and let the various aspiring National Socialists return to the platforms those other socialists get to use. The man talks about a wall, he talks about bringing the USG's aspirations back down towards what it might do, but this very specific idea a number of these strings and forums advance is not something I have found in Trump. Still much as the Pantsuits will comb Trump for dogwhistles for their strawman... Anglin, Heartiste, and poorly identified forum strings have developed this idea to insulate themselves from the need to break with Pantsuit.
It is hard for me to tell if this is a savior complex or something else, but these odd ideas about Trump are an obstacle. That people who hate Obama and the Deep State and hate that the Deep State is constraining Trump are willing to bet it all on the elderly and mortal Trump fixing their problems as an alt-mammy instead of turning towards The Republic baffles me. Even when I manage a piece of evangelical Republican writing well received by the targeted community as measured by 'likes'... the reception warm reception is fuctionally empty. The other common response is curiosity about Uruguay, and the meat passes by. If there was meat to begin with.
The observation that I am becoming a gruff, curmudgeonly old male rings true. Living, surrounded by all of these alien cultures, I am becoming better at navitating Latinos and their formalities. Yet it still grates that the standard response to "Are you Xstring" is "Soy yo", completely absent an affirmative or negative. As ungrammatical as "a mi mismo" may be gven the rest of the language, at least it specifies a target. "Soy yo" grates as an empty tautology. Then there's the peculiar manner in which trust functions among Latinos in that while all strangers are untrusted by default simply starting a conversation overcomes the barrier in most cases.
The pile of things the Republic has with which to attract continues growing. FFA, Eulora, Cuntoo, the list goes on and yet... Republican evangelism faces a less receptive ocean than it did in 2015 when TRB occupied center stage. It wasn't until the Pizarro Rockchip offering that the recipe for a clean gentoo started getting passed around. Before the Rockchip, Republican doctrine favored older distros, but was dominated by negative recommendations. Don't use X. Not here's how to get something cleaner. In 2018 the Republic made substantial steps towards positive as opposed to simply negative declarations, but the work continues.
Aside from the dependence issue, Pizarro rapidly accumulated a documentation debt exemplified by the massive running GPG textfile of everything from missile codes to the most mundane of notes intertwined into a mess. Progress has been made opening the book keeping to the point the December 2018 statement was hours rather than weeks late.2 I am not happy that nearly a year into Pizarro that this is what progress looks like, but what is, is.
As it stands without further capital infusion it appears Pizarro will fail in March or April. With further capital infusion that date can be extended. I am inclined to crank the outreach measures up even more as I move to walkingless promising databases. I am unsure if the Republic can economically utililze enough dulap class machines and Rockchips to cover Pizarro's fixed costs in the near to mid term provided the machines are brought to Uruguay. This uncertainty creates the sort of destabilizing wobble which consumes far to many of my brain's clock cycles. As much as the Republic rightly frowns upon 'man alone' activity in other areas, when it comes to marketing/evangelism... I'm my self evaluations suggest I am too isolated3 in respect to the man alone index.
I can't rightfully expect the forum to offer easy answers quickly or quick answers easily, but I hope to get some discussions.
- Shared hosting which entered December on shaky ground and left December refined thanks to intervention by Mircea Popescu supporting one of his girls. [↩]
- For the December statement the major consumer of time was the customer equity calculation and rereading. With the November statement the major consumer of time was making sense of an unaccounted surplus carried over from July and August. [↩]
- For what its worth perhaps to my peril, I have not yet engaged in more than a cursory survey of the secular employment landscape in Uruguay. I want Pizarro to work, and pray it does. for that I am not persuing secular employment here. The loss to worry I haven't found a manner to eliminate.
In spite of, or perhaps influenced by the worry the pull to plant roots in this country has been strong, as measured in tempation to get a dog. [↩]
Preparations For The Second Navidad In Uruguay
Monday, December 24th, 2018
Well, I've been in Uruguay for more than a year. That means Harry is festively attired for the occasion. It also means these past few days the number of bums in my neighborhood has increased along with the number of fireworks stands. The recent discovery that the the ExpoCannabis more resembIes the Argentine Comicon documented by Hanbot than anything else after attending it this year following substantial hype for the event last year has cemented by low opinion on most things the locals intend.
No, when they intend something the results disappoint. These people seem more moved by the sun, the moon, and the tides. Bums from places like Cerro,1 which is a poor shithole. Normally the pichis don't migrate en masse because they aren't organizable, and when they do move individually the moves are contentious and usually undertaken under duress. Such is life for those lacking doors and locks. Yet during the days before Navidad the accumulate around the Shoppings to panhandle and fight the local bums.
