A Nerd’s Metaphor for the California State Government

I’ve had my iBook G4 for a long time. I got it in the summer of 2005, right after high school, making it almost 4 1/2 years old, roughly 143 decades in computer years. It’s been very good to me, though I regularly have to change and update it as times change and old programs become obsolete. There are a few structural problems, certain issues that have never been resolved and continue to be a bother, but for the most part they are just minor nuisances, paling in comparison to the many ways in which my computer helps me in every aspect of my life.

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What are you reading right now? Do you like it? Would I?

Bonus points to anyone who comments.

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Procrastination is a Hell of a Drug

I’m back from Argentina, which I will talk about in greater detail soon, but in the meantime please check out THIS ARTICLE that I wrote for AssociatedContent.com. AC, as the cool kids call it, collects stories from all around and pays its writers based on page views, so check it out, I says. This particular story netted me $1 upfront (woo!), and I hope to make a tiny bit more as people read it. Other than that I’ve apparently made 26¢ from page views, which is 26¢ more than I’ve made from the Santiago Times, though mostly what’s up there are my articles from the ST.

Speaking of which, I quit my job, basically. I’ve been having differences with the publisher, which I went into some detail about in a previous post. I told them I’ll still try to write a little about the election, but I’m basically over it. I told him it was because school is too time-consuming, which is partially true, but I’d rather just have the time to travel and do other writing, either for this blog or for other places more likely to turn into money, or my new favorite activity: reading in the park.

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The Terror of the Chilean Seas

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Thanks to my dad for the pic.

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A Lover and a Sword Fighter

Being 6’5, one becomes pretty used to comments about height, and the inevitable question of “Do you play basketball?”

“No, do you play miniature golf?” has become my favorite response, but seriously, I don’t play basketball, or football. I tried both, and I’m pretty terrible. I do, or did, play hockey, I might say, which seems to satisfy their curiosity for a moment, though I always feel bad saying that. Sure, I played something that had the word “hockey” in the name, that is the bastardization known as “floor hockey,” but if someone called on me to demonstrate something as simple as skating in a straight line, I’d fall every six seconds. Floor hockey, on the other hand, is played on a floor. You know, something that humans can walk on without strapping blades to their feet.

But I digress.

The sport that I got the most into in college was fencing, including taking a class for a couple of years and competing on the team in a few tournaments. And while I would be the first to admit that my footwork never proceeded beyond “terrible,” I was quick enough in my upper body to consistently stay one of the better students in the class. It helped that the majority of students switched to the club when they reached a high enough level and quit the class, following the eternal hatred between the class and the club, but shut up. I was good. I have a lot of pictures of me winning, but they’re all, um… on a different computer. But I swear they exist.

Oh wait, here’s one! Continue reading

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Shameless Self-Promotion! Subscribe and win a free postcard!

This is not a contest, this is an offer. You don’t have 1-in-1,000,000 chance. You aren’t going to be entered into a big hat with names on it to be drawn randomly. No purchase is necessary, nor is crossing fingers or knocking on wood. Rather, it’s a 100% thing. Really, where else can you have that kind of assurance in this 24-hour news cycle world? Nowhere, that’s where.

I will be writing and sending out postcards over the next week, and I would like to write one for each and every one of my subscribers. This will be a real, authentic Chilean postcard, written by yours truly with a real, authentic Chilean pen, sitting on a real, authentic Chilean chair at either a real, authentic Chilean desk or in a real, authentic Chilean café. Too much? Perhaps.

If you’re interested in receiving one, please e-mail your mailing address to dzka87@gmail.com. Subscribe!

Thanks!

Your email:

 

(If you’re already subscribed, you will have the option to change your settings instead of subscribing. Don’t worry, you’ll get a postcard too.)

Cheers from Chile!

