{ bobharris.com }

I’ll be in South America for about six or seven more weeks, so I don’t know how often I’ll be blogging.  But I found this place while looking for a room in San Carlos de Bariloche later in the trip. 

I like to think there are actual pudus trotting around the front desk.  And maybe another pudu with a bellman’s cap on, scratching at your luggage.

Travelling again, which is why the blog is not so much with the blogging of late.  Hope this makes your Friday better.  It certainly made my Wednesday nicer.

That’s from a hill called Panecillo ("little loaf of bread") overlooking Quito, Ecuador. You’re at almost twice the altitude of Denver, so the air is remarkably thin — and when it’s clear, my camera can’t possibly do the colors here justice.  (Altitude sickness, just from being here, can be a problem.  Fortunately, I live in L.A., so I got over the need for a steady oxygen supply long ago.)

Yesterday, December 6, is the local equivalent of July 4th in the US.  This particular year is Quito’s 473rd anniversary.  It’s celebrated with a major festival lasting for several weeks.  So major town squares and sometimes whole neighborhoods have been filled with dancing and singing and general merriment since I got here.

Highly recommended.

Plus, the whole downtown is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, filled with magnificent churches, convents, and assorted Spanish colonial stuff, all of it pretty damn gorgeous.

Here’s how I’ve been treated since I got here: last night, I was one of thousands of people crushing together along a major avenue, awaiting the Parade of Sound and Light.  Things were delayed, so this was rapidly turning into the Parade of Standing Around Freezing Two Miles in the Air While Surrounded by People With Much Stronger Lungs.

Pretty soon, I’m talking with a local named Paul.  Mucho gusto.  He introduces me to his wife. And his son.  And another son, and two daughters.  And some in-laws, I think, and maybe a couple of cousins.  Frankly, I lost track.  But they practically welcomed me into the family, just standing there on the street, helping me with my jagged Spanish and filling in the words when I couldn’t find them.

A few minutes later, Paul asked if I had any friends in Quito.  (I don’t.)  Then, before I could answer, and in all sincerity, he corrected himself: "besides us," he added.

Maybe you had to be there to know that he meant those words, already.

There’s a thing that musicians do here after songs, at least during the Fiesta.  They lead the crowd in a quick call-and-response: ¡Viva Quito!  ¡Viva Ecuador!

So far, I have to agree.

By making the lead singer from Midnight Oil…

… Australia’s new Environment Minister.

Oz rocks.  As an official matter of government policy, in fact.

I am so moving there one of these days.

Friend of the blog Paul Paquet runs a combination PR and trivia-question-writing company in Ottawa that actually does a pretty nifty business.  I had no idea the market for minutiae was so large.

His website hosts a weekly trivia quiz that Paul writes himself, and it’s always a fun way to knock a few minutes off while procrastinating online.  This week’s quiz is loosely based on Who Hates Whom, a recent book of mine you may have seen subtly mentioned elsewhere on this site.  Ahem.

I thank Paul for the thoughtful bit of pluggage.  If you’ve got ten minutes and want to play, click on over.

One key caveat: the quiz also contains material not drawn from the book, and there are several places where the quiz phrases things in a way I wouldn’t have chosen.  Consider the entire quiz Paul’s work, not mine.  He deserves full credit for all any fun, reward, or outrage you may experience.  Enjoy!

Actual current Adobe online ad, noticed on several pages of Salon.com:

Docomunents?

Regular visitors know that I spend a good deal of pudu-related space spewing purest balderdash about the habits of small creatures. This week’s absurdity is actually real.

Last week I posted this note about participating in the European Quizzing Championships, which included some of the most lunatic and delightful questions I’ve ever seen — one of which asked us to name a kind of civet, common in the Balearic Islands, which marks its territory by doing handstands.

I couldn’t answer the question myself.  I was too busy giggling at the mental picture, and at the absurd sight of seeing competitors from fifteen countries nonchalantly nodding and writing down their answers, as if handstanding Balearic civets are in no way unexpected or wondrous.  Can the world truly be this comfortable with its own weirdness?  Apparently so.

Here’s our answer, as it appeared on the tournament’s big projection screen, and in four languages, no less:

The genet, dear readers, is our little self-inverting anus-gland-exposing gymnastic Mediterranean friend.

What am I thankful for in this year’s installment of socially compelled Two Minutes Gratitude? Many, many things. But most of all, to live in a world so strange and magnificent in the first place.

Have a gleeful holiday.  If you’re in the Balearic Islands, please hug a handstanding civet for me.

(And yes, I know genets don’t really like to be hugged.  But millions of Americans are getting hugs they don’t really want today, too.  So think of it as sharing the holiday spirit.)

Back in the US, still catching up, but had to share this:

Astute visitors here may have noticed that the site hasn’t been updated in the better part of a week. That’s because I’ve been in Blackpool, England, having a ball at the most unbelievable trivia tournament I’ve ever seen.