Earlier today one of the local tramps generally engaged in neighborhood improvement2 advised me that the petty crime had really gone up in the past week, and I had to agree. Also happening during this increase in petty crimes? A lot more police doing foot patrols in pairs. There's even normal police patroling on the Rambla in what is normally Navy police territory, and yet... more police, more crime?
Gloria, the Peruana is not a full time resident of the habitation module, but she is spending increasing amounts of time here cleaning, cooking, adoring me, and being the losing party in the never ending tickle fight. Her dedication to cleanliness is impressive. I'll find her laudering shirts and other white clothes that I'd just retrieved from the lavadero earlier in the day. When she leaves for her pension3 near the border between Tres Cruces and Cordón she'll take half of my towels and return them clean.
She's fascinated by white people food, particular the parts that don't intersect with the Uruguayo menu. Consider:
This month's fascination is chocolate chip cookies. She was absolutely horrified by the amount of butter, especially after it was bulked up by blonde sugar. Stuffing last month was simpler: make a sort of soup, mix a bunch of dry bread in the soup, and bake. She will expertly dice vegatables and produce rich soups and stews out of what appears to be very little. She's managed to cook just about any protein I've presented her without consulting any reference materials. She can wake up in the morning, cut potatoes, and immersion fry them in a skillet without making a mess to produce papas fritas for breakfast without appearing to expend anymore effort than a typical North American assembling a bowl of cereal. Yet measuring, mixing, and baking appears as some sort of myserious dark magic to her.
Compared to last year I have yet to see Judas burning or anti-semetic stickers, but the fireworks haven't even gone off yet. But the trash situation already decaying, and I have a more complete picture of the Christmas related bum situation. It's also nice composing a post in a less Spartanly configured mp-wp, coming soon for Pizarro customers.
- Cerro is a beach barrio on the other side of Montevideo bay. Cerro and its Western extension Casabó have quite a bit of shoreline. And the old hilltop fort! And a golf club! All of the things that superficially make it seems like a place where things could happen. But being on the wrong side of the bay, no one ever made a case for it and the result is a beach favela. Residents of Cerro are bitter about how this happened and from time to time graffiti will appear in the parks of Pocitos and Punta Carretas alternately declaring the glory of Cerro or proclaiming that Pocitos and Punta Carretas are actually Cerro. [↩]
- This means he puts trash into dumpsters instead of doing the opposite as the bums do, repairs sections of the sidewalk in his territory when they come lose, and along with other tasks relating to cleanliness and neighborhood safety. He further keeps less desirable bums out of his turf and does more to discourage petty crime than the Police do. For his work he gets an aclove sheltered from the weather and donations of food and change more generous than the bums recieve. When his right eye was puffed up and swollen with puss after an altercation with a bum, I filled his antibiotics prescription for him. His death or disablity beyond his occasional intoxication would be a profound negative, but a couple hundred pesos is a bigger ask than I expected the Uruguayos to fill. [↩]
- It is one of four bedrooms tucked behind a kiosko in a single story building, shared kitchen and a couple shared bathrooms. College dorm style rules to keep the girls from killing each other. Standard, for this type of accomodation, prohibition on overnight guests because the owner doesn't want to get a whorehouse license. No windows, skylight in the common area, no air conditioning, bring your own heat in the winter... This is the typical accomodation for the unmarried women without families. There are similar more limited options for single men, but they are usually advertised exclusively for students (though not usually enforced in practice) and an age cap. [↩]
The Expocannabis An Executive Report
Monday, December 17th, 2018For my Cumpleuruguayo I checked into the old barracks for a few nights and decided to check out the Expocannabis which I heard so much about my first few days after arriving in Uruguay. After a night making sure my ears could still mostly understand spoken Portuguese1 I decided to hop on the bus.
I arrived at LATU the "Laboratorio Tecnológico del Uruguay" roughly half an hour early and found a shady place to sit. The fence pictured is not the fence surrounding LATU. That fence surrounds a campus with an area roughly 8 typical Montevideo city blocks in size, but this is car friendly Carrasco with strip malls and parking lots for just about every business. As can be seen the Expo is still being assembled at T minus 30 minutes until it kicks off.
At 14:00 hours local time I make my way to the entry on the other side of the corral. The area enclosed in the corrall appears to be equivalent to the playing area of between 2 and 3 American Football fields. On this first day I was admitted after presenting my ticket to be scanned to a girl with a pnoHe. She signaled to a gossiping old man to give me a wrist band while 5 other persons gossiped and watched the que occasionally admitting people as they worked in three person ticket taking teams. Apparently wrist bands are expensive. When I returned subsequent days I was admitted after engaging in short contests of who could be more incredulous, I who had the expectation that new day equals new wrist band, or they who thought tossing a wrist band because who won't wear or take off and repair the same strip of paper for 3 consecutive sunny afternoons.
