New Year’s in San Salvador

 

This was an amazing thing to see. Salvadorans seem happy and optimistic. A few years ago it was like: Don’t go to this place; don’t go to that place; you can go to this tourist place, it’s safe. Everything was either off-limits or a walled garden. Someone I know was robbed at gunpoint of her cellphone while sitting in her car with the window down and having a conversation. Everyone says she was lucky.

Now it’s a different country. There is still crime but you can go almost anywhere. The murder rate, once sky-high, is low by US standards. The downtown was dilapidated and dangerous. Now it’s being renovated, bustling, a nice place to walk around.

It’s all because, almost by chance, Salvadorans elected a president who was serious about stopping the gangs that were responsible for most of the crime, and politically skilled and lucky enough (very) to pull it off.

National turnarounds can happen. El Salvador, maybe Argentina, maybe the USA. Europe looks in a bad way, reminiscent of the late 1970s before Reagan and Thatcher. Of course this time is different, it’s worse this time, etc. But this time is always different, and thus rarely different at all: trends, including bad trends, don’t go on forever. Here’s hoping.

Interior View

We decided to take a break from watching the interminable (and at this point, rather depressing) Midsomer Murders. From a starkly realistic point of view, the mythical English Midsomer must be about as dangerous as Cabot Cove, with regular citizens regularly dropping off their various perches, to the tune of lashings of blackmail, family grudges, illicit relationships, financial fraud, and outright criminality among the lush gardens and even lusher cozy cottages. It got to the point where we were playing “spot the actor” or “what had we seen this guest star in before?” Anyway, we needed a break, and the choice fell on the latest TV series adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee mystery novels, Dark Winds … which turns out to be surprisingly good, although some elements from the books have been combined, and the lead characters various backgrounds tweaked a little.

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Gliding to the Matterhorn


“Welcome to Columbia Untisemity”

(Via Lex)

Plane Spotting Meets the 21st Century

As a kid I would love going to the airport and seeing all of the different types of planes, and the branding, and would always wonder where they were all going. Planespotting.

Now, you can go onto Youtube and enter “planespotting” and any of a number of different streams will populate, many of them live, that will take you all over the world to see all types of different planes from passenger to cargo to pleasure. Many have a revenue stream and are dependent on eyeballs and donations/subscriptions and many are just a guy and a camera set up on a hill.

Probably one of the biggest and best is Airline Videos Live, and they are usually planted around LAX. This week they are in ANC and the video from yesterday is absolutely stunning. They even had a DreamLifter show up.

If you like this sort of thing, the world is your oyster now.

Disclaimer – *I have no financial or any other gain by referring AVL*.