Euro up a tiny bit, real up quite a bit during real taking season. Only a 10th of a peso movement between UYU and USD.
Peso Watch January 2019
January 31st, 2019Reading Two English Language Publications On Uruguay
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: Read the rest of this entry »
- The awful trend of presenting history as a "social science" rather than a humanity lives here as well. [↩]
Terminal Pantsuit Discourse: No, There is No "We" In "Si se puede"
January 24th, 2019The ongoing USG interference in Venezuelan domestic politics has lead to an observation that the USG propaganda outlet CNN has been translating sloppily and lazily. Notably taking:
Si/í se Puede
On the streets of to be
Yes we can.
This doesn't work. First for the minor point that verbally sí meaning yes and si meaning if need to be distinguished. The distinguising happens through conversation. In a chant the ambuguity CANNOT be resolved. Ths quirk of the language does have cultural impacts. At the other end of the chant the English word "can" maps onto the root word "poder" in Spanish which can be branched as follows:
- I can == Puedo
- You can == Puedes
- He/She can == Puede
- We can == Podemos
- They/Yall can == Pueden
Which form of the verb poder is chosen determines who can. As you can see there are plural option of this list for the first as well as second and third person perspectives. Puede is clearly singular. One person can, and that person can be a third person or the second person addressed formally in the third person. As far as the pronoun "se" it can do a lot of things. The only thing of importance here is that excludes introducing the first person. This allow clarifying that one person who is neither me nor us can. However it could be you provided you are cool enough to formally address in the third person.
At no point at all is there a "We" involved.
Which leads to the wonder of why the tired Hussein Bahamas campaign slogan is being forced on to these poor Venezuelan marchers? Could it be CNN and the Pantsuit femstate were abusively instead mocking the English language. That the "We" in Obama's "Yes we can" was never about the abusively educated kids getting to be a part of the "we."
US Pantsuit Interest In The Spanish Langage
While CNN is abusively mistranslating street chants for their handicapped English as a single language audience, they at the same time publish numerous puff pieces favoring mass Central American immigration of a very particular sort to the United States. They advocate bringing the poorest of Central America's poor into the United States to deliver them asylum from their own poverty.
I don't particularly care whether poor Hondurans speak their Mayan languages in Honduras, California, New York, or Alaska. I find it peculiar that the particular Central American country Pantsuit has focused on is the one that speaks the least Spanish. As far as I can tell Pantsuits appear to be giving up on language as a tool for social engineering their Femstate.
Consider the situation on the ground in Venezuela. Both sworn Presidents of Venezuela drew enormous crowds in rallies supporting them. Now there are Venezuelans, mostly outside of Venezuela who hold strong political opinions which they try to ground in reasons, to the extent they can given the toxic information warfare environment dominated by dueling flavors of socialism. There's surely some of these in Venezuela as well mostly trapped by family obligations. The major dispute in the crowds however is a simple one.
One group is comfortable with the dry goods basket Maduro's team delivers to them. The other group thinks someone else could give them a better dry goods basket. This makes very educated Venezuelans who survived intense schooling in the soviet tradition very uncomfortable when mentioned.
The Gibs Problem
US Pantsuits see what is happening in Venezuela and they envy it, seeing how it matches the strategy they have been using to dominate urban politics in the United States expanded to a national scale. Consider the last few US presidential elections:
- Bush/Gore: Two candidates debate dueling visions for the US leadership in the World
- Bush/Kerry: Two candidates debate dueling visions for the US in a world where the US apparently is less popular than imagined.
- Obama/McCain: Hope, Change and free shit versus a stern lich1 imagining himself a Maverick while pathologically agreeing with Hope/Change guy.
- Obama/McCain: Now he can (after failing to deliver) versus polite fellow uncommitted to win it
- Trump/Clinton: Narrative of redemption and a path for more gibs versus old woman who waited her turn.
It appears whoever most convincingly makes the case they are going to give the people what they want wins. Simplifying what the people want to a particular monthly basket of dry goods sure seems to cut out a lot of messy business. Nevermind the difficulty of holding the elected government to their promised dry goods basket while being the sort of biped choosing a government over how many noodles they are offering. Maybe one candidate offers longer noodles, another a higher count of noodles, neither are likely going to want to be pinned down and made to offer a weight of noodles.
What Is Pantsuit Talking About Today?
Today the trendy Pantsuit organs, the remains of Gawker, WaPo's magazines et al are talking about a story they broke this weekend. A white 14 year old boy attending an anti-abortion protest with a a group from his catholic school was part of a group aggressed by "Black Israelites" from another protest group hurling racial abuse. An old "Native American Rights" protestor with yet another protest decided to intervene in the situation by approaching the school group and aggressively beating a drum inches away from the school group. The fact the the white kid reacted by smiling triggered a fountain of outrage.
After days of being outraged, hedging their outrage, and doubling down on their outrage, the Pantsuit press continue targeting this one 14 year old boy personally by name. Now they are outraged that they've driven the kid to issue a statement that his does no feel sorry towards the old chief who got in his face with a drum. There's little to the story other than the kids haven't been completely cowed out of politely standing their ground.
