Fractals of Change

Ryan InterContinental

Why is the luxury InterContinental like low-cost no-frill Ryanair? Read on.

What a deal! Mary went on Priceline and got us three nights in the Athenaeum InterContinental Athens for $100 night, just a little more than we paid for the three star Acropole Hotel in Delphi.

At check-in, knowing we were paying so little, I accepted the €30/night upgrade offer to a renovated room on a high floor. The room is nice and we can see the Acropolis, which is lit up at night. I'll never know what the un-upgraded room would've been like.

Well, of course the Acropole had free WiFi; it's €19.95/day for the cheapest option at the InterContinental up to €49.95 if you want 10Mps and need it to work not only in your own room but in public areas and meeting rooms.

Breakfast was included at the Acropole. It's €30/each at the InterContinental (but you can get your eggs other than hard boiled). Mary and I like cheap, greasy breakfasts (she actually prefers sticky to greasy) but the InterContinental is in a commercial zone which seems to be free of competing restaurants. That also meant that last night, when we were tired from a day on the Acropolis, in the Agora (birthplace of democracy), and walking around the old city, we ate in the hotel restaurant. Pretty good food but ouch! A bottle of three buck chuck equivalent goes for €26. A bottle of Jack Daniels (which we didn't have) is €140.

Ryanair will famously fly you for a single euro plus tax on some routes. But then there are the booking fees, credit card fees, baggage fees (where do you think US airlines learned that trick?), priority boarding fees (no assigned seats so you want to be able to make a dash to stay out of the middle), lots of opportunity to buy things inflight, and nada for free.

Has lnterContinental learned to use Priceline as a low cost lure? Probably not but it wouldn't be a bad strategy.

See http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/03/easyjet_is_chea.html for my experience with Ryanair clone easyJet.

Buy Local, Sell Global

It doesn't scale. We can't all buy locally and sell globally. The less politically correct sounding version is "beggar thy neighbor".

Last week when we were vacationing in very friendly Apalachicola, I was mildly offended by a banner one block off the tourist street advising everyone to buy local. "What, no Vermont maple syrup? No ski vacations?"

This Thursday the front page of the "what's happening"" supplement of the usually excellent Stowe Reporter , the section tourists presumably read to see what to do with the rest of their money when the ski day is over, is all about taking a "Stay-CATION" – that's a vacation taken from the convenience of your own home. I doubt if people'll just pack up and go home because the skiing's still pretty good. But Stowe'd be in a pretty pickle if all our visitors had decided to take stay-cations instead.

In Vermont neither our university nor our state colleges would be economically or educationally viable if they took only in-state students. We would be a very insular place if all our own kids were educated here in the State (and stayed). But there's constant pressure to limit State financial assistance to Vermonters who attend college in Vermont.

On a larger scale, undeterred by the example of the Smoot-Hawley tariff (a Republican idea) which some economists believe greatly deepened the great depression, pandering legislators are trying to sneak protectionists measures into almost every piece of bailout legislation.

Labor leaders are pushing to restrict immigrant visas. "We don't have enough jobs for our own people." If an immigrant does a job, she spends most of the money she earns here. If a job is outsourced, the money is really gone. Someone in India suggested, only partly tongue in cheek, that the US should expand the number of visas for foreign workers because the Indians who come here to work will buy houses and stabilize the housing market. They may also know how to spend without massive consumer credit.

But, people argue, if US taxpayer money is going to a company, should it then be used to pay foreign workers? Good question. The answer is in the premise of the question, however. US taxpayer money shouldn't be going to corporations as aid unless it's meant to help in the orderly dismembering of a corporation that's too big to fail on its own.

We are spending fortunes in US taxpayer dollars to bail out US corporations. Other countries are doing the same for their corporations. The bailouts preserve capacity but don't increase demand. To a large extent the bailouts by different countries to their own industries cancel each other out leaving taxpayers poorer and erasing current or future demand. Failure to recognize that the economy is global was catastrophic in 1930. It would be really dumb to double down on that mistake.

