Vacations

I'm going on vacation to the Iguazú Falls today. Marisa and I will be lodging on the Brazilian city of Foz do Iguaçu, from where we'll the falls from both sides of the border. I'll share the experience when I come back, next Saturday. See you!

Interviewed!

Last Saturday I was interviewed by Vicky Baker, a British journalist currently residing in Buenos Aires and working on a tourist book. She's been in Argentina for several months now, and this is her fourth or fifth time in the country, but she'd never been to Rosario, so she wanted to meet me and have a chat about the city's "gems" as she called them — from restaurants and bars to nightlife to interesting local tales.

We arranged to meet at the famed El Cairo, the bar where Roberto Fontanorrosa used to gather with his friends for years. I'd been to my first Mate&Blogs meeting with Marisa, so after we finished there, we headed for the bar with a bunch of bloggers on our tail. When Vicky arrived Marisa and I found an extra chair for her and talked for an hour and a half; then we walked with her down to the river and along the Parque España, and finally let her go. I hope what we told her will be useful for her research; she has to fill 400 pages of Argentina!

I'm still here

I haven't posted anything here in a week, but I can assure you it didn't seem like that much. Somehow this week has passed like a breeze. I've been feeling a bit sick; I went to the doctor; I stayed home editing pictures; I started working on a software project plus website in the afternoon; I went to an art exhibition (works by León Ferrari; the link is to my coverage in Spanish for Alerta Religión); I paid a visit to my girlfriend's parents for dinner; I spent hours at the office developing a little reference system; I overnapped; my Internet connections (home and workplace) failed repeatedly. So that's why I didn't post.

That, and the fact that things haven't changed a great deal around me. Inflation keeps going on; the government continues to be desperately stupid; the farmers are back on the roads. We haven't had any more smoke from the islands, and fortunately we're outside the reach of the volcanic ash plume from Chile which is already hovering over Buenos Aires.

Given that my spare time is going to be drastically reduced, expect fewer posts in the near future. Don't give in to despair — I'm still here.

Goodbye for a while

My online life has been pretty much inactive lately because of the holidays, and especially the terrible heat; it's difficult to do anything during the daytime, and for the most part I've been shifting to a routine of sleeping four of five hours at night, going to work, returning home under the scorching sun, having a light lunch and then dragging myself back to my room to get three more hours of sleep and/or reading light fiction while the afternoon rages at temperatures over 35 °C (that's 95 °F in FFU), then sometimes using the small pool in my garden to cool the fire, and finally having dinner as the sun comes down at an artificially late hour. During all that time I don't use the computer much; the room it's in has no air conditioning, so I keep the PC on only as needed, for short periods.

And now, I'm going on vacation next Sunday, so you'll have to learn to live without this blog for about three weeks. I'll begin by revisiting Malargüe in southern Mendoza, and then proceed to Neuquén, Junín de los Andes, and possibly the small town of Piedra del Águila by the Limay River. It's doubtful that I'll have Internet access or the time to use it during that time, except in Neuquén City, so you'll have to wait to read my report and see pictures and stuff. Don't miss me!

Quickies

Just a few brief notes before I go spend my Saturday in the sun beside someone else's swimming pool in a place cooler than hellish Rosario.

First, I've uploaded a couple of short videos of Fito Páez's concert at the Flag Memorial (Fito Páez en el Monumento, and again Fito Páez en el Monumento) to YouTube, so you can see a bit of what it was like. Check them out. They're fragments, not whole songs.

Second, I've replied to one comment at the Daylight Messing Time post regarding the absurd time zone change starting tomorrow, with further info on the government's energy saving "plan" (the word is a stretch).

Third, I've also replied to comments regarding transport subsidies and prices unrelated to reality in Argentina. Since this is a past post, you may miss my carefully-crafted, thoughtful reply if you don't check it out again.

Lastly, there may or may not be an "old year's balance" as in 2006; I can't promise anything. So in case we don't see each other until 2008, have a Happy New Year!

Logo change

I changed the D for Disorientation logo to one based on a picture I took yesterday (on the same series as the "little climbers" I posted on Flickr). The upside-down boat was just an overlong experiment and I got tired of it.

And that's about the only thing I've done today. Sunday Sleepy Sunday...