Yet, at a time when another color revolution is going on and and Iraq style "humanitarian intervention" is in the works... they can't stop writing about the kid and putting his headlines above actual developing news. Instead they wring every ounce of emotional response out of the kid's smirk because they have to try their damnest to drown out reality with concern over form.
What Is Pantsuit Not Talking About Today?
The sad story of Simón Bolivar who inspired by the colonies to the north casting off the British worked to liberate the southern Americas from the Spanish. However when spreading Democracy he took the gringo "people" out of context to mean all featherless bipeds with flat nails at at time the gringos were using people to mean a much narrower class of bipeds. He spent his last years horrified by the monster he wrought which in his own lifetime frequently materialized as elections decided by who promised the most generous monthly rations.
Fellow citizens! I blush to say this: Independence is the only benefit we have acquired, to the detriment of all the rest - Simón Bolivar
Eventually, painfully Venezuela emerged as a country. Enough of a country to take loans from Europe and get blockades after defaulting on the loans. Then the democracy brought the World Wars the Americas got leverage from having not been wrecked. Uruguay had a miracle, Argentina was a power, but Venezuela was a petro state. While the rest of the continent ran out their luck by the 70s, Venezuela was rich as late as the 1990's. Richer than Qatar, but... more populated. Then they got Chavez who read young Bolivar without reading old Bolivar. In the name of equality everyone got poorer. When elections came around, the will of the people continued to favor monthly rations over earning one's own way. Repeatedly. When Chavez died, the last of the skilled people started fleeing but Maduro kept riding this formular to the re-election for which he was just sworn in.
The Pantsuits are quiet now because they want Trump to unleash USG.RED so they can pin the ensuing debacle on Trump. All of the starving babies under Maduro be damned, Pantsuit want to unload democracy's failure in Venezuela on anything but socialism. Until the missiles start flying and Maduro sinks an aircraft carrier, Pantsuit can only bide their time and bitch about smiling white boys. Once the missiles fly they'll demand Maduro voters resettled in Ohio, but I doubt they will expend the effort to learn Spanish. Going back to the start of this post they will simply keep telling Anglophones and Spanish speakers different things while dutifully inserting themselves in the middle as unreliable translators.
- Once undying and now dead [↩]
The Internet Of Poverty Or Why Residential Internet Is Cheap
January 22nd, 2019For more than a year now I have had the priviledge of living in Uruguay while working on an Internet venture. Unpacked this means:
- Living In Uruguay: I've gone from being the longest staying guest in my initial tourist accomodation/residence to renting a residence, signing associated contracts, and generally being embedded amongst the Uruguayos. I drink the tap water, I have favored kioskos, and I know which Pichis and Planchas belong in my barrio1 and which don't. Terraforming though slow is happening. My social contacts have shifted from largely being weighted towards various types of nomads to locals and fellow immigrants.
- Internet Venture: By this I mean physical machines, actual cables, some tangible keys in addition to cryptographic ones, and a number of contacts with the upstreamprovider that I have talked to more face to face than any other communications channel. I get the priviledge of looking at the machines, checking seals, and more when the act up. In the search for a datacenter I got to appreciate how rare an independent non-Equinix datacenter is that doesn't make cloud automation software for industrial laundries their primary business.2
Problemata
Uruguay is similar to Canada in some ways with an economy supported mostly by agriculture, tourism, and some mining. While the popular analogy is proposes Uruguay as Argentina's Canada, during my time here Brasil has appeared to be the bigger influence in everything except the langauge. Manufactered goods of any sophistication come from Brasil, China, or Europe. Some consumable consumer goods of Argentine manufacture appear on store shelves, but Argentina largely doesn't have the prowess to be competitive. The 20th and 21st century history of Uruguayo and Argentino economic relations is Argentina falling from emergent world power to a regional abcess that won't heal and Uruguay catching toxic shock and other nastiness through physical proximity and cultural channels. A more accurate attempt to analogize relations in the region to Anglophone countries that Uruguay is the United Kingdom if Agentina takes the place of the US and Canada if Brazil is the US. If you try analogically mapping South American countries to US states, Argentina is Illinois and nothing else maps cleanly.
Mind that as the dollar printing press loses strength due to Bitcoin and other reasons3 that US position appears as though it will approach Argentina's more rapidly than Argentina itself did.
For all of this, a residential internet connection runs ~42 USD monthly paid in local currency. The connection is carried over an optical fiber that terminates inside the home and by most appearances functions like a home connection does in the US. Streaming video works, IRC works, torrents work, and so on. Streaming multiple high definition videos from multiple platforms just works. How does this happen at this price point in Uruguay? The answer appears to be the same as in the US or any other part of the world.
My God The Caching
It has been roughly a decade now since Netflix killed Blockbuster and then pivoted from offering a large catalog of movies distributed through the mail to a tiny catalog4 streamed over the Internet. During the first few years there was a lot of drama over the internet transit this required. The amount streamed has grown while the complaints have all but disappeared. This is not because internet transit capacity grew faster than the streaming. It is not because Internet transit got cheaper. It's because Neflix places boxes with local residential ISPs.