"Buy Local, Sell Global" makes no sense at all. In the context of a recession which could easily be deepened by a panic, it's a dangerous idea.

New York in Winter

There was a patchwork of empty seats all over Madison Square Garden for the Friday night Knicks game; I'd had no trouble getting four good tickets online a few days earlier; used to be you had to go to a scalper for any Knicks tickets if you weren't a season ticket holder. Tickets have been easier to get ever since the Knicks stopped winning, but I could almost see the bankers and their clients who used to be in all those empty seats. The Club Restaurant in the Garden had the same great buffet and service; but half the tables were empty. The Knicks did beat the Memphis Grizzlies, however, in the too-quiet arena.

Mary used Priceline to get a reservation at the Times Square Hilton (four star) for $125; another sign of the times? From our 31^st floor window we couldn't see a single building crane. There were some major renovation projects still going on and a new office tower in the process of interior completion at 42d and 8^th; but daughter Kelly, whom we were visiting, says many projects have run out of funds and are stopped in the middle.

We had the wonderful Bronx Zoo almost all to ourselves; that had to be the bitter weather. Most of the few other visitors who gaped at the Siberian tigers with us were foreign tourists who probably couldn't wait for a warmer day. The tigers, just feet away when they chose to be on the other side of the glass, yawned at us and showed their teeth. The gorillas moved to their warm indoor quarters and perched just above the window out of sight except for swinging vines and falling hay. Small homo sapiens climbed close to the glass and squeezed their cheeks to it; "I see the monkeys," they squealed.

The Hudson is almost as ice-covered this winter as it was in my long-ago youth. The ice begins just north of the George Washington Bridge even though the water is still salty there from the tides. It stretches across the broad bay at Tappan Zee with only a few gaps.

Although I know the Arctic breakout over the Northeast didn't originate on Wall Street and it's much, much colder home in Vermont, New York seems groggy, dazed, and wounded – perhaps even more than after 9/11 when it was defiant and had stories of heroism rather than venality to tell.

But…

When we checked into the hotel, the girl behind the desk with an Eastern European accent told us that she had just moved to New York from Poland. "It's a wonderful time to be here," she said. "I mean if you have no family and no kids and you're young." Maybe it's always great to be young and obviously she had a job. Maybe winter is only in the eye of the beholder.

Has the Financial System Disconnected?

Before finding any Internet access – and so before we had any news in English – we found an ATM. Tried Mary's card and it failed authorization; tried mine – Oh oh: same problem.

Our first thought was that the world financial system had simply disconnected at the retail level! Maybe I should'nta been so antibailout. Now there's personal panic; conserve cash at all costs. Eat only at restaurants that take Visa. But is Visa working?

Tried our Visa and it still worked for purchases. Not a complete disaster yet.

Tried another ATM machine and it took both cards fine. Panic over.

But we do depend on a lot of stuff working. Hope when the banking system is put back together (if it doesn't become a government agency) that it is much less concentrated and centralized – sort of like the Internet. Not what's happening now at all with consolidation despite the fact that "too big to fail" entities caused the current problems.

First Lock

Blogging offline. To be posted when connected.

We shouldn'ta watched the DVD before starting our canal boat adventure. All of the easy docking demos showed at least three crew members. One's at the helm; two (always a man) jumps ashore; three (always a woman) throws lines to two. That's all easy.

But son Jarah isn't joining us until six days after we begin. Mary and I are going to have to do a lot of docking before that. Doesn't matter that just the two of us often dock our own boat or rented boats; Mary saw the video and there are three people doing the docking. She does have a point that the helmsman of the canal boat is high on the upper deck with no good way to throw or cleat lines. A coupla times Mary asks me are we sure we can do this; a bad sign.

Plan was to just spend the first night aboard at the place on the River Siles where we picked up the boat; after all we're old enough to be retired; have six hours of jet lag and got what sleep we did on our transatlantic flight. But it turns out there's nowhere to provision there; next day is Sunday when stores in Italy are closed; got to go just a mile downstream to Casier. And dock!

