Archive: Posts from December, 2008
December 10th, 2008, 2 Comments »
At the moment, Julie and I are shacked up in a little casita on Isla Carenero, a tiny island opposite Bocas Town, the largest town (with all of about 3500 citizens) in this far flung province of Panama. This is our third night here. We’ve been settling in, exploring and we’ve begun making deposits in our overdrawn sleep debt account.
Our place is on the water, surrounded by the shacks and tin houses of the local community. The setup provides a great view into how the locals live–they outnumber the tourists by at least twenty to one. Young couples chastely walk by, long motorized canoes deliver wood and kids play soccer, all outside our front door.
In terms of tourism, this region is relatively under-developed. I was talking to the house manager, and he said the region was like “Costa Rica, 25 years ago”. That’s the feeling you get when you walk down the main drag of Bocas Town. There’s a few rickety hotels, a bunch of open-air restaurants over the water, and a handful of eco-tourism services and surf shops. There’s also one nightclub–the only downside we’ve spotted thus far. The club’s rumbling bass carries across the strait all too well.
There’s a Subway restaurant in town–the only franchise I recognized. It feels like the advance guard of a wave of international money that’s likely to visit the region in the coming years. Hopefully they can retain as much of the local character and charm as possible.
An Ethnic Stew
This region has a fascinating ethnic mix. The Spanish never consolidated their hold on this part of Central America, so while there are plenty of ethnically Spanish Panamanians here, there are also many descendants of Afro-Caribbean immigrants. Combine those with the (sadly declining) people of several indigenous tribes and a smattering of grizzled gringos, and you’ve got a interesting ethnic stew. As you might expect from a Caribbean town in the middle of nowhere, everybody’s extremely laid back. I don’t think race relations are an issue.
The Latest End of the Earth
We are apparently attracted to places that feel like the end of the world. I know I said that about Gozo, but where we’re headed tomorrow might top that. Check out this Google Map:
View Larger Map
That’s Punta Laurel, a little group of buildings built on pilings about 1500 feet off the coast of Isla Popa. A mostly unpopulated island in the southern most part of the Bocas archipelago. Our guidebook gives the island a single sentence:
Isla Popa is crawling with fer-de-lance and other poisonous snakes. It should be visited only with a good forest guide.
We’ll stay out on the water, thanks. We’ll be there for about two weeks, off and on, and plan to do a whole lot of nothing (besides, you know, writing a book). To my shock, they usually have satellite Internet access on Punta Laurel. I was pleased to hear that it was out of commission at the moment–I’m trying to disconnect for a while.
I’d upload more photos, but we’re using a pretty dubious web connection at the moment. I’ll just post one for now, and save the rest for a fatter Internet pipe.
2 Comments »
December 6th, 2008, 5 Comments »
As I mentioned, we’re off to Panama. Our flight leaves later this afternoon, and it’s a multi-stopover red-eye through the night to Panama City.
We’ll be there until late December. Then we head northward for a few days (and New Year’s) in Manhattan. We’ll be back in Victoria on or about January 3rd.
Posting will thus be light around here for the next month. We (joyfully) won’t have regular web access for at least the next two weeks. We’ll probably visit an Internet cafe or two, though. In the meantime, there’s a couple of other pages on the Intarweb for you to look at. For example, I just discovered Is It Funny Today–kind of a Digg for web comics.
Have a good December, and, you know, be nice to each other.
Photo by Keven Law.
5 Comments »
December 5th, 2008, 1 Comment »
Waxy links to this terrific (though, warning, vulgar) video by Monsieur Frank discussing ideas.
He calls ideas that stay in your head “brain crack”–that’s a very apt metaphor. If they stay in your head, you can never screw them up.
1 Comment »
December 5th, 2008, 4 Comments »
Last week I saw Rachel Getting Married, which is a lovely movie full of terrific, naturalistic performances. The script is quite strong, and is written by Jenny Lumet (she needs a Wikipedia article), the daughter of the great director Sidney Lumet.
I was reminded of what I think is an under-recognized phenomenon in Hollywood: many of the most popular actors, directors and other creatives are the offspring of Hollywood personalities. Here are a few examples:
- Angelina Jolie is the daughter of Jon Voight.
