Ham, it's not just for eating anymore

It's also an excellent home decor choice. Come on kids, it's time to grow up. Throw out your Starry Night and Reservoir Dogs posters. Think ham, people, what other wall hanging can you eat? That's an open question, by the way.

Where did you get those nice sunglasses, gypsy?

Let's face it, gypsies get a bad rap. No, you didn't get "gypped" on those Abercrombie capris with the pre-worn knees that dissolved after two washings -- maybe you got "anglo-ed" or "deutsch-ed." Ever think of that? So, anyway, I asked this Spanish gypsy to marry me. She played confused, gave me a spring of rosemary, and stole my wallet. But, really, anyone might have done that -- it isn't because she's a gypsy. Racists.

Sorry, but the Carses will probably kick your family's ass











For some, water skiing is a sport. For others, a passion. For the Carse family, it's a life pursuit. Enders, NE -- represent.

And afterwards, when it's time to tell war stories



















You know we're going to be throwing down a few frosty ones at Good Times -- Wauneta, NE.

Halloween 2006
Blue man group, watch your back. There's a hot new talent on the scene:

Alaska and new friends

Hey, I will probably write something soon about my trip to Alaska, but in the meantime I wanted to poste some photos of some new friends of mine. They told me that they are both "on the market" and would love to have a little lady to homestead with up here in the great north. These are solid dudes -- let me know if you're interested.

Cigar-rolling in La Pintada

On Thursday afternoon, we saw how cigars are made at this small artisan factory in the village of La Pintada, located in the mountains of the Cocle province.

Travelling by Cayuco on the Cocle del Norte

After a grueling and extremely bumpy three hour packed into the covered bed of a pickup truck with fifteen friendly campesinos -- during which I was primarily concentrating upon not slamming my big gringo skull into the web of steel crossbars that ran overhead -- we arrived in the quiet mountain town of Coclesito. From here, we hoped to catch a cayuco (sort of a large, flat-backed canoe with a small outboard motor) to transport us down the Cocle del Norte river to the Caribbean. We found two guys willing to do it, which was lucky considering that it was already after 5pm when we arrived in town and daylight was already beginning to dwindle. The price was steeper than expected: $90. But we wanted to get going and forked over the cash. The three hour trip down the river turned out to be a highlight of the trip. We meandered among ancient-looking trees, waved at friendly solo fishermen in small cayucos, smelled the acrid smoke of burning forests, and watched hundreds of bats skimming insects off the water as dark fell.

We arrived in the town of Cocle del Norte in the humid, salty, Caribbean night -- miles from the nearest city of any size -- hoping to catch a boat over to some cabins rumored to be nearby. But, it was dark and a good deal of drinking was in progress, so we were told that someone would bring us in the morning. This left us standing around awkwardly (actually, more awkwardly than usual, since standing around looking big and clumsy is my modus operandi in Latin America) and wondering what to do next. After some talk, we were offered the floor of a room in a house that was being renovated, referred to hereafter as the Cocle del Norte Hilton. The people of Cocle del Norte were very kind to us -- sharing beer, booze, and conversation late into the evening -- even though it seems pretty certain they had never had a pair of dazed gringos schlep into town looking for a place to crash for the night.

The Cocle del Norte Hilton -- Presidential Suite


As it turned out, room service wasn`t included. In order to sleep through the night on the floor of this random family`s house in Cocle del Norte, Jeff and I set out to drink outselves into hibernation. Luckily, a group of hospitable young men were doing their best to polish off a bottle of Johnny Walker Red when we arrived. To protect the honor of our homeland, we had no choice but to assist them in this task. The above photo is the morning after. No sore backs...refreshed and ready to go!