I’m at the European Quizzing Championships, part of a four-man Team USA along with Ken Jennings, Ed Toutant, and David Legler, with occasional cameos by the founder of the US Game Show Congress and US rep on the International Quizzing Association’s board Paul Bailey. (Incidentally, if this group were the Beatles, make no mistake: I’m Ringo at best. If not Stu Sutcliffe. Those guys have a total of over $7 million in quiz show winnings between them. Me? I have, um, this blog.)

We’ve spent the last three days hammering our brains against about 100 inspiring fanatics from nearly 20 countries from all over Europe and as far away as India. And just how crazed can the questions get when you’ve got people that good from all over the world? This one was completely typical, I swear to you:

I had no idea whatsoever. (Not that you need me to tell you that.) But the English guy sitting next to me came up with it after about thirty seconds of thought. He figured it out, in fact — by remembering which region Marmont was Duke of, then coming up with its biggest city, then modifying the name into a common French verb form, resulting in the educated and correct guess of "raguser."

Good lord.

Here’s another:

There are people from Belgium, Norway, Hungary and so on who walk around knowing that Zamenhof was born in Bialystok. Yes, yes, dear boy, ask us something difficult, would you?

So: this was three days of trying to come up with Albanian dictators, East German ping-pong players, Senegalese poets, and more weird random crap than I ever imagined I’d see asked with a straight face.

We actually did OK, if you’re curious. In the singles event, Ken ranked near the top (gee, big surprise there) and the rest of us were respectably middle and up. As a team, we again fared middle-up, losing the exhibition match against an international European side by one point, 60-59, because we could only identify two of the three snips of cinematic dream sequences we were given in the last round.

But winning was never the point, of course. Mostly it was a great chance to hang out with the guys and meet dozens of fascinating international nerds capable of raking at brain-frying trivia while — let’s remember — not even playing in their own native language.

So: thank you, EQC, thank you Paul Bailey, thank you fellow US players, thank you Steven and Chris and Jane and a bunch of other folks who put together the quizzes, and most of all, my hearty thanks to thousands of random events, objects, and historical people whose names I have now at least heard once before I humbly die.

Incidentally, and I say this with glowing affection: the Belgian players are total freaks. Off the charts. They know crap in four to six languages that I can’t even spell in English. Mark these words: never challenge a Belgian to a trivia duel. They will cut you with their minds.

At one point — my hand to any god you prefer — they actually asked which species of civet in the Balearic Islands marks its territory by performing handstands.

And like half of the people in the room just nodded dismissively as if they’d just been asked, I dunno, the capital of Denmark. I’m sure the Belgians were waiting for the really hard questions to start.

Wait a minute — you mean there are civets that do handstands in the Balearic Islands? How did I not know this? At least now I have a picture to seek out for Friday pudublogging.

More when I get the chance. A couple of the guys and I are taking a few days to hang out in Northern Ireland before heading home, and I’m not sure what the WiFi sitch will be. Should also be some pics from there and around Blackpool here, too.

(And yes, I am leaving the identity of that handstanding Balearic civet to your Google skills. Assuming you don’t just know it off the top of your head. I’ll post the answer later in the week.)

The floods in Tabasco have left countless people homeless. Nobody knows how many yet.

We do know that at least half a million people are affected, their homes cut off by the water, flooded, partially destroyed, or simply washed away entirely.

There may be 20,000 people still trapped on their roofs.

Up to eighty percent of the entire state has been inundated.

Obviously it’s one of the worst natural disasters in Mexico’s history. And it’s nowhere near over.

People are running out of food and water. Electricity is down. Waterborne illness now becomes a major risk.

Some of the Televisa photo gallery is simply hard to believe. If you don’t speak any Spanish, just assume each caption says something "yes, it’s hard to believe life can suddenly suck this much." Take a look.

If you’d like to help, you can donate to the Red Cross, UNICEF, Save the Children, or any other charity you prefer in a matter of seconds. The Mexican Embassy has also posted direct transfer bank information for relief-specific accounts accessible in the U.S. and Canada.

Si hablan español, el gobierno del estado de Tabsaco tiene todos sus últimos avisos de la emergencia aqui, y Televisa pone sus noticias actualizadas con frequencia y muchos videos aqui.

CNN has an English language video report here.

Serious Katrina memories. I hope you’ll want to toss in a few bucks yourself.

We get a lot of questions about pudu maintenance. For example, some people’s pudus wobble through corners at high speed.

So how often should a pudu’s legs be rotated?  Is it better to switch out the front pair with the back, or to rotate them four ways, like with a car?

Generally, you can just switch the front legs with the back legs and get improved mileage and stability.  (Above, a pudu in mid-repair.)

With proper care, your pudu should be reliably tiny for many years to come.

Photo by an Argentine named Ricardo Cenzano, whose work I love looking at and who probably has a wonderful life.