Take a Deep Breath™

Looks like fun.

We've gotten some good references regarding skype... but to tell you the truth, navigating the skype webpage is less than satisfying.

Maybe some skype fans can chime in with some help on the basics.

When you first go to skype.com the joy is boundless (par for the voip course) and you are herded to "download now."

You can resist the urge to download... but your only other options are "use skype", "business" and something called "shop".

"shop" isn't available to your average Argentine IP address and I can only hope that the "shop" holds t-shirts and trucker caps... rather than what I'd really like to know and buy. "business" sends you to a page splashed with a graphic of one of the many bald-headed pricks that led me to consider emigrating from yanquilandia. That's ok, that's ok! I hear skype is great!

If you click "use skype", you are encouraged to "set your conversations free." Not so bad, really, in that they are alluding to the fact that calls are free of charge if a skype customer calls another skype customer.

But I don't know any other skype customers (other than Rob and Shake from the previous comments ...not that it wouldn't be nice to speak with the "auld salt" himself at a Quaffers! And I officially invite Rob to join.) so I'm not concerned in the least about calling other skype customers. And, although I understand the marketing- focus going on there, it's a little creepy to me ...ala facebook, myspace, et al ...although I'm not quite sure why those sites and the above photo creep me out. Age, probably.

I'm not really too concerned at all about my out-bound calls. I'll jump through a hoop or two to make my calls and faxes to other countries ...it's not too hard nor too expensive, considering all the options available.

What I'm concerned with is the ease with which people in other countries can call ME. Nobody jumps through a hoop for me.

So after drifting through the lovely celeste haze of "use skype" page with its "finding friends" and other chatty options ...I notice a bar at the top that has something called "features".

"NOW THAT'S BETTER THAN A PHONE" blasts me from the big green graphic. Then more about skype-to-skype and cheap SMS and forwarding to a mobile. All fine and good.

Then after all that, they get to "or set up a personal online number for friends, family and colleagues to make a local call from their old-fashioned phone to your Skype, wherever in the world you are."

Now we're gettin' to the bifes!

But "OR"? Or? OR you can set up a number where people can call you? What was the "either" part? I'm having trouble believing from the propaganda here that this is something other than a service for people that like to make so many calls that they don't care if someone is calling them ..."who cares? I'm already talking to them! For the third time today!" That also brings back a hazy memory of the first days of skype when it really wasn't much more than an outbound-call service.

But I persist. I scroll down a bit and find a bullet-point graphic and something that says, "Online Number... People call your personal online number at local rates." Ok, finally, maybe.

"A SkypeIn™ number is perfect if you have friends, family or business colleagues that don’t use Skype. Anyone can dial your personal SkypeIn number from a phone or mobile and hey presto, your Skype rings and you pick up the call – wherever you are in the world – and the caller only pays standard local rates to call you and not international rates."

Hey! Presto!

"For example, say you now live in Auckland and are traveling to Melbourne, but your dear mother, your best friend and the real estate agent trying to sell your apartment are back in Auckland. You can get an actual Auckland number that is connected to your Skype. So, when your mother misses you or the real estate guy wants to tell you the good news, they punch in a number familiar to them and they only pay their standard call rates – but you pick up the call with Skype in Melbourne."

Great! That's what I'm looking for!

But no joy. After going to some lengths to tell me how much it will cost (not too much, really,) I'm referred to some links:

• How do I get a SkypeIn number?
• Can I have more than one SkypeIn number?
• How much will it cost my friends to call my SkypeIn number?
  Read other FAQs

...which refers me to a "knowledge base" of several other links. Most of these are useless to what I want to know: "How can people call me on this SkypeIn number and how do I get one?" But I do get some pretty scary options such as, "Why can't some of my friends call me?" That makes me feel good.

Apparently, it can be done. But you'll have to download the software BEFORE they will explain how.

Don't do it ...yet. The Yanq will go through that trouble for you. More to come.

"Verdict may be the final nail in the coffin..."

The most popular standalone voip provider and its customers have dodged a few bullets over the last few months but ...well ...if your phone suddenly goes dead, don't be surprised (that's what happened to the 200,000 SunRocket customers just this last July. No notice, no nothing.)

