American Madness

This week I’m in Mendoza, which is about a 14 hour bus ride west of Buenos Aires, or 1050 km. It’s a great small city, population 100,000, and probably the second most visited place in Argentina after Buenos Aires. It’s mostly known for being in the middle of wine country, but it’s a great city in it’s own right; clean, flat, manageable, and with a thriving night life.

The 14 hour busride sounds torturous, yes, but it’s not as bad as it seems. The busses here, at least the company I took, give you a couple sandwiches and cookies when you board in BA. Not to mention a coffee machine that dispenses good coffee, and water, throughout the trip, for free. And they have these things that fold under your legs so you can stretch out. Not at all like the Greyhound-death I’ve experienced on many a trip from New York City to Pittsburgh. No, here they do it right. I was actually able to fall asleep for about six hours of the journey.

The trip took me across the belly of Argentina; a long, flat (and I mean FLAT) expanse of land covered with scrub brush. I saw a few small towns, and some cows, but not much else. And the highway was two lanes, one in each direction. Furthermore, our bus driver fancied himself some kind of professional stunt man, because he insisted on passing, especially when there was another vehicle coming in the other lane. I´ve got to hand it to the man: he did things with a four-ton bus most people couldn’t do in a Ferrari. The busses here have two levels, and I was on the top, in the front, so I had a bird’s eye view of this perpetual excitement. (more…)

I just got an inside scoop on a new website: MostEmailedNews.

Started by Tim Brennan and Spencer Moy (the founders of Blinxi, “a social networking site for grown-ups”), it doesn’t look like much, but what you’ve got at MostEmailedNews (MEN) is just that, the most emailed news.

Most news websites have that little box somewhere on the first page telling you the top stories that people are sending to each other. MEN takes those boxes from a bunch of different news sources (ranging from sites like the NY Times and CNN to the Times of India and the St. Louis Post Dispatch) and puts them all togehter for you.

On display from the start you get the top 5 stories from 18 different sources, you can expand any of the sources to see the top 10 list or collapse it to make it disappear. It gives you a nice cross section of what people are emailing, weather it is the AP article “Tax rebates start showing up in bank accounts Monday (AP)” posted on Yahoo or “The Coolest D.C. Party is Still Lame” from Time magazine. Plus the site updates every 10 minutes keeping you up-to-date on everything.

In planning it out and picking sites Tim says they “thought of all the sites that we see linked to the most from blogs we read, and also to have a good mix of regions in the country.” Since they have just launched the site don’t be surprised to see a few updates/upgrades along the way, though even if it stays as it is now, that works fine too.

Taken from the car window (on the way to the airport) in Nashville, TN. Sometimes it pays to have your Polaroid on hand.

For those of you with poor eyesight:

Reg. - An Arm
Med. - A Leg
Prem. - 1st Born

Downloaded via DSL (that’s David Simon Levy) at Gargle.org:

found this amazon review:

“Well, there are a few ways to demonstrate that you’re like a bird: You can be graceful like a bird. You can fly like a bird. You can sing like a bird. You can crap all over car windows. Or, to avoid any chance that people might not notice the similarity between you and birds, you can just be like Nelly Furtado and announce, ‘HEY EVERYBODY! I’M LIKE A BIRD!’
Wow, cool. Let’s break up.”

Josh, Matt and I (and the Misses Hazard and Matt) rendezvoused at the latest Lower East Side restaurant A Casa Fox for its inaugural brunch.

The brick-n-mortar realization of Melissa Fox’s long running catering business, A Casa Fox pulls from her rich cultural experience growing up in New York with an American father and Nicaraguan mother, and she has put together the tastiest brunch this side of Granada.

Her fried plantains rely more of the thinness of the original slice and less on the a double dose of frying. The hot sauce is made 50 feet to the left of your table. And the empanadas, which aren’t embarrassed of their flavor, and are baked, not fried. The result is a tender, flaky crust on the outside which does a good job of holding together succulent meat and cheese, vegetable and cheese or just cheese and cheese goodness.

We ordered at least a dozen of these addictive stuffed pastries and it is not a stretch to say Matt and I could have ordered a dozen more. While all of them were perfectly balanced and well done, we were particularly fond of the chorizo and manchega cheese and the pulled pork with caramelized onion.

Everything else on the menu was equally good. The tortilla chips are made on the premises and the guacamole, pico de gallo and black bean dips they were served with are, without exaggeration, the finest examples of these three respective sides one will find in New York.

Of the brunch entrées, the hands down favorite was the terrine with chorizo and aged manchega — a perfectly crispy-on-the-outside-gooey-in-the-middle fried egg laid on top of a spicy, but not too hot, chorizo and cheese combination. It was of little wonder when I asked Melissa where she got such good chorizo — and growing up in South Texas, I know good chorizo — and she told me she had them imported from Spain. (more…)

Do you think if Barack Obama had left his seriously ill wife after having had multiple affairs, had been a member of the “Keating Five,” had had a relationship with a much younger lobbyist that his staff felt the need to try and block, had intervened on behalf of the client of said young lobbyist with a federal agency, had denounced then embraced Jerry Falwell, had denounced then embraced the Bush tax cuts, had confused Shiite with Sunni, had confused Al Qaeda in Iraq with the Mahdi Army, had actively sought the endorsement and appeared on stage with a man who denounced the Catholic Church as a whore, and stated that he knew next to nothing about economics — do you think it’s possible that Obama would have been treated differently by the media than John McCain has been? Possible?

And — this is fun to contemplate — if Michelle Obama had been an adulteress, drug addict thief with a penchant for plagiarism — do you think that she would be subject to slightly different treatment from the media than Cindypills McCain has been? Anyone?

From Cogitamus.

From CollegeHumor:

What It’s Like to be a Foreigner in Buenos Aires
…Notes From a Confused Gringo

Today in front of the Congreso Nacional I saw a father, mother, and their two-year-old kid on a motorcycle together. The father was driving, the mother was on the back, and the niño was in the middle, holding on to his father’s torso. None of them were wearing helmets, in fact there was a helmet tied to the front handlebars. The strange thing is, after just one week in Buenos Aires, this scene barely even surprised me…

In Buenos Aires parents seem to take their children everywhere. The other day I saw a man walking down Avenida Santa Fe, one of the busiest streets in BA (think Madison Ave.), holding the hand of a baby who was barely able to walk. She was just sort of stumbling along in her diaper, as babies do, to calls of “vamos, vamos” from her father. Just a regular little porteña trying to make her way to the next café or restaurant or party, or whatever. At the San Lorenzo soccer game last week, in a neighborhood called Bajo Flores, in a scene that was composed of 95% men, there were children of all ages. Even some infants…yes, infants.

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Yes, I have been MIA recently, I apologize about that, but when you are working extra long hours the last thing you want to do when you get home is sit down in front of a computer and bang out a post. I am hoping things calm down a bit here in the coming weeks so I can get back to my usual posting.

In the meantime, I’ve got a quick and simple recipe for folks to give a whirl. It’s just a little something I whipped up last night as a little snack, and that doesn’t take more then 10 minutes to make (even with the prep work). It was pretty delicious. You could also make this for breakfast or as an appetizer. There is an aspect or two that may sound a little difficult, but I assure you it is easy as pie.

Ingredients

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