kirktastic

I know, me with all caps. I never do that. What is amazing is how in the past I used to love American Airlines. I would travel a lot and I’d insist on AA. Then they started to suck. But I stayed somewhat loyal for a while. About a year ago I got stuck at DFW (where I happen to be writing this right now) and the way American Airlines handled things I decided I’d exhaust my miles and be done with them. I haven’t had to travel for work lately and when I did go on trips I’d go on great Mexican airlines like Mexicana.

Today I decided to take a last-minute trip using my miles. I got to the airport and was chilling in the departure lounge when they announced over the PA that the flight to DFW had mechanical problems and was canceled. She said we could either wait at the gate in line with her, call the 800# and have them rebook, or go back out past security again and talk to a ticket agent there. She said there’s ten agents out there that can help rebook.

Since I’m a special case flying on an award ticket I knew I just couldn’t got to the automagic kiosk and be on my way. So I called and was transfered to the international agent and was quickly answered by a man with an English accent that could see about helping me. According to his information the flight wasn’t canceled yet but he said that since I was at the airport I’d have more updated information so he tried to find me another flight to DFW to make my flight (I had a 3 hour layover and since AA has about 1 million flights to DFW from Austin it should be a piece of cake, right?) Well the other flights are oversold. He did say I could take Continental to my destination through Houston. I wondered if I could do that on a free ticket. He said sure. So he went about changing my reservation to a Continental flight and I’m thinking my prepaid hotels past their cancelation time for the weekend would be used. He did say I’d have to go out to the ticket counter and have an AA agent issue a paper ticket (remember those?) that I could take to Continental for the boarding pass. No problem so I walk out to the ticketing area and there’s a giant line of fellow passengers waiting for the TWO agents (not TEN as she said before). The line was not moving. I was upset (especially since I’ve lost platinum and then gold status on AA and I couldn’t use the first class line).

So I walked over to the Continental counter since it was empty and they had my reservation but couldn’t issue a ticket because I needed the AA ticket first. The couldn’t help me, but since the Continental flight was still hours away I could manage to stand in line and not worry about missing the flight. Back in the AA line, I’m waiting for about 10 minutes with zero movement in line and a man from the airline comes out and says that the flight is un-canceled and will be leaving at two and people needed to get back to the gate with their original boarding passes. It was about 1:30 at this point. But the problem was since I saw my reservation at Continental, I didn’t know if my boarding passes were valid anymore. So I waited in line and called AA again. Again, the agent answered immediately and after looking at the information said I seemed to have a valid ticket on AA and could take that flight. With about 20 minutes before the flight was to leave I, could I make it through security and to the gate. Well Austin Airport is small and the last time through security might have taken one minute. Sure. He said if I didn’t make the flight, to call back and wished me luck.

So now in the security line it was full of people that were normally at going through plus all the people on my flight that needed to go back through security again. I finally make it to the X Ray machine and since I knew my belt would set it off, had it off and was ready. Well the person at the xray machine monitor had problems with first bag full of clothes and no weapons or bombs. So she calls over someone to inspect that bag. I can’t leave since my other bag and my Mac are still in the machine and now there are SIX TSA agents staring at the monitor with puzzled looks on their faces and pointing at the screen. I’m going to miss my plane. It was a miracle the mechanical problem was resolved and now I was going to miss the plane because of this bag. THE SAME BAG I WENT THROUGH SECURITY WITH 45 MINUTES BEFORE with no problem. Zip. Nada. so I ask the brain trust that if they have to check my other bag anyway why not just check this bag too? They look at me as if I’m nuts. But the fact they’ve been looking at the bag in the XRAY for more than five minutes, they probably should inspect it by hand right? The supervisor is involved and the number of people crowding around the monitor is now at 8. No new passengers are entering the airport through this checkpoint.