Vonage lost again in court yesterday in its patent infringment case with Sprint. The monetary judgments are piling up to a critical point for a low-cost provider.

I've absolutely adored the service from my first day about 3 years ago. I don't think it can be beat.

There's a lot of other fans in the expat community. Anybody got an idea as to where we'll all go if the line goes dead?

Internet Explorer 7 Sucks

Well, it's almost midnight but, although I slept like a baby last night in the campo (like always), right now, I'm bushed.

We got back in time for me to take a stab at the problems that Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 users were having with this blog.

What a pain ie7 is! Some blogs and websites are actually BLOCKING ie7 users. Mr. Gates and Co. seem to be deliberately flaunting convention ...and making life tough for developers that make sites with Mozilla/Firefox in mind.

Mozilla/Firefox is truly the superior browser ...ask anybody. Entonces, you should think about getting it today. I was talking to Tom of Sexy Spanish Club at the inaugural meeting of the Quaffers about this. He was hesitant to download it (FREE) on his new mac. Don't worry about it. Mozilla/Firefox is easy, safe, and everybody loves it.

I'll have some clean-up to do with links and such ...but that will come along. My apologies to Mozilla/Firefox users but fully half of readers use Internet Explorer ...and an ever increasing percentage of those have upgraded to the buggy, malware, Version 7 of IE (usually thru automatic updates.

We here at Yanqui Mike Buenos Aires Argentina are working around it like everyone, everywhere.

Gone to the Campo

The blessed rains have subsided. The wind and sun have dried the fields enough to get into and work.

And I have 50 little calves that I that need the Yanq to castrate them.

Probably be back late Sunday.

Until then... chaucito... and a spendid good morning to the newly inaugurated QUAFFERS!

"The American Peso" Sheesh.

From Boo Chanco of The Phillipine Star comes word of a "joke circulating in financial circles that the once “almighty US dollar,” is fast turning into the “new American peso.” Since 2001 the dollar has lost more than half its value against the euro. It now costs nearly $1.40 to buy one euro. And it isn’t just the euro that seems to be growing stronger against the US dollar. It has declined against many other major world currencies, and even including minor ones like our (Phillipine) peso, reflecting the dollar’s loss of purchasing power."

As the Los Angeles Times reported, “in much of the world — from Brazil to Poland to Thailand — one dollar buys less than it did a year ago, and far less than it did four years ago. On Friday, the US currency hit a 30-year low against its Canadian peer.”

That gives me an opportunity to finally post this bit of trivia regarding a time when the dollar was worthless and the peso was king.

"Not worth a Continental" was a phrase heard in the 18th and 19th century to describe something as valueless as ...as ...well, the US (Continental) Dollar.

The Brits never sent enough currency to the colonies and, later, the young US couldn't get the hang of issuing its own.

If you wanted to transact in cash ...there was usually only one kind of cold hard stuff: the Spanish Dollar.

The Peso. A piece of eight. The ocho reales.

Not only was it used out of necessity but it was also official US legal tender until the time of the US civil war.

It is also the origin of what yanquis call the "dollar sign."

Those two symbols on the above coin are a likely source of the $. Another is the way peso was abbreviated by writing a "P" on top of an "S" ...sort of a ...later they simply dropped the top part.

"Why can't these people get their OWN damned dollar sign? It's SO confusing!" ...ever hear that around town?

But if you think it's confusing now ...buckle up, Dorothy.

Dreamy ...very dreamy

Not that anybody is STILL interested in biofuel ...but since this is from the National Geographic and chock full of good descriptions of the process, I thought I'd include it.

In its own way it gives a very balanced view of turning food into fuel ...but only if you keep in mind the title, Green Dreams.

The author is concentrating on the dreams and the dreamers behind the push to bring efficiency to biofuel process. So much so that you could get caught up in all the blue skies. Every few graphs, though, the author tries to bring the readers back to earth but you'll have to keep your head about you to notice.

Lurking throughout the article, however, is the tolerance that dare not speak it's name: the petro industry's lack of a challenge to this "alternative" fuel ...as long as it is based on a petroleum intensive process. My suspicion has always been that as soon as biofuel starts to be based on non-petroleum thirsty plants, look for all government support to be withdrawn and for Big Oil's claws to come out.