The boat boy from the place gets us out of the crammed boat parking lot. I take the helm and halfcrash, halfland the stern on a dock so he can hop off with his bike. We're on our own. This thing is about forty feet long; it's wide. Doesn't steer in reverse but does have a bow thruster (side facing prop in the front of the boat that can push the bow left or right. Should make everything a piece of cake). We're festooned with bumpers.

"I think that's the place," says Mary pointing out a concrete wall with some pilings in front of it and steel ladders imbedded in it.

"I don't think so," I say. "It's not far enough."

"I think it is."

Well, I think, we have to dock sometime. Might as well get it over with. "Ok." I remember that it's best to dock heading upstream; current about two knots; no wind. We've already discussed that she wraps the first line around something onshore; cleats it back on the boat; then does the same for the second line.

"Do you want me to do the rope in the front or in the back first?" Mary asks.

"Back, because then I can use the bow thruster to push the bow in and you'll be able to grab that." Bad decision. I don't get the stern close enough to a piling so Mary somehow leaps with the line to a ladder and wraps the line around a rusty rung. She's onshore now; the bow is pushed out by the current. I can push it back some with the thruster but Mary's stuck on the ladder and I'm at the helm.

"Tie the line to the ladder," I try to say in a calm voice of command which isn't quite calming. "Then I'll throw you the bow line."

"How'll you do that?" Mary asks still clinging to the ladder. "You're up there." She doesn't remember the part of the DVD that says one person is chosen as captain and everyone does what he (sic) says.

I leave the helm and go to the bow so I can throw that line. "Where are you?" asks Mary. "Are you OK?"

But we get it all sorted out and the boat safely docked. Turns out it's the wrong place and there's no store. It's getting dark.

Look, we're experienced now. Untie. Go downstream another half a mile; turn into the current; pull up to the concrete quay. Do the bow line first this time because the current'll swing the stern in. Piece of cake. We ignore the laughing little boys who want to help us. Even get to the grocery store before it closes.

Oh yeah. The first lock. The lock tender laughed at us a little when we rammed the side of the lock. But we're on the other side now in the Venetian Lagoon proper. That's what happens when you're a good team.

UPDATE: whoops. Hubris. Really screwed up docking in Burano in a small space between a houseboat and a dredge with deadly protrusions. Ok, though.

Trains and Planes

At 1PM, someone trusted by our driver at the train station in San Rafael, Mexico “knew” that the 1:20PM train to Chihuahua wouldn’t arrive until 2PM. In fact, it didn’t arrive until almost 3PM. No one seemed to know about the full delay since there were both vendors and railroad employees waiting for the train from 2PM on. Such delays are common on the Chepe Express; two days before the train hadn’t run at all.

While we waited on the platform, we had plenty of time to notice that only one wire went from the utility poles on the street to the houses and businesses. There was power but no telephone. On top of the train station there is a mast for radio telephone which some people use. Along the railroad track there are old telegraph wires, but they are apparently no longer in use since they hang to the ground from some poles and make a trellis for vines. The trains spend a lot of time on sidings of the one rail line, waiting for each other to pass.

“Communications problems,” I said with a superior air knowing that Telmex’ effective monopoly has retarded telecommunication development in Mexico.

Almost exactly a day later we were in O’Hare waiting for a flight to Burlington. Half an hour prior to the scheduled 7:05 PM United departure, all the fancy displays at O’Hare said “on time”. When we got to the gate, a big LCD with Burlington weather said there were just two minutes until boarding. Mary has this habit of looking out the window instead of at the electronic screens; “there’s no plane here,” she said. She was right.

“Minutes until boarding” disappeared from the display; I had sort of thought it might go negative.

“The plane is coming from the hanger,” the gate agent announced. “It’s had some maintenance but it’s on its way over now.” She had lots of communication equipment: a landline phone, a computer, two cell phones one of which also had walkie-talkie capabilities, and a PA system to talk to us with.