Eventually the supervisor makes the executive decision that the bag must be searched by hand. I have 10 minutes to get down to the gate. So now two agents are searching each of my bags. One is trying to use his psychological profiling techniques by asking how I’m doing. I said I was doing fine until I had to go back to the ticket counter and now this problem with the bag. The same bag I passed through security with less than an hour before. I was worried about missing my flight and wondered why it took them so much time to just pull the bag and look at what they couldn’t see with their fucking x-ray machine (I think I might have said effing to the man). He goes through the bag and there’s no bombs, just my toiletries bag (sans liquids, they’re in the ziploc bag) my MacBook’s power adapter, iphone adapter, some headphones and shit like that. The geriatric woman with poor eyesight is taking her time going through my clothing bag. I’m finally deemed not a threat to national security and get to the gate. If you’ve seen my tweets this week you know my knee is fucked up so I was only able to walk at a brisk pace to the gate. I’m preparing my dialogue for the AA agent back at the ticket counter as I get the Continental tickets after I get to the gate late. Well, there were still tons of people in the line at the counter that needed their flights re-booked back onto the flight so the plane wasn’t going anywhere yet. I could have stopped for a drink and still made it before the door closed.

I get on the plane and it becomes clear what the mechanical problem was: the AC was broken. It is 93f and sorta humid and the AC on the 20 year old plane was broken. I optimistically thought maybe after we were underway it would work, but nope, not going to happen. It took about 30 minutes to get from the gate to take off — it is only a 35 minute flight — and no AC. But instead I was happy to get to experience not one, but two screaming babies that had their scream volume turned up to 11. My battery is dying on my iPhone and there’s no jack under the seat to recharge. It was miserable.

I know what you’re saying AA isnt’ so bad, dude. They were going to fly you out of the country on a competing airline on your free ticket. They did get you to Dallas. They can’t control the morons on at the security checkpoint. The plane is a machine, it breaks sometimes. Wouldn’t you rather get your flight traveled than being an broken plane? Right. But what they did do is how they handled announcing the delay and non-mechancial issue (the mech issue could be something additional to no AC). They tell the customers to go back past security to the front ticket counter when there still was a high probability the flight was going to go. They could have had the agents at the front of the airports come to unused gate counters to rebook people. But they didn’t. They said the flight was canceled and if you want to go to Dallas it would be faster to go through security to many agents that can help. Someone — perhaps the gate person making the announcement — decided to make the problem not her problem by sending people back outside. That’s my problem.

So fuck American Airlines. Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them. I’ve flow countless flights on them and given them (a lot of time paid by my employer) a lot of money but no more. I’m not flying them again. The free flight worth of miles I have left with them I’ll spend on hotels or something. But they’ve lost my business for good. (exlcusions: a) I have to take them home on this trip and b) if my employer insists on my using AA I guess I have to go, but I won’t like it).

The good news is I’m on vacation now. I’m in the godforsaken DFW airport and it is sucking less than usual. I got something to eat (I forgot to mention I was starving while I was having all this shit happen). I am able to charge my computer and iPhone. Things are turning around.

If I had the knowhow I’d make a plugin for browsers that would block comments on newspaper websites and YouTube. 90%+ of these comments are made by complete morons. AND THEY WILL USE ALL CAPS TO EVEN COME EVEN MORE STUPID THAN I THOUGHT POSSIBLE. Swine Flu in Mexico? BUILD THE FENCE!!!!!! Anything about the economy? OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST COMMUNIST AND NOT EVEN AN AMERICAN!!!!

I love a good argument as much as the next guy but you can’t get in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. Just because Glenn Beck or Lou Dobbs says it doesn’t make it true.

OMFG!!!! EVERYONE PANIC!!!! The Mexican Flu could be pandemic!!! Of course the border fence people are using this as just another example of dirty Mexicans coming over the unprotected border and killing Americans. Except, of course, the flu is was detected in central Texas (about 80 miles from where I am sitting — by the way nice work LA Times, it is Guadalupe county, not Guadaloupe county as you have in the article — that is how people in this part of the country pronounce it, but it is spelled in the traditional manner) far from the border. In the cases in San Diego and Imperial counties it is right on the border, except of course THERE IS A FENCE THERE! All of the cases in Mexico are in Mexico City which is pretty far for a person to walk or ride a freight train. If someone contacted the deadly strain of flu in the DF, they would be dead by the time they got to the border.