Another barely-under-the-radar aspect of this good read is the reoccurring mention of how this could all be consigned to the scrapheap the same day that the price of oil drops below a certain, probably never-to-be-seen-again level. That screams volumes not about government support but rather the lack of yanqui will to anything about what burning fossil fuels is doing to everyone.

"¡No HAY monedas!"

I knew we were all in trouble again when I saw the way that my kiosquero drooled at my coins.

It comes and goes. Nobody knows why ...although this video is terrific in the way it shows the problem and asks yer reglar José and María what they think and what they've heard as to the possible reasons.

The expat's favorite, The Hundy (100 peso note) will draw grins or grimaces depending on where we all are in the re-occurring cycle. Cigarettes with a 100 ...don't even think about it. (A pack of smokes costs about 3.20)

A hundred for smokes ... that would never fly in Yanquilandia, either.

If you're "plugged-into" your barrio, however, it's a much more of a minor nuisance: you ALWAYS break your big bills at a big supermercado ...and you ALWAYS try to buy little things like coffee, cigarettes, gum, etc from your local merchants, and you ALWAYS pay THEM with the smallest combo of bills and coins you can come up with.

That way, when the next down cycle in bills/coins comes along ...they'll cut you some slack if you're caught without (?) and have to pay with a larger bill because you don't have anything smaller.

Of course, you'll get all that small stuff by hoarding small billetes/monedas for the bus, cigs, coffee, etc. ...which doesn't do the gov any favors when they're trying to plan for what we all need. But if my stash gets too big, I just vomit it all on my local kiosquero.

It'll all get back into into circulation tout de suite.

a Reader Responds to "Biofuel"

Anonymous left a comment on "biofuel rundown":

"It's a lie that biofuel can only be produced from corn. That's what Fidel Castro and Chavez want us to believe. When the US goes after the oil, they complain. Now Aericans want to reduce their dependency on oil but the leftists won't stop bitching. Some people are never happy, I guess...

The truth is that biofuel can also be produced from sugar cane, like they do in Brazil. That kind of fuel is more efficient and won't raise food prices. But hey, the left wants to make us believe that corn is the only option. It always amazes me to see how some people twist and pervert the truth to suit their purpose."

Anon makes at least 1 good point and probably more than that (especially if you include "bitching leftist" as a description of yours truly) and his/her comments are truly welcome.

However, toward a rational discourse, he/she's gonna have to give up the tired "limbaugh" constructs that have worked so well for 25 years but have now become a bit threadbare:

#1. trotting out Castro/Chavez as the supposed ally of any liberal Democratic critique of their policy failures and...

#2. invoking the "same thing!" device in which they boldly equate two unrelated examples just to pollute the discussion, add to the cognitive dissonance, and make the liberals flee the debate rather than come up with a soundbite that shows the million ways they are wrong/lying.

But like I said, it's worked like magic since the Reagan administration so it's gotta be a tough habit to shake.

But Yanqui Mike don't play dat.

Let's begin, as did Anon, with a comparison of corn to sugar.

Then we might even take swipe at "Some people are never happy, I guess..." as it pertains to a group that for 6 years controlled the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court and the press ...but still couldn't stop crying "victim!"

Of course, biofuel can be produced from grains other than corn ...I even mentioned soy. The article I referenced concentrated on the effects of this goldrush on the Great Plains/corn belt part of the US.

Sugar is, indeed, probably the crop that is most efficiently converted to alcohol ...that's been known since the great triangle of Sugar/Rum/Slaves of the 18th century. The Brazilians are the champs right now owing not only to their massive production of sugar but also to their emphasis on converting it to biofuel since the 1970's oil shocks. As Argentina presently contains the highest number of natural gas fueled automobiles, Brazil is home to the largest fleet of alcohol fueled vehicles.

Corn has been converted to biofuel in the US for decades as another sop thrown to first small US farmers ...then to the megaagribusinesscongloms that ate so many of those small farmers that the US census stopped counting them.