Even at an event celebrating a plant whose history of producing fiber suitable for pulping and paper... the locals treat scraps of paper as a valuable commodity.
Entering the Expohall lobby we see a small educational area. This is the garden. None of the plants in the garden have mature flowers. None of the plants anywhere in the expo would end up having mature flowers. This appears to have been intentional, given the ample documentation available on stable cannabis cultivars.
None of the edible cannabis products sold openly in the Sunday ferias were sold openly during the expo. Nothing psychoactive was openly sold at all.
The offical expo swag corner enjoyed priviledged position in the nominally educational lobby.
The obligatory science fair style poster presentation ends the educational lobby area. Not in the lobby area, but in the "Guía -Expo- Cannabis" obtained in the hostel was a "Cronograma de Actividades" full of academic presentations and panels largely focused on legal and policy wank.
But we're looking for rebels!
Going to the sales floor we find this rotary garden.
Eventually people will come.
Seeds.
Local seeds.
Local press doing something.
I2 AM THE PRESS!
HERE LIES BATMIX!!!
One of many booths operated by local grow shops selling subsets of their normal inventory at 25-75% markups over in store prices.
Mujicannabis, a "brand" apparently trying to sell clothes. The normal sort not made with any part of the cannabis plant. Just doing the low effort, lowest legal risk "I'm just an artist printing speech man" schtick. And yes, there are many more unattended booths not pictured.
Seeds and growshop apparently collaborative project. The relation between Spanish seedbank Dinafem and the locals could not be discerned over the course of the weekend.
Outdoors in the food court area of the corral. Stage on left, expo hall on right, food trailers behind. The food trailers number three putting this on par with the Highland, Illinois3 Municipal Band concerts on Friday nights during the summer and far behind the Highland, Illinois Schweizerfest in serving capacity and variety.
As time went on this space filled up and the level of intoxication increased. Numerous retards walked with their pnoHes just below eye level taking video as they ambled. Everything I hate about local pedestrian habits amped up several orders of magnitude. A majority of stoners in the smoking corral appeared to lack their own marijuana and formed crowds gathering around giant novelty joints or awkwardly tried to integrate into bong circles.
As with the sales floor centerpiece capable bongs were few. Small dab rigs4 dominated clustered around rosin presses used to discard the plant matter found in cannabis flowers leaving psychotropic resins for consumption.5
A burger and fries with mustard.
As the weekend went on I'd walk, get fed up with retards and leave for air. Come back, get fed up with retards, and repeat. Saturday afternoon for far too long the stage was occupied by a group of girls in a group composed of nothing but saxophones. In a suburban area with ambient road noise leaking in, a music group composed of nothing but saxophones on microphones is torture.
As to be expected given the strength of contemporary cannabis there were at all times far more people ambling around incredibly stoned than actively smoking. I doubt any effective Republican evangelism occurred at the Expocannabis itself. It may, but probably won't be worth revisiting this event with outreach intent using different strategies next year. Overall I'd say the Expocannabis is most similar in size to the Perry County Fair in Pinckneyville, Illinois6 homecoming though the setting of the Expocannabis is a bit more rural. I was expecting something closer to the DuQuion State Fair.
Spending the weekend at the hostel by contrast was a pleasant experience. In spite of a complete turnover of the volunteers my position in the hostel heirarchy was swiftly re-established. The English language, which had come to become too common when I left for the current habitation module, in the interm had retreated back to the level it was when I first arrived. When I first arrived one year ago listening to conversations was a tiring exercise which resulted in me unserstanding very little of what was being said. This year listening was easy, productive, and joined by the opportunity to actively participate in coversations. Like last year Portuguese was the dominant hostel language, but Spanish was present to a stonger degree than last year. Some of the same Brasileros and Brasileras from last year returned this year.
Reports were hostel goers had better luck acquiring cannabis for themselves anywhere but the Expocannabis though there were no problems for anyone wanting to get high at the expo. Prices reported were substantially higher than normal though Uruguay is in the awkard period where high tourism season is in swing but the traditional harvest season is several months away.7
One major change over last year is that the folks working street corners last year advertising cannabis had largely moved on to advertising cocaine this year.
- Who and When are still a bit iffy [↩]
- Not pictured [↩]
- Population 9919 per the 2010 census. For comparison the number printed on my ticket was in the low 40,000s [↩]
- A dab rig is a type of water pipe that resembles a bong scaled down to be a crack pipe [↩]
- The discarded plant matter is not completely without psycotropic contents and can be used as feed for chemical extractions later. A point I suspect was not lost to the fellows who brought and operated the presses. [↩]
- population 5,464 [↩]
- With modern autoflower genetics a crop planted in August and harvested in October/November could exploit this being dryed, cured, and dank in time for the tourists. [↩]