Although this strain of flu is serious, I think it the US media is blowing it out of proportion, as it tends to do on all things. If you’ve been to Mexico City — a city with nearly 25 million people — you’ve probably seen that it isn’t exactly Disneyworld clean. There is a lot of poverty and so this non-doctor is not surprised there’s a higher death rate from this strain of flu than you might see elsewhere. Mexico’s has world class medical care for those who can afford it — but the median household income in about $7,000 a year so hardly anyone can afford it. I think the Mexican government’s call to close schools and other public gatherings is responsible since it can limit the spread. Common sense helps a lot in the spread of disease — wash your hands, if you’re sick don’t go out and spread it.

Let’s not forget that in the US, 40,000 people die each year from the flu. 40,000! You don’t need mandatory flu vaccines and military law to stop that. Just wash your fucking hands and sick people need to stay home. I know the problem with the sick people staying home thing is many people can’t afford to stay home.

The last big flu scare was the Bird Flu back in 2003. Rather than in Mexico, there were cases in Canada. There wasn’t a call for closing the border or building fences to keep those dirty Canucks out. During part of the paranoia I was on vacation in Europe and when I flew from London to Brussels, my flight was kept from disembarking because there was an Asian person on the flight who had their traveling in China and this person was sick. To complicate matters the Belgian Minister of Health was at a bird flu conference in Geneva so he had to be contacted to give the OK to let us go. When we were allowed to leave I had to make the unusual step of letting the health officials know where I was staying in Belgium and to contact them immediately if I felt any symptoms. At the time, I was sort of bummed I wasn’t quarantined in Belgium for the entire incubation period so I could not have to go back to work (sorry boss, the Belgians won’t let me leave!).

My point is the world is a much smaller place since the advent of the airplane. If this flu does spread to the US it won’t be due to some guy sneaking across the border. It will be because of people entering the country legally at the airport. They might not be on the flight from Mexico City. They could come from anywhere because we’re all connected. But making mountains over molehills won’t help. It will just fan the flames of the anti-Latino hate. And how can you hate the people that gave us the taco, margarita, mojita, Brazilian, and fun hats?

Oh, Facebook…

My life has not been complete without fantastic tattoo images like this. In fact, maybe I’ll get a tattoo of that tattoo.

Also, it is colder out here than I’d like. The cafe al fresco has turned cafe al frio.

The US media has finally glommed onto the drug wars in Mexico. The stories breathlessly warn of the violence “spilling over” into the United States. The dipshit governor of Texas wants 1,000 troops sent to keep this spilling over from happening. Obama asked him what exactly they’d do on the border and why 1,000 were needed.

Hills Clinton was in Mexico last week and actually said that the US is partly responsible for the violence in Mexico because of America’s insatiable taste for drugs. Truer words could not be said. The reason the Mexican cartels send tons of drugs into the US every day is because American’s are their number one customers. In a way the cartels are nothing more than freight forwarders: they are taking the drugs from their source and delivering them to them to customers in the US. The only difference between them and FedEx is their product is illegal and operates outside the law (although a significant amount of drugs in the US are transported via FedEx, UPS and the good old Post Office). The cartels fight for the drug routes among each other in Mexico because there are billions of dollars at stake.

The “Build the Fence” crowd like stirring up this “spilling over” myth. Sure some drugs come over the same routes as immigrants — the human smugglers often need to pay the drug cartels for protection in ferrying people northward. But a 100 mile tall fence from Imperial Beach CA to Brownsville TX would only slow down the drugs. The drugs are coming in on airplanes, rail cars, semi trucks and in passenger vehicles. The drugs come with immigrants too, sure. But the guy that came to the US to do your landscaping didn’t bring a ton of dope with him.