Half an hour later there was still no plane at the gate. O’Hare’s big but it’s not that big. I was going to question the gate agent more closely but noticed that she was looking out the window the same as I was to see whether anything was parked at the gate. On the LCD, new departure and estimated arrival times were posted every ten minutes – always ten minutes later than the previous post. Once the boarding clock ticked down from fifteen to one again but that didn’t bring any plane. Twice the agent told us that she had been told that the plane had now left the hanger. Once, inexplicably, she’s said it just landed – maybe it flew across O’Hare.

Finally a plane did arrive. We boarded quickly and were assured that we would get a speedy clearance and have a speedy flight because of stronger than usual tail winds. What the pilot didn’t know and couldn’t tell us was that a problem with the evacuation slide indicator lights had been fixed but not yet tested. Not sure I want to go down a slide into Lake Champlain in January but no one asked me. That test (which didn’t involve deploying the slide) took forty minutes. Then we went home.

So, with all the modern communications technology in the world available, United didn’t do any better at telling its passengers when they could expect to depart than the operators of the Chepe Express did. Anyone who flies frequently knows that this isn’t an isolated failure.

Moral is that both Mexico and the US have a lot of modernizing to do if we North Americans are going to compete in a global economy. I know the Chinese railroads had there own problems last week but China is getting better fast at the information technology needed for a huge economy and its infrastructure to function. Trains and planes ought to run on time; the whole economy suffers when they don’t. When they’re late, people need to know. I think we’re buying a lot of gadgets but don’t have the will to put them to good use.

Escape from Copper Canyon

Pictured above is the hike we wanted to take, down into Copper Canyon. Instead we’re playing cards and dominoes in a lodge perched on the rim at 6500 feet and tantalized by five-minute clearings between downpours. The road we came in on is now at least partially impassable for vehicles.

The hike we ARE, apparently, going to take is six miles out to San Rafael where we’ll catch a train to Chihuahua.

The road is GONE- washed away! We’re edging along fragments of crumbling cliffs with a sheer 7000 foot drop! We have to scramble over huge, gelatinous mudslides; boulders cascade down around us; raging new rivers cut our path!

Not really; that’s just Mary’s nightmare. But we do have to hike out because the road is no longer fit for cars (see the van in the ditch below).

 

As you can see, I’m wearing a garbage-bag poncho that certainly isn’t Gore-Tex. The lump on my back is thirty pounds of computer (naturally), batteries, sat-phone, more batteries, Kindle, mobile phone, chargers, portable solar charger, more batteries, and other essentials. Brother Bill was kind enough to take the smaller back of dry clothes Mary was wearing under her garbage bag. My assumption is that we’ll never see the rest of our luggage again.

First part of the climb is up seven hundred feet. Since we’re starting at 6500, we can feel the altitude and my pack doesn’t help. I’m drenched under the garbage bag even though the rain has stopped right on cue as we began our escape.

The road didn’t really disappear anywhere; it’s mainly cut into limestone cliffs and so is essentially natural concrete. Parts (as above) are impassable to vehicles because slippery mud washed onto steep grades. Turns out we could’ve gotten a ride for all but the first part but now we’re determined to have at least one hike and we have plenty of time to catch the train.

Only one stream cut the road and we found a fording place with well-placed rocks just a little upstream. Almost – but not quite – toppled over with all my electronics into the stream. The fog lifted and let us see beautiful side canyons; the rain held off to make sure we left the land of the Tarahumara; would have certainly started again if we tried to stay.

Plan B – the horse I thought would carry our bags out – disappeared on an errand the day before we left and never came back. But good news: there are plan C burros. Our suitcases are in those garbage bags on their backs.

Kindle Travel Test

I could read books on my Amazon Kindle even when the bright sun was over my shoulder, not just when it was in front of me making me squint as in the very posed picture above. Like a book, Kindle isn’t backlit; it has crisp black type on a grayish surface. At night the gray is slightly less reflective than pulp paper so I couldn’t read Kindle quite as far into the evening as Mary could read her traditional books; had to give up and turn on the light slightly sooner which mattered on our vacation because we were either draining the house battery of a boat or using the last few watts of solar-generated electricity in a rain-swept cabin on land.