- George Clooney is the nephew of Rosemary Clooney.
- Bryce Dallas Howard is the daughter of Ron Howard.
It turns out that Anne Hathaway, the star of Rachel Getting Married, is the daughter of an actress.
I don’t raise this topic because I think it’s unfair. It happens in every industry–a little nepotism is unavoidable. I do think that it makes the American dream of “farm girl just in off the turnip truck becomes a star” all the more unlikely. As it is everywhere, in Hollywood, it’s who you know.
4 Comments »
December 4th, 2008, No Comments »
I’ve been meaning to mention two local sites that I recently discovered:
- VancouverBC.com is a kind of portal site run by the guys who publish Vancouver View magazine (which I used to write for about four years ago). It’s focused, I gather, on locals–most of the other Vancouver portals seem to target tourists. There’s a schwack of blogs on the site, as well as a smorgasbord of event listings and other stuff you’d expect. The Vancouver hyper-local web is a competitive place (compared to sleepy, old-school Victoria), so it’ll be interesting to see how this one fairs.
- The Big Wild is an environmental outreach site run by Mountain Equipment Co-op (disclosure: for whom I’ve done a bit of consulting, though not on this site). It’s an advocacy site, with causes to support, green event listings, news and a way to turn your wilderness adventure into a pledge drive.
No Comments »
December 4th, 2008, 1 Comment »
There was a beautiful sunset in Victoria (and apparently Vancouver) tonight. This photo doesn’t really do it justice (click for the super-sizing)
Here’s another similar photo I snapped (available in humungous size for your desktop).
1 Comment »
December 4th, 2008, 10 Comments »
I still have a Google Alerts feed set up for the all-too-common title of our ebook, “Getting to First Base”. As you might imagine, the results it generates are quite varied. I’ll be happy when we finally decide on a name for our forthcoming dead-tree edition, so that I can monitor the web for something a little more unique. Fingers crossed on that front.
Yesterday Google Alerts served up a link to this post on a blog entitled My Life. As Impacted by Neve Campbell. From an introductory entry:
Neve Campbell and I were students together for five years at Vista Heights Public School. We were enrolled in a French Immersion program in Mississauga Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, Canada. The following is the story of my life as it relates to her.
Weird, eh? Almost all of the entries were written in April, 2007, and they’re quite exhaustive. They include a couple of class photos and extensive tales of life near Neve. They’re quite detailed:
I remembered her telling me that her younger brother had been diagnosed with asthma. We were sitting in class at the time and she began asking me all these questions about what it was like for me growing up with asthma. As she led me away I had this bad feeling she was going to tell me this brother of hers had died.
When she finally spoke, she told me that she had made arrangements to go to a private school the following year and she wouldn’t be coming back for grade 5. This was bad news, but it wasn’t the kind of ‘end of days’ news that warranted this degree of seriousness.
It’s all a bit creepy, and there’s a certain tone of Penthouse-Letters-Without-the-Sex to the whole thing. There’s no easy way to confirm the veracity of the blog, but if its faked that takes some serious dedication. Also, if it was fake, the author might have done a better job of promoting it.
10 Comments »
December 4th, 2008, 2 Comments »
Frank Rich has been a New York Times columnist for at least five years. Scott Rosenberg recently twittered about a post by Edward J. Delaney, in which Delaney interviews Rich about a practice that sets Rich apart from nearly all of the other Times columnists: he includes hyperlinks in his work.
Adding links, he says, “came about very informally…I’d say the biggest single breakthrough was to realize, as my assistant Benjamin Toff realized, we have the capability to insert links into the pieces easily, electronically…without going through the bureaucracy. If every link had to go through a bureaucratic procedure that was time-consuming on deadline, we couldn’t do it.
As Scott notes, it’s shocking that, 15 years into the web’s popular existence, we’re still talking about this issue. Rich says that “columnists at The Times are free agents”, and yet hardly any of them link to other stuff. Bizarre, eh?
There is hope, however. Mathew Ingram points out that the New York Times has started linking to third-party sources from its front page.
Both Delaney and Ingram reference smart media thinker Scott Karp, citing two articles on the value of outbound links.
2 Comments »