Mexican border towns have felt the most from the violence in the cartels’ war with each other and against the Mexican government. It is a shame really. In my travels into the interior I’ve often passed through these border towns. In the past the streets would be full of gringo shoppers buying medicine in the pharmacies, getting drunk in the bars, and buying curios from shops. Bus loads of senior citizens would come for the brand name medication at prices that were cheaper than in the US. But now it is pretty devoid of that activity. The Americans stopped going years ago when they heard about the drug wars on the border. Just like when the gangs were running Chicago in during the US prohibition the “civilians” are pretty much not the subject of violence. But they all stay away anyway. The last time I was in Nuevo Laredo the busy main street was pretty much a ghost town at sundown. Many of the souvenir shops, pharmacies, and bars are closed now since there’s no stream of tourists crossing the bridge. The military is in town and you see troop carrier trucks throughout town and there are checkpoints. For the most part, as a güero I’m pretty much not hassled by the military and am allowed to pass without hindrance. There aren’t massive shootouts every day where innocents get killed. There are isolated violent activities between the various cartels and between the cartels and the police or military. But the violence isn’t “spilling across” the border. For one thing, in the cities where this violence happens the US border is pretty established and well guarded. It isn’t a “war” like imagined where there’s a front line. There’s a narcotraficante’s safe house that gets raided by the police several kilometers from the border. Nothing is happening on the bridges or border crossings. The cartels are violent and evil but they’re also businessmen and there’s no business benefit of “invading” the US. They don’t have to.

There are Mexican gangs in the US but they aren’t sneaking across the border as the media suggest. They’re already here. They’ve been here for generations and many of the people in el norte are US citizens. They own the wholesale network of getting the drugs to the dealers. The dealers get the drugs to the end user. The “Mexican drug gang violence” is the same old drug distribution violence we’ve always had but just as after 9/11 every terrorist organization was “linked to al qaeda” it is simpler to just say these are the new Mexican drug gangs. It also helps with the whole racist element of pundits like Lou Dobbs to say they’re dirty Mexicans. Let’s not forget that one of the reasons that marijuana was made illegal in the US was because many Mexicans and Black people smoked it and “real Americans” were afraid their white children may consort with them.

A lot of the violence in Mexico would go away if their neighbors to the north faced its drug problem. Billions are spent each year fighting the “war on drugs” which has been a gigantic failure. Billions more are spent incarcerating drug users — creating a whole industry of private prisons and lots of profit. So you have the cartels making billions on selling the drugs and you have the government spending billions on stopping it. But they can’t be too successful in the war on drugs or they lose billions of dollars. So like immigration, they have to put on a show that they are fighting the drug menace without being too successful or the money dries up. The cartels spend billions paying off government officials on both sides of the border to get their product through.

So if the US legalized (or rather, decriminalized) drugs, the criminal element goes away. Instead of buying your drugs from a dealer who gets his supply from the local gang who get its drugs from the cartels. Instead you go to the “drug” store and buy it from a licensed store. The dope is taxed and some of the tax programs could be used to fund drug abuse programs. Farmers could legally grow and sell their marijuana. There wouldn’t be so many people in jail for having a small amount of drugs on them. It would still be illegal to smuggle drugs. You would need to be an adult to buy or consumer drugs. It would still be illegal to drive or do other things under the influence of drugs. But having a small amount on your person wouldn’t be a crime.

In the 1980s there were shootouts in the streets of Miami between the Colombian cocaine cartels and the police. The US government was successful shutting that trade route down. It didn’t stop Americans from doing drugs, it just moved the route through Mexico. If the US and Mexican governments are successful shutting down the Mexican route to market, it will go through Canada, China on container ships, anywhere. People aren’t going to stop getting high.

I mentioned immigration earlier. Our economy is dependent on the cheap labor from the south. The government makes some show of trying to crack down and works on projects like the border fence to show it is being tough. But it isn’t sincere. They can’t be or it would harm the economy! The reason people risk their lives to come to work in the US doing shitty jobs for low pay is to support their families. If there were no work, they wouldn’t come. This is pretty evident now as many illegal immigrants are going back to their home countries because the work isn’t available. It is sad the economy had to shit its pants to prove my point.