But converting corn to biofuel has always been just that: a sop. Converting corn to biofuel has always been a joke. Unlike sugar, it takes more than a gallon of petroleum related products to produce a gallon of fuel from corn. US subsidies for the fuel conversion were always just a small part of the tremendous overall corn subsidy that gave yanquis and the world incredibly cheap food ...and kept most other countries out of the corn business thus destroying the competition with US agribusiness.

Traditionally, any oil producing nation or company has leapt in to put a damper on any alternative fuel. I suspect strongly that the Bush family and their close associates in the petroleum sector have not only failed this time to leap into the fray but are now actively supporting this "alternative" fuel because they know that they will actually sell MORE petro-products for every gallon of corn-alcohol produced.

US sugar has already been so heavily subsidized thru price supports that they really can't pump anymore money into it. Chicago was always the penny-candy capitol of the US ...the factories are now almost all closed to production and they import the finished candy from ...anywhere! Anywhere sugar prices are not so heavily supported. Even mighty Coca-Cola allowed a change to their famous secret formula (from sugar to corn syrup). That's why Coke down here tastes to us yanquis like it did when we were kids.

"Now Aericans want to reduce their dependency on oil" ...now? What are you talkin' about "now"? Americans have wanted to do that for more than 30 years. Is the "now" somehow related to almost 4000 American dead in the middle east since the beginning of whatever you prefer to call the current war? The same conflict that is draining the US treasury to the tune of $2 billion per week ...in addition to biofuel subsidies? You guys love having your cake and eating it too.

I've been "bitching", it's true. But I've been bitching about what it's been doing to food. You are paying record prices for food since this bamboozle was inaugurated.

But I suspect that you are a true-believing 29 percenter. You've been feasted on God, guns, and gay-bashing. Finger-lickin' good distractions to those food prices as your jobs and sometimes whole factories were sent overseas, your sons and daughters to war, your treasury into the pockets of profiteers and speculators, your legal protections into the shredder.

Even as your income shrank you were exhorted to spend lest the terrorists win, fattening the credit card companies that eventually took away even your hope of bankruptcy.

There is probably nothing that could convince someone so long-suckered into believing that you made enough money to be a Republican. But I think that there is the creeping realization among the rest of your party that someone has made off with the till and that they will be much poorer than when love was new.

"Some people twist and pervert..." Some people twist and shout. Some people just get left to twist in the wind.

Whatever...

(September 11, 9-11, ... Whatever. Thanks, kid (known only to the world as Josiah Cooper... dig the anger... "whaddya rebellin' about?" Remember the reply?)

911, 09-11-01, twin towers, WTC, NYC... whatever. Six years ago I was preparing to make a left turn into my office parking lot on about the 30th day of the most incredible, argentine-like clear blue skies when WBEZ almost laughingly reported that a plane had hit the world trade center. I went in, and asked if anyone had heard about the plane crash. Nobody had. A few minutes later a woman came into my office to say that the second tower had been hit and it "looks like terrorists."

Big Deep Sigh... I knew it from that moment. I even said it at that moment, "they're gonna run off with the till on this one." My recently arrived Argentine wife called frantic with the images on TV of the collapse. I got to a television a few hours later. I remember best a dust covered bond trader sobbing, "you can kill us, you can knock-down our buildings... but you cannot make us poor!" Yeah, whatever. They couldn't...

I got back to my office and even though it was all too goddamned cinematic for any of us to make sense of... my stupid attempt at reassuring everyone and myself was to say, "don't worry about terrorists. Worry about what we'll do to ourselves." Whatever.

You knew the fix was in when the whole country developed a steaming crush on NYC... although hours before it had been common knowledge that "every red-blooded American" hates the big apple like a gaucho hates la Capitál. Frontpages that morning all over the US told of Rumsfeld's imminent firing being delayed simply so he wouldn't be the shortest lived Sec'y of Defense in history. Rudy Guiliani was hiding his head in the shame caused by divorcing his wife in the press... before he had even bothered to mention it to the missus herself.

By the time prime-time tears had been shed for lower-Manhattan bond traders... every real New Yorker knew we were through the looking glass. Whatevah.

