Far South of I-10

I'm in quito for work and I'm stuck in the hotel room because I've picked up some kind of stomach virus that won't go away. All I've done for the past 24 hours is migrate from the computer to the bed to the bathroom, so I got to watch about 15 hours of TV yesterday. One of the expat channels is showing forrest gump this week, so I settled down to watch forrest and bubba discuss boiled shrimp fried shrimp, shrimp sandwich, etc. One scene that particularly jarred me was the peace protest rally, where they are protesting Fucking VIETNAM! The big banner behind the podium says "Support our GI's, bring them home". Which makes me wonder if the hippies even spent money to reprint signs for this war, or they are using the same ones. Iraq and Vietnam are similar in that the roots of both wars are deep. There were several points in time before ground troops were in vietnam where we could have changed policies, not returned indo china to france after WWII, not

One of the reasons I've felt weirded out this past week, apart from too much work and not enough time to do it is that I'm reading 'One- hundred years of solitude' by the colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I tried to start reading it in spanish, but it is so different and weird that my first reaction was 'fuck, my spanish must really suck, because I don't have any idea what he's talking about.' So I bought the english version instead and it really is a fantastic book, in every sense of the word fantastic. It follows 5 generations of the Buendia family and it rings so true at the same time that every almost single event that happens in it is false and magical, the story is told in the past fantastical tense. Everything that happens could be a later mythical interpretation of past events, instead of a town being built because a group of young couples are moving away from their parents after one of the men kills a rival, instead they leave because

Do you ever travel to a different city and go to one of those places...what's it called? oh yeah, a casino, and you play craps for about 4 hours and lose $100 in a slow unfun kind of way while drinking what do you call them? oh yeah, cuba libres, then you get get tired of losing so you go over to the $5 baccarat table even though you don't know the rules, but it's really pretty easy so you play and you win back your money plus another $50. Then you go back to your room and turn on the tv and they have what's it called? oh yeah, the wizard of oz with Pink floyd's dark side of the moon dubbed over it, and it plays and it plays and it seems to fit so perfectly that you realize that pink floyd, the people that wrote the wizard of oz and the guy that dubbed the movie with the album are all doing you know, what's that called? oh yeah....serious drugs. Man, I hate it when that happens. [dorothy is just meeting the scarecrow, and "dark side of the moon" is p

I've been so busy lately that this morning I'm actually tharn. Like a rabbit being stalked by a coyote, or a manager stalked by too many employees, I'm laying in the grass with my ears flat against my head as snowflakes of emails drift down around me and the buzzing cricket of my cellphone rings incessantly. Should I dash for the warren, just shut down my rabbit computer and leave the crickett where it lies, vibrating? Unfortunately, I'm in the warren, it's sunday morning and the oilfield is calling me here at home....shit, no more rabbit metaphors.

Steve Martin has a great blurb in the New Yorker called 72 Virgins. Linked from Instapundit, since I'm so busy lately the only web surfing I do is check LGF and instapundit to see what's going on in the world. It's sunday, so I read the Nytimes & times picayune too, yeah! Here's the 20's, I hope bin ladin is enjoying his 72 Virginians : Virgin No. 21: I hope you’re not going to sleep with me and then go sleep with seventy-one others. Virgin No. 22: Do you mind if we listen to Mannheim Steamroller? Virgin No. 23: Are you O.K. with the dog on the bed? Virgin No. 24: Would you mind saying, “Could I see you in my office, Miss Witherspoon?”? Virgin No. 25: Ride me! Ride me, Lucky Buck! Virgin No. 26: You like your vanilla hot? Virgin No. 27: Does Ookums like Snookums? Virgin No. 28: It’s so romantic here, dead. Virgin No. 29: Well, I’m a virgin, but my hand isn’t. Virgin No. 30: You are in?