So if the US government only enforced the laws that already exist regarding the hiring of illegal workers, there would be no immigration problem. I can be nearly anywhere on the planet and buy something with my Visa card and immediately the purchase is authorized by my bank in California. A similar system couldn’t be done with employment? You mean to say the country that put a man on the moon couldn’t have a system where even day workers could be instantly verified? And if there were strict punishment for companies that knowingly hired illegal workers, the profit motive for hiring illegal workers goes away. If the CEO of Hormel could go to prison if his company knowingly hired illegal workers, do you think they’d hire so many. But today they can hire anyone they want because they know they won’t get caught (or if they do the fine is so little it makes economic sense to take that risk).

You take away the demand for illegal workers, the supply will go away.
You take away the demand for illegal drugs, the supply will go away.

kirktastic.com expires in 60 days. Although the cost to renew is negligible, I’m thinking of shutting it down by then. I might keep the domain kirktastic.com for some TBD purpose in the future. At present, I pay my host $20/month for this site plus hosting a few email-only accounts and a boatload of storage I don’t really use. I may drop that down to only a rowboat of storage and the email hosting.

My point is, I’ve been doing this blog since the spring of 2001. Here it is in the spring of 2009 and I’m sort of bored with it. I have a few dear readers but most of them can get ahold of me. I barely have enough content for a good tweet, let alone a weblog.

I’ve always been somewhat anti Facebook. I didn’t see the point, perhaps I’m showing my age. I recently tried Facebook again and found it somewhat boring. Maybe it is just me, but a lot of lost connections I’d like to reconnect with don’t use Facebook. And the new friend requests I get from people are most often people I didn’t want to reconnect with anyway. For one reason or another we’ve grown apart. I’m not the same guy I was in high school (or college or whatever). Being connected on Facebook with cousins I haven’t really met and don’t really know won’t grow my family of nomads together. I’m not going to hook of with friends of friends on Facebook. Of course, Facebook only works if everyone is on it. Facebook should have sold itself to Microsoft when it had a chance. Unless they do some serious data mining and connecting FB data with mailing lists, customer lists, credit files, public records, there isn’t really a long term business plan is there? You could say the same thing about a bazillion “social media” sites, too. Like I said I don’t see the point. Bah humbug. Get off my lawn you kids.

But wait, you say. You’re on Twitter! That seems pretty pointless too, doesn’t it? Absolutely. But I do like the SMS messages from a few of the people I follow and I like some of the “celebrity” twitterers because they are sort of funny and in the 140 character space, quite creative. Although I loathe my daily newspaper, I do like its Twitter feed (However, the Statesman has kind of gone apeshit with the number of feeds it has but I do find out about local news this way. Of course some marketers are trying to “monetize” with twitter and there is actual spammer on there now. My company recently had workshop on Twitter and Facebook — mostly for using the services as cheap/free marketing and how to keep the posts from getting the company sued. There’s this corporate version of Twitter called Yammer. It lets you tweet behind a wall. It is the equivalent of having your boss look over your shoulder while you post something. Most of the posts are so asskissing, I’m not seeing the point again. If it is somewhat successful, Microsoft will add it on to its Exchange messaging services like they did with Sharepoint and the Corporate IM client.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do with kirktastic.com going forward. Maybe one day it will just be a blank page with links to my Twitter feed and my Flickr stream. Or I make it into a highly monetized Web 2.0 portal for blah blah blah.

Battlestar Gallactica. I’ve revealed here before I’m a Battlestar Gallactica nerd. The series finale was last night. The big final battle was space porn as its zenith. Not bad for a low budget show on a second tier cable network. But now, the morning after, I’m troubled by the ending. It was one of the best shows on TV and I’ll miss watching it on Saturday on my DVR.

