Mobile Phones More Dangerous than Smoking
Not that the increasingly ominous evidence is going to do anything to actually reduce cell phone usage, especially among young people. At the very least I’m hoping that we’ll end up with a new school of futurism that actually acknowledges the reality of our natures as organic beings, rather than impatiently waving those realities aside as tiresome nuisances to be ignored.
My friend Terry asked in comments why we decided to move here. I guess I’ve never really gone through the list of reasons, but it’s all pretty simple. For starters, Kenn and I moved to Guadalajara because we could. We’ve been talking for years about how we can pretty much run our business from anywhere in the world, and we finally decided to put our money where our mouths are. There were a couple of things holding us back until recently. Our dog Lucky was much too old to deal with being relocated, and we mourned her for a year after she died before we really committed to moving. Also, laptop technology wasn’t really in place for doing intensive graphics and illustration, and there was no way in hell we were going to move down here with a couple of desktop furnaces. We seldom deal with Canadian clients, and all we really need is a decent internet connection. So after a year of paperwork and filling out legal forms and getting permission to start up a Mexican corporation, here we are.
The night we decided to leave Vancouver, we took a laptop over the the Red Door on Granville and started doing some research. After a couple of hours searching the globe with Google Earth, we’d settled on Guadalajara. Phrases like “The city of eternal spring”, “Paris of Latin America” and “the San Fransisco of Central America” kind of helped nudge us in the right direction.
The climate here is beautiful and clememt year-round. We’re on a 5000 foot high plateau, so the air is always clean, and being in a high desert, there’s practically no humidity. Guadalajara is at least as modern as any Canadian city, with a vibrant culture and an arts scene that’s second to none. We’re centrally located here, just a 40 minute flight to the Pacific Coast, and within reach of thousands of places to explore in Central and South America. The cuisine here is wonderful too, with more world-class restaurants within walking distance of us than I’ve ever had access to in any other city, even in Europe. And there’s a pleasant, laid-back and relaxed atmosphere here that Vancouver used to be famous for, but which is long gone there.
And Guadalajara is affordable. After 13 years in Vancouver, it was clear that no matter how hard we worked, we’d never be able to afford to retire, let alone buy a property we’d consider worth mortgaging our futures for. That’s too bad because we both love Vancouver, but it’s not the laid back, affordable, easy-going city it used to be. That place is gone forever. Here in Guadalajara, we can consider owning a fully paid-for property in a few years, and contemplate retiring in our mid-fifties.
And finally, we moved just for the adventure of moving, learning a new language, experiencing new things. We hope to make Guadalajara our home base and spend some time living in and exploring other places in South and Central America in the years to come.
You can’t have a blog as deliciously subversive as Stuff White People Like and NOT end up with 18 million hits in three months and a juicy book deal. Congratulations!
Out of all the speculation around Britney’s spectacularly entertaining train wreck of a career, the one idea you almost never see put forth is that, mental illness aside, maybe she’s just a truly horrible person.
Sure, and while we’re at it, why torture young people with such arcane skills as woodworking and drafting? After all, we have China to make everything for us now. Surely we’ve evolved beyond the need for obsolete hand skills. And while we’re at it, isn’t it kind of cruel to force kids to learn how to play sports when they have perfectly good Xboxes and PS3’s? Why even teach typing, when within a few years it will be possible to dictate everything perfectly? For that matter, what are we still doing funding libraries, when as Steve Jobs so famously put it, “No one reads books anymore.” Why teach young people how to paint, or draw, or make pottery or do any of those obsolete things that we have computers for now?
Cash-strapped Borders books has had to put itself up for sale, a victim of that vague “Credit Crunch” bogeyman du jour. Which is good news because books are obsolete artifacts clung to by sentimental fearful Luddites who don’t want to let Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey De Grey live to be 1000. One less bookstore chain means more people reading online, which spells progress! Can mind uploads and runaway godlike AI be far behind?
One of Josh Marshall’s readers seems a little unclear on the concept:
“The superdelegates weren’t created to add fluff to the popular vote, but to make the educated decision that voters sometimes can’t.”
Or maybe I’m the one who’s unclear. I have to confess, I really don’t get the whole idea of “Superdelegates”. Did they even exist in the last nomination race? And is it wrong for the expression “Pyramid Scheme” to come into my head whenever they’re mentioned?
