Haven’t pudublogged in a while, but I suspect they’d enjoy the island
I just spent a week exploring.  (Rough life, I know.)

Until I actually
get around to writing up my thoughts, here are a few pics for the
curious:

Tobago from the air, yesterday morning, facing south, from an airplane passing over the Buccoo Reef.

Englishman’s
Bay on the island’s leeward coast.  If you ever need to stare into
space for a few hours, thinking about nothing but how the air feels on
your back, this is a very good spot for it.

French angelfish near Store Bay, flanked by what I believe are
immature clown wrasses.  But I know very little about tropical fish, so
I should really write “blue-faced servingtrayfish, plus a bunch of
yellow panicdarters.”  That’s what I actually called them when I was in
the water.

Americans rarely visit Tobago for some reason, but
it’s a fairly popular destination for folks from Canada, Europe, and elsewhere in the Caribbean.  There have been some serious
concerns lately about safety in the news (scroll down past Jamaica, which is also kinda how you find Tobago itself) and in various government travel advisories (e.g. Canada, Australia, the UK),
but the major problems seem mostly to be on the sister island of
Trinidad.  (Which, you notice, I reluctantly decided not to visit.)

For now, Tobago still seems cool if you don’t make yourself a target by large displays of wealth or perhaps by screaming “I curse you, steel pan music!” at the top of your lungs.  I walked alone all the time and never once felt my feelers twinging.  Obviously, the tourists mentioned in the government advisories had a different experience.

That
said, many of the reefs are in real trouble, American-style franchising
is on its way, and the inability of the police to handle increasing
drug-related crime is so bad that they’ve actually asked the Colombian
cops for advice.  Oy.

So I did have a sinking feeling the whole time,
sensing that I was seeing an island which won’t be the same in the
not-too-distant future.

Somewhat like Earth itself, the way things are going. 

More later.  Gotta unpack and stuff…

The new Chomsky just came.  I didn’t exactly run around the house like Steve Martin in The Jerk getting the first new phone book with his name in it, but if, like me, you enjoy the characteristic Chomsky-exposure mixture of (a) appreciating the work of a guy who tries to refuse moral relativism in all its forms, while (b) becoming incredibly depressed, it’s a hell of a good read.

I’d recommend alternating with John Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise, a surrealist almanac more accurate than most of the evening news.  The authoritative list of eight U.S. presidents who had hooks for hands, for example, is a perfect reset-button after reading Chomsky’s assessment of the U.S. electoral process.

That may be the single most enjoyable entry title I will ever write. 

I am so not making this up.

There’s a good write-up at Liberal Oasis.

Or you could just read the text of Condi’s happy chat with the dictator here, from the State Department’s own website.

The Amnesty International report on Condi’s “good friend” includes grossly unfair trials, roundups and beatings of immigrants, suspicious electoral results, financial fraud, confessions extracted under torture, and summary executions.  Care for some champagne?

Meanwhile, happy pal runs a country where most people live on less than a dollar a day, but Condi’s new best friend squirreled away tens (and possibly hundreds) of millions of dollars in a DC bank known for its lax standards, ties to the CIA, and (coincidentally, of course) handling of terrorist funding.

Sweet. 

UPDATE — oh, and I forgot: Obiang’s globetrotting son — the one in charge of housing for his poor nation, which he apparently oversees from his mansions in London, Paris, and Los Angeles — has been dating hip-hop singer Eve. 

Small, nasty little world. 

Baseball fever… I have no life.  Here’s your 2006 All-Authoritarian-sounding-names fantasy baseball team, starting with the hitters:

• c           Ram