I spent 2 full years feeling like a Jew in 1930's Europe... (and wondering which one of the two kinds of Jews I was going to be... and wondering which of my family members would grieve and which would make excuses. "What a shame about Mike... welllll... you just can't walk around saying things like that!")

It's all been done now (short of news that we've begun bombing Iran.) Habeas corpus has been "suspended". The Geneva Conventions that we negotiated and enforced... are now optional. The dollar is in shambles... with the economy waiting to follow. The moral beacon that we would flick on to opiate our suppression abroad and dissent at home is now faded from all but memory. If there's a road back... it'll be a long one. Yesterday, the top US General refused to release figures on the war in Iraq... and the Democrat controlled committee refused to ask for them. Whatever.

La Argentina es mi hogar nuevo. If it's yours too... I wish you all the best. I'm feeling a little too old to feel the anger that Josiah is demonstrating... and a little too wised-up not to know how to direct it. A fellow student asked me last month why I immigrated here. Not knowing how to briefly sum up all the reasons behind such a decicion, I joked with the old saw, "para hacer la América." I'm more serious than I knew. I hope you are too.

Yanqui Stay Home?

Michael Collins
First Published in
“Scoop” Independent News
"Washington, DC The General Strike of 9/11/2007 is the first of a series of events planned for September. It began in mid summer as a new, first time coalition effort by activists from different groups with a shared agenda, positive change. Reliance on the Internet and the unknowns between now and 9/11 make it difficult to say how widespread participation will be. But the pattern is set. Like the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, this peaceful general strike will show what rank and file movement members and committed citizens can do when they demand action."

Notable general strikes (from wiki)

• 1820 Rising in Scotland
• 1842 General Strike in England organised by the Chartists
• Haymarket Riot, 1886, occurred during a strike for the eight-hour workday.
• Russian Revolution of 1905
• 1912 Brisbane General Strike
• Spanish General Strike of 1917
• Irish anti-conscription general strike of 1918
• Barcelona General Strike of 1919
• Winnipeg General Strike of 1919
• Seattle General Strike of 1919
• British General Strike of 1926
• San Francisco's Big Strike of 1934
• Toledo General Strike of 1934
• Great Arab Revolt of 1936
• Luxembourgian general strike of 1942
• Liberation of Paris, in which all Parisians went on strike and built barricades during WWII
• Finnish General Strike of 1956
• French general strike of May 1968
• Uruguay general strike of 1973
• Northern Ireland general strike of May 1974
• Spanish general strike of 1988
• Nepalese general strike of April 1992
• 1995 strikes in France
• Ontario, Canada's Days of Action in 1995
• Italian general strike of 2002
• Ukraine's Orange Revolution of 2004
• Guinea general strike of 2007

¿Que Cuajo es?

Yes my friends and oh my foes... we are in possession of cuajo. Rennet to youse all that ain't picked up yet on the patter (full disclosure: in retrospect, I think I asked for "cuaje"... God only knows what THAT means in lunfardo. But the guy at the desk didn't even blink. ¡Que gente!)

Coagulant...if you will. The stuff that makes milk cheese.

Thank you, Mr. Salt Shaker.

I was never ambitious about cheese making. All I ever wanted to do is to make the easiest of cheeses: cottage cheese. Then I discovered that although you can make cottage cheese with nothing more than lemon juice or vinegar (like some cheap mozzarellas or all the ricottas) you need to go full-blown rennet for large-curd.

They tell me there used to be cottage cheese in Buenos Aires... like so many things yummy probably from Parmelat before they went cleavage-up.

I'm not even a tremendous CC fan... I think I miss it because it's one of those things that is inexplicably unavailable here. Go figure, the mildest of cheeses NOT available in the land of the mildest of cheeses.

Anyway... we got some now. What is more, rennet is the gateway to ANY sort of great cheese. So, maybe there is a camembert or cheddar in my future.

Día del Inmigrante

I don't know how I forgot it ...but it was Tuesday. In years past there was always some kind of féria. Did you hear anything about it?

biofuel rundown

It appears that the press has had a chance to digest.

John Vidal writing for South Africa's Mail & Guardian walks you thru the ramifications of changing food into fuel like no other article I've seen of such brevity. Yet he leaves virtually no stone unturned.