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The Plan, Stan (Part 2)

Santiago is a different city in the spring, which it finally finally is. Sure, the temperature still varies wildly and the sky is known to occasionally open up with a 10-minute rain and hail downpour, but for the most part it simply varies from brisk to beautiful. The sun is out, the flowers are starting to bloom, the young horny couples are inappropriately touching each other in inappropriately public areas, it’s Spring!

On my part, I’ve been trying to make opportunities to walk as much as possible, something that seems to scare the hell out of most Chileans. “You’re going to walk home? From here?” my friend said incredulously. “But we’re right next to a Metro stop!” I attempted to go to a movie yesterday, but ended up stranded on the far end of Providencia, needing to get home (long story), the Metro just closing, and decided to walk home. I arrived about two hours later tired, but in a good way.

Today I went to Los Leones to check out the leather jacket shop I’d seen my first week in town (god a nice new leather jacket for about $42), and was on my way back when I decided to stop in to the Mundo a Mil (basically their version of a $1 store). I picked up a SUPER 3D PUZZLE of the USS Constellation CV-64, an aircraft carrier, and I was blown away by its amazing descriptions on the packaging. In its unedited glory:

Use hand and head — Training kid’s flexible for their proportion on the hands and eyes.Develop them imagination ability. Make a teaching fairyland.

Design munificent — It can be assemblaged detached over and over,and looks like vertiable.It needn’t any assist tools.

Perfect in workmanship — Materials are daintiness. Safety and slightly.Full of colour printing.

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ENRIQUEZ-OMINAMI CUTS TIES WITH CONVICTED FORMER CAMPAIGN MANAGER

Presidential hopeful Marco Enríquez-Ominami is taking steps to distance himself from a former advisor, Edgardo Lepe, who last month was found guilty for misuse of state funds to finance campaign activities.
Lepe was found guilty of fraud by Valparaíso Judge Juan Carlos Maggiolo, who handed down a 540-day suspended sentence and ordered Lepe to pay $770,000 Chilean pesos (CH) (US$1,400).
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The Plan, Stan (Part 1)

I’ve been wondering recently about my relative lack of updating, and I think I’ve traced the issue. It’s certainly not for lack of things to  write about, rather I’m accumulating a laundry list of topics that I really should mention, to the point that it would take the rest of my Chilean experiment just to describe everything that’s happened so far. I’ve yet to describe Peru or its alpacas, or La Serena and it’s penguins, or any number of things in Santiago that are worth at least a second look, if not a third or fifth.

Still, I think that part of it is just that I didn’t have that itch, that nagging necessity to write, the “ganas de escribir,” if you will, that I had like crazy for the first few months of my trip, and I believe that I can blame that entirely on my iPod. That’s right, music and audiobooks. I’ve been listening like mad to everything I can find, from Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, by Mark Twain, to The Conscience of a Liberal by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. My podcast subscriptions regularly provide me with hours upon hours of history lessons, political analysis, introspective storytelling, or side-splitting comedy. I love listening to things while I walk, but it blocks out my own thoughts, and I decided that it was time to take a break.

That said, the last few days have been some of the most interesting and fulfilling that I’ve had in Santiago, not because of crazy trips or new toys. Just ’cause.

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ENRÍQUEZ-OMINAMI PULLS AHEAD OF FREI IN BIG CITIES

Sen. Eduardo Frei is seeing his second-place standing falter in the country’s biggest cities, according to a poll to determine expected voter behavior in the upcoming presidential election.
The most recent poll by conservative daily newspaper El Mercurio and a Santiago-based polling organization, Opina, surveyed 1,200 people across Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción between Oct. 10-12.

Frei, the candidate for the governing center-left Concertación coalition, would beat out rival independent candidate Marco Enríquez-Ominami in the first round of an election, 22.8 percent to 21.5 percent (within a statistical margin of error), but would fare worse in the eventual second round against leading conservative candidate Sebastián Piñera. In such a runoff, either candidate would lose to Piñera, but Enríquez-Ominami would capture more of the vote (40.3 percent) than Frei (38.1 percent).

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