Google places racks boxes with residential ISPs that'll hold big chunk of Youtube and other Google mystery meat, Akamai enthusiastically racks boxes with residential ISPs that'll hold the porn flicks, and your resdential ISP will pay a pretty penny for a general caching solution under the guise of serving the web but mostly serving popular torrents... by they time your residential ISP is done they'll have a couple racks filled. They'll also have recreated something like an old school BBS system to serve most of what their customers want.
For all the press about a "high speed" and "global" internet, it is in a residential ISP's financial interest to locally cache everything it can. The only reason "high speed" connections to a "global" internet works at residential price points is because they don't have to.
Any Everything Else?
Everything else is relatively small and unavoidably expensive. This includes any realtime two way communications. The expectation of routinely carrying two way real time communications is why generally entry level "business" internet plans involve doubling the price and decimating the advertised bandwidth. It isn't simply that sticking the word "business" in front is a license to mark up. It's that a couple hours of video calls to another provider costs them more than streaming Friends beginning to end on repeat.
This means everyone smart is serving lean content. It also means that when Conde Nast presents Ars/Wired/Cosmo/BarryDillerIAC tell you to funnel all your shit through https or a VPN while wrapping 1KB of text in 2 MB of shit that they bleed. And how do they bleed.
What Does This Mean
Back in the old days 10 and 20 years ago the force driving down consumer connection prices was over subscription, that while a plan was advertised "up to" a certain speed "demand" could drive delivered speed down. Now the force driving down price is the fact that delivering 90+ percent of what the customers demand can be done from their own premises. The advertised maximum has also become unimportant so long as they can support enough simultaneous video streams on their local network as demanded.
It also means home machines are uninteresting for DDoS attacks, servers don't deal great returns, and anyone who knows what is targets the routers either intentionally or unintentionally. It means the actual deep dark web is only going to grow. It means the cost of offering anything to all comers is only going up.
Solution?
There isn't a stable one. Thankfully there can't be a stable one. Whether you hit them or not, walls are going up and location matters.
- Unlike in other Latino locales, every neighborhood is a barrio. From historical Barrio de los Judios near the not especially commercial La Commercial to the present Barrio de los Judios more commonly know as Punta Carretas. [↩]
- Asia is weird and Pacific coastline correlates with poor international internet connectivity. [↩]
- Such as form continuing to be substituted for substance. [↩]
- Featuring classics such as Fireplace For Your Home: Birchwood Edition [↩]
More Lessons Learned - Pizarro Entering 2019
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. [↩]
Peso Watch December 2018
December 31st, 2018
USD down one tenth of a Peso Uruguayo.
Preparations For The Second Navidad In Uruguay
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
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. [↩]
Thanksgiving And Ongoing Cultural Exchanges
November 28th, 2018Let us look at where this city used to be:
We have the obligatory fortress hill across the bay surrounded by comparatively new ghetto. On this side of the bay the old city is distinguised from barrio Centro by the newer hood's wider streets capable of being lined with trees.
The footprint of the city as it was when the British occupied it with 10,000 men for 9 months, the footprint of the Capital of a newly independent country, of a country that fought decades of civil wars... It all sits there in an area I don't spend much time because it is too far from the parts of the city I use. The only streets in that footprint still regarded as relatively important are 18 de Julio which starts where the old city ends and the Rambla which hugs the coast. The city's major thoroughfares Avenida General Riviera, Boulevard Artigas, Avenida Italia, 8 de Octubre, and Louis Alberto Herrera don't even come as close to the city as it was as the building whose roof the city was photographed from.
It is a tiny portion compared to the size of the city's footprint today.
Coming from where I do, last week there was a holiday. One of two where everything shuts down back home as compared to the many down here where everything shuts down, though to a lesser extent in my barrio compared to the rest of the city. Here the billoards marketed the day after the holiday, as they do back home. Advertisements were everywhere though fewer people than normal were hanging out at the mall for Black Friday. I suppose big sales aren't much of a draw when the money with which to buy what is on sale is lacking.
Anyways, seeing as having particular foods is a major point of the holliday I had some work to do. With Gloria the Peruana as a competent cook, the bird problem resolved itself. The only turkeys were frozen US imports offered at 329 pesos a kilo, I didn't think to acquire a duck or goose for butchery at the Feria the Sunday before, and a whole splayed seasoned "pollo parrillero" was 400 pesos.
The concept of stuffing however didn't parse when described with words, so I had to demonstrate. Thusly a portion of the groceries were understood, and the purpose of a substantial number of the groceries was likely beyond the understanding of anyone other than myself in the store that the loaves of crusty bread, chorizo, cebollas, and pasas de uvas rubias had a common fate.
Here we have the chorizo browning with the onions, raisins, and mix of balcony grown and commercially acquired herbs. The two loaves of bread had already been torn and dried in the oven to the kitchen's puzzlement while the stock lay in wait to hydrate the whole orchestra before the much of hydration would once again be sacrificed and baked off in the oven. The result was understood and lauded. It turns out stuffing theory can indeed be grasped.
Peso Watch November 2018
November 28th, 2018
From last month the Peso Uruguayo ticked down a slight bit across the board.