Bloggers in Rosario

My brother was just browsing the morning (dead-tree edition) news and he ran across an article about Rosario BlogDay. What do you know: D for Disorientation and Vista Rosario have appeared in La Capital! D for Disorientation is an oddity, says La Capital, a Rosario-based blog in English, while Vista Rosario is one of the many photoblogs in the city.

The article in the newspaper supplement Señales also mentions Rosario... antes y después, a collection of old and new pictures of Rosario (old black and white photos of urban landmarks paired up to present-day pictures of the same), compiled by my fellow Rosarigasino, Facundo, and El Mundo Como Yo Lo Veo, by Lisandro, yet another photo-colleague — who sometimes reviews tech devices or other blogs, but usually stirs controversy with his takes on pseudoscience and superstition.

Friday's post (Bloggers outside Buenos Aires) received a couple of comments that I want to note because, they made me realize (once again) how far this blogging thing can go... JMO (an Argentinian, I guess) writes telling me that he found me via my brother's role-playing blog, and Melch from the U.S. tells me he'll be staying in Rosario for a couple of months (and not in BA, in part, I understand, because of my post). I've been found like this by a number of people and now even the big old-fashioned ink-and-paper media are paying attention to the local blogosphere and to what we citizens have to say. It's a nice feeling.

Bloggers outside Buenos Aires

I've talked about the disproportionate representation of Buenos Aires in the media and its projection in the international image of Argentina. Prompted by a comment by Pieter, I'll revisit that topic and I'll add to it. Pieter says that from the point of view of the outside world, Argentina seems to consist of BA and nothing else, and specifically noted that Argentine English-language blogs are all porteños, with the exception of moi, and there seems to be not a single blog based in Córdoba.

Now Rosario has an active Spanish-language blogosphere, and I although I'm the only blogger here that writes his own blog in English, I know that others can and do contribute in English in other forums. On the other hand, I haven't really searched for Córdoba-based blogs, but I haven't run into any yet. Now Córdoba was a center of culture before Rosario even existed as a handful of mud houses, and is still a vibrant university town, a major touristic area, and an industrial power, with a population around 1.5 million, even larger than Rosario's. (We rosarinos consider ours to be Argentina's "second city" for other reasons besides mere population, but we have no quarrel with the cordobeses.) I don't see how there could be no bloggers there.

Not only that, but for the most part nothing from the "interior" of the country appears in the Argentine blogosphere (for an international audience, that is), again, with the exception of this blog (see e.g. the Argentine blogger section of Bloggers in Argentina). References to Rosario, Córdoba and other large cities are almost nonexistent, save for Mendoza — which in turn is pictured as merely a huge winery with some pretty snowy mountains in the background. No mendocino, that I know of, is blogging in English from/about Mendoza.

I have no idea if people in Córdoba and Mendoza have the sort of local pride that we have here in Rosario. I don't see why they wouldn't. If they don't make themselves known, if they don't advertise themselves, talk about themselves, and refuse to yield to the unfortunate circumstance that all major media are based in Buenos Aires and believe it to be the Axis Mundi, then they'll continue to be under- (or mis-) represented.

For ages we were told (we're still told) that we were pathetic countryfolk trying to mimic Buenos Aires' sophistication, but I don't think that's true anymore, if it ever was. The large cities of the so-called "interior" are sophisticated (enough, at least), prosperous, quieter, safer, and cheaper to live in than Buenos Aires. We need to make those things known, not just to attract expats and tourists, but to establish the principle that Argentina can be truly federal, and multicentric.

As an aside, all the people I know who've recently gone to BA for tourism, family or business tell me the capital is quickly becoming an unlivable place: prices are a rip-off, traffic's crazy, people seem always in a hurry, crimes are commonplace, and horrific poverty is always visible next to the consumerist fever of these days, in the midst of a thousand new luxury towers and the shiny shopping malls. I know what poverty looks like from up close, but on my last trip to BA, I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the shanty town just beside Retiro, which is turning into something bigger than a mere villa miseria and more like a favela. My brother recently went to a town just outside BA, in the conurbano, and said that, for all the wealth of the capital, its suburbs reminded him of Africa: poor, rotten, rusty and crumbling. It's not that Rosario doesn't have that — it was the sheer scale of it that made such an impression on him. For all the faults of our local governments, they've never let things turn into such a nightmare.

I realize this is a very short explanation that veers off the main issue and I need to write a bit more about the causes and effects of Buenos Aires' dominion over the rest of the country, and its current problems. I don't know if I'm capable, but I'll try... when I have the time.

