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…

Home from Tobago (about which more shortly), I go online today to peek at what I’ve missed, and holy crap — this government’s constant lurch into a lunatic parody of a corrupt third-world regime remains unstoppable:

About $4 billion in Iraq war spending “could not be tracked,” although the war party illegally hijacked $2.5 billion to prep for the Iraq war while Bush was claiming he was still seeking peace.  Meanwhile, after the deadliest month so far this year in Iraq — a war that is supposedly going to stop terrorism, remember — we find a worldwide three-fold explosion in terrorism.

Didn’t see it much on CNN or Fox, but a bipartisan Senate investigation has just blamed Bush — by name — for a delay in the response to Katrina.

But there’s sure plenty of noise from the usual morons about people who love this country wanting to sing the anthem in Spanish.  Lo siento que tan muchas idiotas en mi pa

An acrostic (click to download a better-quality .pdf file) based on a quote from this very site, composed by kind reader Arsino

Heading southeast for about a week.  Not sure what the online access will be like.

If you still see this message after, say, Friday, there isn’t much, or I’m too busy running around to post.  Either way, hoping to have a couple of cool pics and a good story or two shortly.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and please don’t anybody bomb Iran while I’m gone.  Thanks.

UPDATE: I’m here, it’s fascinating, and yep, online access is limited.

But cool pics a-plenty and a good story or two around the end of the week.

But my goodness, judging from the TV ads, India looks like a fabulously itchy place.

I’m keeping myself company while working late (again) with the second cricket test between Oz and Bangladesh, this one from Chittagong.  It seems to be the live Indian feed again, complete with commercials.

It seems like half the ads are for creams and powders to keep your body from spontaneously swelling, turning red, and driving you slowly insane with pain.  This must happen a lot, apparently.  Not being able to understand Hindi makes the whole thing a notch more delirious.  Neat!

Now that I finally have that dang Dermi-Cool jingle out of my head (see earlier post, below, and praise Shiva for the relief), I’m giggling at a competing ad, depicting, in sequence: a fashionable young man in considerable discomfort, a cartoon of a bright red swollen crotch of ambiguous gender, and then the same guy dancing with a cute babe in a disco.

Oddly, a Hindi slogan begins the ad with a little arrow pointing at the guy’s lower torso, but later, the words reappear with the arrow pointing at the cute girl’s lower torso.  I’m guessing that a phrase like “hot body” in Hindu is being remapped to refer to both a man’s itchy groin and a woman’s fantastic butt.  Thus the humor.

Either that, or it just says “abnormally red and swollen genitals.”  Also funny.

(Rainy day?  Make up your own!)

And now as I write this, the damn Dermi-Cool ad is back on!  Crap!  Thande Dermi-Cool ka!  It’s back in my head!  Aaaaahhhhhrrrgggg!

Itchy itchy itchy, this India.  At least judging from the cricket ads, which of course is no way to judge.

I must go there and see someday.