Spoilers ahoy!
OK I liked that they went to Earth at the end and the planet was pristine gorgeous place. But the decision to just toss their technology and scatter in the wind like that just doesn’t jive with me. Yes, it was man’s technology that created the Cylon and got them into that mess, but taking your ships and all of the technology on them and flying them into the sun? C’mon. Then in the Coda, the “Angels” looking over the show’s creator reading in the modern Earth times an article about discovery of the first humanoid and the say that was Hera, the human/cylon meaning we’re all part Cylon was a little forced. They didn’t need that as it was pretty implied that the people of BSG were our ancestors. The part with Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower with the shots of our present day robots and the parting “this has happened before and will happen again” did make me chuckle.

I guess I was let down with the easy peasy “God did it” type solution to tying up loose ends. And angels? What I liked about the show all these years was they didn’t go for the easy out. True, they were boxed into many plot corners toward the end, but c’mon. I would have almost preferred a Sopranos ending.

At the beginning of most episodes during the opening credits and they have title cards explaining the rise of the Cylons and how they took human form, the last card would have “And The Have a Plan”. Whatever the Cylon’s plan was did not get revealed. But during a commercial break there was a teaser ad for a show coming this fall which will be Battlestar: The Plan which is told from the Cylon point of view. I’ll probably watch it.

Speaking of robots…TiVo. I fired up my old TiVo that I decommissioned when I got my HDTV a few years ago. I hooked it up to my old analog TV in my bedroom. Without a subscription it doesn’t to all the much except let you pause and go back on live TV. What I forgot I missed after getting the Time Warner DVR was the TiVo suggestions… it records stuff I might like based on what I watch and give a thumbs up to. I also missed the ability to have it record stuff over the interwebs (and the mobile site is optimized for iPhone). Oh, and the ability to move a file from the TiVo to my computer (they didn’t have this for Macs when I had it last, but they do now), and from there is the ability to put shows on my iPhone. I was also surprised to see what was on the TiVo and what I had on the Season Pass. Shows like “Arrested Development” and stuff.

I was going to return my Time Warner cable box today but my TiVo doesn’t do HD. I thought of going to just Cable Card so I could watch HD cable channels. What I’d miss the most with that setup is HBO on Demand. It is how I catch up with the HBO shows I watch. If I get the TiVo HD box and put the Cable Card in that, I could just record the HBO series I want when they come on and get TiVo stuff in HD. Oh, and the TiVo HD box can do Netflix. The second box would let me stream stuff from one box to the other.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but when I do it is pretty targeted and I need a DVR to skip the commercials and watch things on my schedule. And on my current workout schedule shows that come on at 9pm are past my bedtime.

Speaking of happening before and happening again… If you haven’t read Matt Taibbi’s piece in Rolling Stone called “The Big Takeover” read it now. It is about the Banking/Finance clusterfuck. I really wish this was being reported on in other media. Like those dying newspapers. People tend to see Taibbi’s f-bombs and dismiss it, but people are worried about those AIG douche’s bonus checks and these guys stole trillions from the Fed and Treasury.

DST. Perhaps it is the fact I was born in Arizona, a state that doesn’t participate in the whole Daylight Saving Time thing, as to why I think it is a pointless, antiquated stupid thing for much of the world. Daylight isn’t saved. At least those in Europe refer to it as “summer time.” I’ve always lived where the days aren’t that short, even in the dead of winter. What is especially frustrating is how former Presidente Bush and Congress changed our spring forward/fall back dates from the rest of the world in the name of saving energy. Which is bullshit.

The Weather. Another silly thing is how no one understands what the X% chance of rain means that the weatherman throws out all the time. They idea that many people don’t understand it but they use it anyway is telling of our society’s laziness. It also provides safe cover for the weatherman when their forecasts don’t come true. I’ve always lived in places where it doesn’t actually rain a lot. Like Phoenix where it rains 7″ or less a year. In Austin and the places I lived in California the rain is closer to 30 or so inches. So when the rain comes, it just happens and is a nice break from the 300+ days of sunshine a year. Right now it is kinda cloudy as I sit outside with my coffee but otherwise nice for shorts + short sleeves. But the weather people say there’s only a 10% chance of rain. I, of course, can make it rain by getting my car washed.