He starts with the producer: in this case a corn farmer in the US State of Nebraska who lives near a little burg that has been down on its luck for quite sometime but is now enjoying a boom from ALL THE MONEY rolling into the local economy for grain ...any kind of grain ...but in this case it's corn. This scenario is playing out just the same way in the Argentine campo.

In the ol' junkie parlance, "ever'body's gittin' well." But it's a pushme-pullyou world and the biofuel fueled prosperity is twisting almost everything that goes in your mouth:

"The same fields that surround Jagels’s house may be bringing new money to rural America, but they are also helping to push up the price of bread in Manchester, tortillas in Mexico City and beer in Madrid. As a direct result of what is happening in places like Nebraska, food aid for the poorest in Southern Africa, pork in China and beef in Britain are all more expensive."

Even as Mrs. Mike y yo have pulled 750 acres out of beef production here, farmers everywhere are deciding not to plant all the lovely grains and veggies that we humans and animals love ...in favor of corn and soy for automobile fuel. The "cornhusker" in the story sells his corn directly to the biofuel factory ...and the rest of us sell our corn to the people he used to sell it to. That raises prices all across the board for what keeps us all alive.

Why? Well, if you liked the Iraq War ...you'll love biofuel.

"Challenged by President George Bush to produce 133-billion litres of non-fossil transport fuels by 2017 to reduce United States dependency on imported oil, Jagels and thousands like him are patriotically turning the US corn belt from the bread basket of the world into an enormous fuel tank."

US subsidies for biofuel production are up from obscene levels to someplace that approaches morbid. All that money is sucking food out of people's mouths all over the world. Cheap food, that is ...and if it continues indefinitely there could actually not be enough left to feed us all at any price.

Before that happens you and I will see a few ugly things up close and personal in the supermercados. We are terribly spoiled and lucky people; we take for granted the tremendous variety of foods not only in the produce section but as a consequence in all the other aisles as well. As the demand for corn and soy based biofuels increases ...it won't just be me and the missus pulling marginal farmland away from beef.

No matter what any farmer or rancher in the world produced last year ...this year and for some time to come he will be trying every trick in the book to get in on the goldrush and change to producing biofuel crops.

(I am very curious to know if the prices we all experienced here for this winter's vegetables were due in part to producers changing to corn and soy.)

The article closes with the prospect of brighter days to come as the marketplace starts to come back into balance and as producers begin to push uncultivated land into production.

But that won't happen until the US stops pumping billions into the pockets of agricultural swing states to fund the biofuel myth (it takes more fuel to produce biofuel from corn than the corn gives back ...which COULD explain why a Texas oilman is competing with petrol without ANY complaints from oil companies!)

Just like the cornhusker, we're making more money per acre than ever. This is REAL trickle-down; Bush Biofuel Bucks go right into my pocket. But I'll suffer too when the only thing for dinner is a corn-soy burger washed down, no doubt, with barrels of ExxonMobile white lightning

...when all I really want is a salad, a steak, and a glass of malbec.

El Eternauta

The Spanish language news agency EFE has an article today commemorating the 50th anniversary of the appearance of the SF comics series El Eternauta ...and the 30th anniversary of the author, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, getting disappeared by the military dictatorship that subjugated Argentina from 1975 to 1983.

The series holds a special place in the hearts of Argentines not only because it is considered one of the most important of the 20th century but for its political activism in its second incarnation.

Oesterheld was the writer of the series and worked with the artist Francisco Solano López (who himself was forced to flee Argentina twice and eventually settled in Brazil.) describing a time traveler and a struggle against an alien invasion. The series and his other writings became increasingly political during the 1960's until he resurrected the series in 1975 as an open critique of the dictadura.

He was disappeared along with his four politically active daughters and their husbands. His grandchild was born during the process of their being murdered and was later united with Oesterheld's widow, Elsa Sánchez, who became a spokesperson for the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.

A compendium of both Parts 1 and 2 of the series was published in paperback book form by El Clarín in 2004 in the Biblioteca Clarín de la Historieta series and was widely available in kioscos. It reads well all these years later and is worth picking up if you can run across it.