Although I did have an opportunity to recharge, Kindle’s own battery – since it’s not providing light and since I wasn’t using the radio – seems as if it would have easily lasted through two weeks and the two books I read on it.

Kindle was more than worth its 10.3 ounces in books I didn’t have to carry. Running out of things to read is not acceptable on a vacation and outdoor adventure-type vacations both make it difficult to predict how much involuntary down (reading) time you’ll have and make it undesirable to carry a lot of extra weight.

I needed to bring one book to read during takeoffs and landings when airlines don’t allow “anything with an on-off switch” to be on. That was Vito Dumas’ Alone Through the Roaring Forties, a good read for someone doing a little tame sailing in the Sea of Cortez. He went around the world single handled in the “wrong direction” (West to East) around all three fearsome southern capes, usually at forty degrees south latitude.

While still in the US, I loaded Kindle with The Immaculate Deception by Iain Pears, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.  Only read the first two so Kite Runner was backup.

The reading experience was very similar to reading a paperback: better in some ways because, if you leave Kindle next to your plate and use your hands to eat, it doesn’t spring closed like a paperback wants to. The pages (at a typesize I can read) have less words on them than a book and there’s a slight pause and flicker at page turn which takes a little getting used to, not much though. The design is flawed in having active controls three-quarters of the way down both sides of the case: it’s almost impossible to avoid accidental page turn in one direction or the other – especially when using the cursor or trying to turn Kindle off. BTW, when you turn Kindle back on, it knows what page you were reading.

My crew was in to word games and Kindle’s onboard copy of The New Oxford American Dictionary was invaluable in solving disputes which would have been tough otherwise with no way to access wiktionary.

Other Kindle posts on FOC:

Kindle – Web Browsing Reviewed

Kindle – Book Reader’s Review

Kindle – Free Internet Browsing for Just $400

Kindle – Shape of the Web to Come?

Kindle – Reader Questions and Comments

Pam’s Poem

On our recent sailing trip, we swam with the sea lions off their rocks in the Sea of Cortez. Friend Marc got scratched or bitten by a playful cub; same cub bit my flipper, just as my puppy Bruiser would have, when I used it to block his rocketing attack from below.

But my sister Pam Zino – nurse/writer/Neried at heart – was swarmed by the sea lions. She disappeared in a crush of them for a frightening moment. She handled them wonderfully and wrote a poem about that and more which she has given me permission to post here.

Without Even Closing My Eyes

I feel the world rocking.

A bright blue rocking

into sandy bights of red spine

rising from the Sea of Cortez.

Wind propelled, cradled by swell

the cat’s hulls cleave

the leeward sea of the red range.

Windward of the cliffs, the waves

  pound rock jetties in their wake.

We forge a saltwater river in

a mangrove thicket to the far shore.

Beaks folded like bayonettes to their chest ,
Pelicans guard the way to a clear lagoon

braced by a warm wall of rock

from crashing sea.

Which, days on land, I still feel rocking me

  as it rocked when I spotted sea lions cupped in its peaks.

“There! At one o’clock,” I yelled. “rising ‘fore the bow.”

We searched the waters. Was that one? More there?

Undulating crests dazzled with water and light

mirroring phantasmagoria, or actual sight?

Then suddenly their bray bounced off a long shelf

of jagged pinnacled rock

They cavorted, snout to snout, trumpeting at play

slapping flippers, rolling about, posing on steep inclines

smooth young pups yelping , huge bewhiskered elders bellowing

The island a riot of sound and form.

I dove into the sea.

Surfacing, a pup breached before me

Another lion torpedoed beneath

I donned snorkel and mask

had them in place, and just as I did

All sight was erased

By a swift silent eddy of lions inspecting me

They circled about

Prodding, nuzzling, brushing, gumming

Their current whirled in

an exquisite softness of water and flesh

an inquisitive stream of motion and press

And a worry of possible biting

- Of welcome to fighting -

Do nothing to disturb them, I thought

Make no sudden move causing fear

Be one with their curiosity

This is what you dove to be near.

