Category: From the Old Server

Here are some random things that I have observed so far on this trip to Mexico:

• eight Mexicans speaking English to each other all night at a dinner party so that their one American guest (me) would not feel left out
  
• a family gathered around the grave of a loved one offering me a drink of whiskey
  
• families staying up all night with musicians and refreshments
  
• two Japanese tourists, complete with nametags and three cameras, marching in Santa Maria del Tule’s “Parade of Death”
  
• three tall white Americans dressed by REI and bedizened with cameras in a small village’s graveyard saying “we’re not tourists, we’re photographers”
  
• tens of thousands of flowers for sale in an open-air market with upbeat Latin music playing
  
• enormous banners hanging from the sides of churches and cathedrals arguing against the legalization of abortion (abortion is currently illegal in Mexico but if you have USD$3000 you can get breast augmentation, laser hair removal, Viagra (“30% off” according to the big signs in Oaxacan pharmacies), and a procedure in a discreet private clinic)
  
• Spanish-speakers cringing in pain when I pronounce Oaxaca “Oh-axe-a-ka” (to be consistent with the English pronunciation of a hard “ex” in “Mexico”)
  
• multi-acre downtown cactus garden from the balcony of one of the world’s best prehispanic art museums
  
• a brass band playing and costumed locals dancing for hours underneath the balcony next to my restaurant table on the main square in Oaxaca

In addition to seeing a lot of interesting and fun things I found a good job to apply for once I get my commercial helicopter rating.  It seems that on the north shores of the Hawaiian islands there are surfers who pay to be dropped from a helicopter into the middle of a swell.  From there they get onto a jetski and are towed to the top of the 18-24 foot waves that are typical in the Hawaiian winter.  One would need an endorsement to be legal to carry surfboards externally strapped to the helicopter skids but otherwise it didn’t sound too challenging and you’d be meeting cool people all day.

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Imagine an average guy with an average job (tire salesman, cubicle-dwelling Java programmer, whatever) with two teenage kids.  The father is upset because his son is using heroin.  Now that the movie Ray is out the son can reply “if I stayed off the smack I might be able to get a job like yours dad but I’d rather be like Ray Charles.”  The 17-year-old daughter is pregnant with her second child, which also earns her some verbal abuse from dad.  In the 1970s she would have to suffer this abuse but today when Buddhism is recognized as the provably optimal religion for human felicity she can say “sorry that you’re upset dad; I was ‘in the moment’ when this baby was conceived.”

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A friend in Alaska sent this email in response to a postcard from warm sunny Greece:

“So, you are there…and… well…we are here… in the snow, sleet, rain, pestilence, fog, and darkness.  What more can be said?  The dogs are howling, the bears are hibernating, and we are hunkered in our camp, slowly cooking cassoulet while riding out the storm.  In fact, it has been so bad here that one of our local judges, Sam Adams, age 47, died of a heart attack while on a moose hunt a week ago, and he had to stay put with his hunting party for a few days before the clouds could clear and the plane could land. Can you imagine being one of the guys around the fire, wondering whether to put cards in Sam’s hand, or look for another moose, etc.”

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Picked up a copy of The Onion on the street corner in Manhattan and enjoyed this entry, headline “Tibetan Teen Getting into Western Philosophy”:

LHASA, TIBET—Deng Hsu, 14, said Monday that he is “totally getting into Western philosophy.” “I’ve been reading a lot of Kant, Descartes, and Hegel, and it’s blowing my mind,” Hsu said. “It’s so exotic and exciting, not like all that Buddhist ‘being is desire and desire is suffering’ shit my parents have been cramming down my throat all my life. Most of the kids in my school have never even heard of Hume’s views on objectivity or Locke’s tabula rasa.” Hsu said he hopes to one day make an exodus to north London to visit the birthplace of John Stuart Mill.

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This article on physician salaries should be emailed to undergrads planning their future and, perhaps more importantly, to any person with a PhD who insists on calling him or herself “doctor”.  It turns out that the average physician in the U.S. makes around $200,000/year after paying malpractice insurance and all other expenses.  The clever docs who specialized in radiology earn a median income of $350,000/year after paying their malpractice insurance premium of $12,000/year.  So next time the pompous PhD signs an email with “Dr.” ask him “Wow, are you making $200,000+/year?  No?  Why not?”

Maybe these are the folks who’ve stripped America’s car dealers of all the minivans…

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Just got back from a showing of the new Alexander Payne movie Sideways here in Manhattan. I went with a couple of old friends to this movie about old friends on a pre-wedding bachelor road trip in central California wine country. Everyone in the theater was laughing. Highly recommended.