Think of it this way: if the “crackdown” in Tibet had been carried out by U.S. Troops, do you think there would be any question of a wholesale Olympic boycott? So why does China get a free pass? Because we need them. Desperately. Because cheap underwear at WalMart is the keystone holding what’s left of our consumer debt-driven economy together.
I wish Canada would do the right thing for once, and make a stand that consists of more than a sternly worded letter Fedexed to the appropriate Ottawa diplomatic assistants. And if the dreams of a few Olympic hopefuls have to get dashed to make that stand, well so what? Who cares? How does that even belong in the same ethical universe of significance?
We thought we’d try out the local Starbucks the other night. There aren’t that many in Guadalajara, at least not compared to Vancouver where “one on every corner” isn’t much of an exaggeration. We walked into the one off the Minerva Fountain roundabout and were hit by a wall of noise – the place was packed. Every table full, standing room only on the upstairs patio, laptop workstations around the periphery, all in use. People there with their families, their grandparents and kids, people on dates, crowds of young people laughing and sharing stuff on their iPhones and music players. It was more like a cross between a community center and a nightclub. I’m just so used to Starbuck’s being either filled with long lineups of unsmiling bitchy businesspeople on their way to work, or forlornly empty, with a solitary sullen UBC student tucked in the corner for decoration. I’m so accustomed to the unwritten cultural rule of Vancouver – that walking into Starbucks is something you apologize for – that “Hey, let’s all go hang out at Starbuck’s – everyone will be there” is a bit of a jolt.
I don’t have any way of measuring the impact Clarke had on my imagination, except to simply say that he shaped it. He was exploring concepts in the 40s and 50s that are still being repackaged and hailed as revolutionary and cutting-edge today. He kept working and thinking and wondering until the very end. May we all be so fortunate.
Sorry for the long abscence of posts. We hit the ground running on the work front, and we’ve both just gotten over bouts of “travellers illness”. In between we’ve both been soaking in the reality that we actually live in a tropical climate now. We’re heading into the hot season, and daily temps are averaging about 37 or so – but you’d never know it with the dry high-desert air. As soon as the sun goes down, the city bleeds it’s heat away into space and it gets chilly enough to put a comforter on the bed. Perfect.
Our new apartment already feels like home, and we’re starting to pick up a few basic Spanish phrases. We have some guidebooks, but they’re mostly of the touristy “How to Complain to Foreign People” variety, featuring helpful phrases such as “This food is too cold”, “Our rooms are too small” and “I’m hot. Please do something about it.”
Thank God for Wal-Mart. A couple of visits there and we’re pretty much set up with all the little extras we need. We’re living kind of at the edge of downtown, in Ladron de Guevarra, which is about a 40 minute walk to Centro. 40 minutes is exactly what it used to take us to walk to downtown Vancouver from our old apartment. Right around the corner from us is a laptop sales and repair store, a gym, a couple of dozen awesome restaurants and a language school where we’ll be signing up for night courses as soon as we’ve established a routine. We were working the day before we moved and have a deadline for Friday morning, so getting that routine down is going to take another week or so.
We’re also starting to adapt to the altitude. We’re at about 5000 feet here, so it takes a bit of getting used to. We have three flights of stairs to our place, and you can get a little winded the first few days. But I’ve never slept so soundly as I’ve been sleeping here. I don’t know if that’s the altitude or just the fact that we’re finally here after months of work and planning.
As for the cats, Shane was out exploring the apartment and balcony the day after we arrived. Klemptor still comes out only at night, and then scuttles away and hides in a box spring mattress in the guest room. Today’s the last day we’re going to let her have that hiding spot. She’ll just have to accept that she’s here. Probably the most alien thing for them is that everything smells different here, even the air itself.
Arrived safe and sound with our cats Shane and Klemptor stunned but otherwise in good shape. They’ve found a box spring mattress in the guest bedroom of our new place that they’ve camped out in – probably for the next week or so. The last five days have been insane – cleaning out our old apartment in Vancouver, getting set up here – but after six months of planning, we’ve made our dream come true. More later in the week. Kenn and I are both still in recovery mode.
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