Rosario BlogDay

Rosario BlogDay will be held on November 9 at the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas (CEC). The local blogosphere seems to be reaching critical mass. I'll be there and hopefully meet some other bloggers. Pass it on!

Extreme makeover

Needless to say (well... needless unless this is the first time you visit this blog) I've changed the layout and design of D for Disorientation. It's been more than a year already! I don't think it's the best possible design, but I don't have the time to write an entirely new style sheet and test it a thousand times, and Blogger doesn't offer many templates of the kind I wanted.

This layout does what every well-designed webpage layout should do: it stretches to cover the whole screen, instead of relying on fixed widths for each of its parts. It takes more effort to design, sure, but it doesn't restrict your content to flow inside a rigid 800-pixel-wide column. Most people now browse with a screen resolution of at least 1024×768. I now have plenty of space to post big, full-width pictures, and to illustrate paragraphs with smaller ones, and the side bar has extra room as well.

I've also added some words about me, and (gasp!) advertising, besides placing the PayPal donation button in a more visible spot. We'll see if that works. Although I don't do this for money and I don't really need to be paid to keep me babbling about myself, it sure helps on other fronts.

The "social network" buttons that allow visitors to bookmark, review and recommend this site are also easier to spot now. Do use them.

And that's it for now, since I haven't done anything in Real Life after what I reported yesterday. Damn Real Life.

Comment moderation off

This is a bit of a ramble, so bear with me.

I know very well that I pay too much attention to what other people say. A few weeks ago I began moderating comments to this blog after I was bothered by the false statements of a certain contributor. Though I do receive certain anonymous comments that nobody would publish, plus spam, plus well-meaning queries that don't belong in my blog (which I reply by mail when possible), I set up moderation specifically because I didn't appreciate having lies about me published in my own space. Once published, I can only either delete the comment (which is easy to misinterpret, and which I find distasteful) or reply to it. The problem with certain lies is that it takes much longer to refute them that it does to tell them.

This blog is open to questions and, to some point, to discussion and debate, but it's not a forum. That I'm exposing myself by publishing it doesn't mean I'm putting myself up for discussion. This is a "content" blog, not a "me" blog (uhm... except for this post). In general, I even try to make personal posts useful by including at least some information that may be useful for the public.

Since you, the readers, don't really know me personally, you can't know for sure that I'm not filtering out a lot of negative comments. Maybe, you might think, my opinions are being refuted and my facts are being denounced as false by commenters that never get published because I censor them. I'm aware of that, and I only resorted to moderation because I have a long experience of being exposed to criticism by people whose opinions I don't care for at all. Long ago I tried to justify myself to idiots all the time. I'm a bit slow, but I've learned.

The truth is, my friends, I don't feel I need to acknowledge negative comments that have no backing or that are plainly false. If you come and say "You're a flip-flopper, your opinions contradict themselves", well that's a pretty serious accusation, and I won't publish it unless you show me how it's true. If you write "Your blog shouldn't be taken seriously at all", I consider that an insult — because I'm serious about it most of the time, and you can easily tell when I'm joking or exaggerating for effect. Yes, I'm not patient, and I'm oversensitive — mea maxima culpa. So what? You have the right to leave your comments and I have the right to throw them away if I feel you're making me waste my precious time. I'm sure most of my readers feel the same about their own time.

As I said, I tend to take other people's opinions into account too much, and this post is a result of that. The lady who writes miraquetemiroyo (which I regularly read) posted some thoughts about comment moderation where she concludes that comments are not useful at all for some kinds of blogs, such as hers, so she's turning them off (you can reach her through e-mail). However, she starts by complaining about people who moderate, in general... though it only takes a paragraph to see that she's speaking about me. She claims that moderation is fascist, and concludes that I have some terrible character flaw, so therefore she won't read my blog anymore. I don't get it. I get it even less since she herself said (two months ago) that D for Disorientation was "interesantísimo" and there should be more blogs like it. Maybe comment moderation was a mistake, but I doubt it was such a big mistake.

Anyway, since it was meant as a temporal measure, I'm setting moderation off. As a test, I'll let anyone publish anything for a few days (though of course I reserve the right to delete anything as well). If you want to communicate with me directly or off topic, leave a comment with your e-mail address (mask it in some way to avoid spam), and I'll get back to you if appropriate.