Will one breach beneath me, I wondered

Will I be carried on a back?

As if divining my thoughts

a lion did just that

But instead of coming from beneath,

mounted me. I was underneath.

I could feel its length, feel its breadth

yet it was weightless:

a muscle of gently suspended flesh

The gesture so exhalted me

it broke my reverie. I called out

and the circle dispersed to the depths.

 

Yet still I feel their water rocking me

See the sea-furnaced igneous range

with sandstone surface gargoyled by wind

its coves of shelled beach

its sere of cactii - silent witness to blaze and gale

And still I feel the water rocking me

though now I hail so far from its reach.

The Curse of the Tarahumara

The old man with the slim-hipped body of a boy did a rain dance for our entertainment. He was once a world champion in the 100 mile super-marathon. The Tarahumara Indians run rather than walk; they live in steep canyons – at 7000 feet in the summer and in the valleys much lower in the winter. He and his friends drove to Leadville, Colorado to compete in the 1993 when he was already in his fifties; he won then. He was second to an American when the race was run in his native Sierra Tarahumura. Now he dances traditional dances, sometimes. His feet and legs are still strong.

He lives in his hut on land belonging to the local Tarahumura council. The hut, which has nether running water nor electricity, is surrounded by his corn field, his peach orchid, and the fenced in area where his bull grazes. The cows are free on the range. They don’t keep goats anymore because of the damage they do to the thin soil of the plateau. When he ran competitively, he wore sandals made from old tires. When he dances the rain dance, he wears rattles on his ankles made from dried butterfly cocoons filled with dry seeds.

Trouble is the rain dance worked during what should be the dry season. It was raining when we got up the next morning (yesterday). In the village before the village where the train station is, we found out that the trains were not running – no explanation, just no trains.

For a not-so-small fee the driver who was taking us to the station said he would take us to the next station (that’s as far as we planned to go on the train yesterday) and rendezvous with the driver who was already arranged to take us from that station to Uno Lodge, our next destination. We changed to a pickup for the ride over the rutted, wet, and occasional steep gravel road to San Rafael, suitcases in plastic garbage bags in the back. At San Rafael, we switched vehicles with an ashen-faced couple, clearly in shock, who had just come from Uno Lodge and were headed back the way we’d come. “Interesting ride,” the man said but didn’t unclench his teeth.

It’s only six miles from San Rafael to Uno Lodge; in good weather the drive takes an hour and there’s usually a four-wheel drive vehicle but that’s in Chihuahua being serviced. And it’s not good weather. The small-wheeled long van with rear wheel drive slips alarmingly on the wet limestone and occasional clay or mud. Some of the canyons at the edge of the road carved into the cliff are a five thousand foot sheer drop. Mary doesn’t look and I only pretend to be brave.

Finally the women revolt and with some relief I accompany them walking the last precipitous mile in a light drizzle. The lodge at 6600 feet overlooks a canyon at least as picturesque and on the same scale as the Grand Canyon. At a mere thirty million years  since its fiery genesis, this landscape is only a quarter the age of the Grand Canyon and correspondingly much more jagged. The views are beautiful when we get glimpses of them through the now driving rain and swirling fog. The guest book talks about the best hikes ever and we’re stuck inside playing dominos and hearts.

We have yesterday’s forecast but the promised afternoon clearing hasn’t happened. The lodge has a little solar-generated juice left in its battery and is recharging the radio telephone so we may get a later report. We’re the only guests and not quite sure if we’ll be able to leave as scheduled tomorrow since the road is no longer fit for the vans even by local standards and snow was in the old forecast.

There’s a horse I call Plan B. It could carry most of the bags. We can walk six miles if we have to if we can keep dry  (it’s cold) and we did save the garbage bags our suitcases were in to use as panchos. Not the hike we had in mind but people do come to Stowe to ski and sometimes find no snow. No use complaining.

Too late I read in the guide book that the Tarahumara like to be left alone. With hindsight that’s clear from their isolated huts spread through the canyons. My advice is don’t accept rain dances from strangers unless you want to get wet.