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I keep reading about how the U.S. economy is in such bad shape and that people are out of work.  Yet when I try to buy a new minivan, either Toyota or Honda, I’m told “You have to wait three months to get your choice of color and options and you have to pay list price.”  What I want is a 2005 Honda Odyssey, Touring trim, white, with nav system (the center windows go up and down on the Odyssey, making it good for dogs).  The list price is something like $35,000 and presumably dealer profit is around $3000.  Toyota dealers were selling leftover 2004 Siennas for nearly list price as well!  If one listens to the John Kerry supporters here in Cambridge it sounds like doomsday for the U.S. economy.  If one walks into the local car dealer, however, it is apparent that the minivan-buying middle class has a lot more cash than back in 1998 when I bought my Sienna for $500 over invoice.

[p.s.  I’m going down to NYC tonight through Sunday morning.  More evidence that the economy is booming is supplied by the fact that nearly every Broadway show is sold out, despite $100+ ticket prices.  Any NY locals reading this blog with ideas for Thu, Fri, and Sat evenings?]

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I attended a dinner party this week in which all of the other guests were foreigners, coming from Mexico, Taiwan, and Colombia.  It was the night of the last presidential debate and the topic of the election came up.  All of the foreign guests espoused great hatred for George W. and blamed the Republicans in general and W specifically for all the violence perpetrated by the U.S.  These were all young grad students and post-docs and apparently America’s long history of violence hasn’t registered with them nor the fact that much if not most of that violence was authored by presidents from the Democratic Party.  I pointed out that the Japanese had killed fewer Americans in their attack on Pearl Harbor than died on September 11, 2001.  Yet Roosevelt, a Democrat, had killed millions of Japanese in retaliation rather than negotiate a settlement.  Kennedy started America’s Vietnam War, which his Democratic successor Johnson escalated.  Jimmy Carter, a famously wimpy Democrat, articulated the Carter Doctrine that any threat to control of Mideast oil supplies would be met with American military force then backed that up by funding a proxy army in Afghanistan against the Russians.  It would seem that W. and the Republicans have no monopoly on aggression in foreign lands and yet somehow the American people get a free ride.  If we can say “we didn’t vote for W” we are considered good citizens of the world.  George W. Bush attracts all of the hatred.

Maybe we should take advantage of the fact that we have our scapegoat in place.  We can make a list of all of the countries that we need to invade, install puppet governments in, or steal their natural resources.  If W. loses the election we go on a big military spree until mid-January and then Kerry can come in and say “We had nothing to do with the fact that Bush kicked your asses but sadly the U.S. government never apologizes for anything or returns any loot.”

[I did catch up by skimming the transcipt of the debate later.  My favorite thing that was said was from Bush:  “the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care.”  This is what distinguishes a visit to a hospital emergency room from a visit to McDonald’s.  Even if you don’t have health insurance and are going to be reamed out of $2000 for a simple X-ray the experience is pure Third World.  As far as the staff is concerned you are not their customer.  Insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid are the customers.  If an executive from Blue Cross showed up at the hospital she would not be kept in a waiting room overflowing with the sickest most contagious SARS-ridden people in the metropolitan area.  If nobody had health insurance hospitals and doctors would start to pay more attention to the patient experience.]

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The October 4, 2004 New Yorker magazine carries an interesting article by Ian Parker about Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne, which won the X-Prize.  Rutan discusses his concern during the first flight that his friend Mike Melvill, 63, might have been killed.

“I’d have lost a friend.  You could say, ‘I should pick a pilot who I’m less friendly with, a guy who’s a stranger to me and just working for me, so if he gets killed…'”  [Rutan] smiled.  “You could say, ‘Let’s have a lawyer fly it'”–a pause–“‘or a liberal.'”

Rutan is quite expansive on the uselessness of the federal government, especially as evidenced by the spectacle of NASA’s inefficiency.  Ian Parker inserts some balance by noting that Rutan operates from the Mojave airport, a recent recipient of $3.9 million from the FAA to improve taxiways.

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In last night’s presidential election debate Kerry confidently claimed that he had a plan for fixing Iraq and made it sound like it was going to be pretty easy.  Get some more countries involved, smile at Iraqis, move on.  It made me wonder whether it is wise for a politician to promise so much.  Americans who follow the news know that Iraq is a terrible mess and has been for most of its history as a country.  To myself and a friend who watched (she is a bleeding heart old-style liberal who hates W.) Kerry seemed ridiculously overconfident when he said that he had a plan for Iraq and was sure that it was going to work.  Did this strike an off note with anyone else who was otherwise a Kerry supporter?

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