(a bunch of Chinook helicopters just flew overhead in a what looked like a scene out of Apocalypse Now without the napalm. I would have taken a picture but all I have is the iPhone which doesn’t do well with objects more than about 20ft away).

Where I’m from. I sometimes get hung up what to put down as “hometown” on forms and interwebs. Turns out I’m not alone. What is also interesting about that research is just how many people never leave the town in which they were born. I left my town of birth at six months of age and didn’t have much say in the matter. I left the state of my birth when I was six. When people in Austin ask me where I’m from, I usually truncate it to being “from Northern California” (which everyone almost assumes = Bay Area but in my case it is not). It is hard to consider the town I grew in as my hometown since my parents left there when I left for school and almost all of my friends from high school scattered in all directions at HS graduation just like I did. I don’t consider where my parents live now as “home” since I really never lived there. It is “mom’s house.” Austin is home for me now. But it doesn’t feel like my hometown.

Although the survey doesn’t talk about it specifically, many American’s lack of mobility is telling of American’s travel habits as well. Very few Americans have passports and lack the curiosity to travel to other countries. Usually these are are loudest USA#1 people you find. And those who do travel outside the US tend to not get as far as Tijuana or Vancouver. Some may go nuts and go as far as Cancún or Puerto Vallarta. But the Mexican border towns and the Mexican tourist resorts are not the real Mexico. And going to Canada — a country and people I love — is not that much different than the US. I know a few people — mostly proud native Texans — that have never traveled internationally and ask why they should? “We have everything in America.”

Lack of money is a really good reason for not traveling internationally and why I got a late start. But I’m not talking about people that can’t afford to travel. These people could go anywhere, they just don’t. If I had the means, I’d travel the world and not stop until I’ve seen the whole damn planet. I’d love to work in another country (as long as it isn’t cold there). Only when you see the rest of the world can you really appreciate your home.

Finally the desayuno afuera season. Birds chirping, flowers blooming, everything green. Yay.

No wonder I’ve switched mostly to twitter these days. I have either nothing to say — or could go on long rant about how fucked up things are in USian politics, USian economics, and whatnot.

I often talk of my love for migas. A Tex-Mex breakfast food that I discovered visiting Austin before moving here. My friends from elsewhere including Mexico have never heard of Migas. You get too far north or south of the Rio Grande and the breakfast staple is lost. When I was in Cd Mexico and Cuernavaca I would ask the cooks to make me migas to a blank look. And I would drop migas knowledge. When I mention there’s tortillas fritas/totopos in them people think I’m meaning chilaquiles and/or huevos Mexicanos. In Austin, pretty much every place that serves breakfast will have migas on the menu. Although someone has finally added the Tex-Mex variety to wikipedia (the version in Spain sounds quite unappetizing to me), it remains a regional secret.

GQ correspondent Robert Draper on his favorite breakfast spot in Austin:
Recognizing that America has had its fill of Texas certitude, I humbly submit this southwestern verity: Nothing lifts you out of yesternight’s gutter like a Tex-Mex breakfast. Scrambled eggs, cheese, hot peppers, tomatoes, and slivers of tortilla chips, all encased in a flour tortilla. That’s migas. That’s restoration. In peace-loving Austin, pitched battles are waged over whose migas most excel. For my money, the destination must be Polvo’s. Cheery but not overly so, and free of all the downtown networkers, this slacker-filled south Austin joint is deceptively fastidious, with excellent coffee, fresh produce, and, of course, homemade tortillas. But what makes the spirit soar are their vats of fresh salsa—the best of which is a roasted chili-tomatillo brew nearly the color of squid ink. Smother your migas accordingly, deploy your flour tortilla in the manner of the blanket swaddling baby Jesus, and something holy this way comes. (GQ City Guide/Austin)

Yes, a link to the GQ City Guide for Austin even though they didn’t use my photo and do a feature on Tacodeli. Yes, Polvo’s has some tasty eats. But Draper’s description of migas is pretty spot on. And double so for the near religious experience of a good salsa.