Adrift on Captain Morgan`s Waters


Saturday morning, we hired a lancha (boat) to take us from Cocle del Norte -- where the river of the same name meets the Caribbean and the Johnny Walker flows like Venezuelan crude -- eastward along the coastline toward the city of Colon. Stuck in a small town with no hotel, no restaurant, no road, and seemingly only one boat for rent, we had very little bargaining power...as you might imagine. When it was all said and done, we had paid $115 to travel two hours by boat. However, the stretch of coastline that we saw as we skipped over turquoise breakers appeared nearly unsettled -- a long line of emerald-green turtle shells covered in coconut palms. Beautiful. Every few miles, we would pass a single house situated atop a cliff overlooking the ocean and I would wonder why more people weren`t living here. Oh yeah, no roads and $4 per gallon gasoline.

I Left my Corazon in Rio Indio

Homeward Bound


Jeff takes a well-deserved siesta -- sans licor -- after a long day and a half of travel.

Two Nights in Panama, Two American Stories: Night 1

I knew it was coming, sooner or later. And, last night, it did – the dreaded “American imperialism” talk. Nooooooo…

It started innocently enough. I initiated a conversation by asking Ricky (my portly, cheerful host-father who bears more than a passing resemblance to Chef Boyardee) about a trip that I was planning to take on the Panama Railroad, originally built in the 1850s to transport gold rush migrants headed to California from ships on the Atlantic to others awaiting them on the Pacific side. Millions of the Americans that headed west in the mid-19th century chose the Panama route rather than travel overland and risk being attacked by the “warlike” indigenous people that still controlled much of American Midwest at the time. I was planning to follow the tracks of my gringo forbearers in reverse, traveling along the Canal from Panama City to the city of Colon.

Ricky and I started off talking about the natural beauty and fascinating history of the Atlantic/Caribbean Coast. In another, perhaps more magical time, these brilliant turquoise waters and mangrove-lined shores were patrolled by the likes of the pirate Sir Francis Drake – he who mercilessly plundered the Spanish gold that the conquistadores had themselves worked so hard to pillage from the Inca. This area of the country, commonly referred to as la Costa Arriba (the upper coast), remained for centuries an on-again-off-again center for New World trade in gold, silver, and other fetishized tropical commodities.

And, in some ways, it still is. Here, in modern Colon, sprawls the “free zone,” an industrial-scale duty-free zone where $10 billion dollars of wholesale goods are traded annually. There has always been magnificent wealth moving through Colon – heaped in the holds of Spanish galleons, strapped on the backs of donkeys, or neatly stacked in Maersk cargo container ships – but none of it tends to stick around for long. Historians have written that geography is the blessing of this particular narrow strip of land. Perhaps it is also a curse.

Colon is by most accounts a dangerous city these days. If you consult the Lonely Planet or other guidebooks, they advise you to stay away or, if you absolutely must, pass through quickly (always keeping one eye on your bags) en route to less dilapidated, more amenable beach destinations. Ricky was of this same mind and advised: “If you have a friend in Colon with a car who can take you out of town and show you around, go. Otherwise, there is nothing there. It is dangerous – not for me because I’m negrito [dark], but definitely for gringos.”

And I am, as Ricky was so very subtly pointing out and you all know, the uber-gringo. I couldn’t possibly look less Latin American.

I had been silent for a while and now felt compelled to contribute something – anything – involving gringos and robbery, I started to pull out an old chesnut from the sack: a story about when I was mugged at knifepoint by a scarfaced teenager in Ecuador. “Quito,” I began soberly,” is also a very dangerous city these days…especially for gringos.” “Do you know why?” he interrupted.

A few pet theories crossed my mind:

1) The Ecuadorian obsession with violence which manifests itself in a perverse national love affair with the work of Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme? 2) Colonialism (always a safe guess)? 3) A particularly nasty string of losses to Peru in soccer? 4) Or maybe, just maybe, the fact that tall white people are generally carrying around the per-capita GNP of Ecuador in their North Face backpacks?

I felt pretty confident that at least one of these had to be right.

¨Neoliberalism,¨ said Ricky point blank. Well, #4 was maybe half-right. He then outlined the long string of clandestine power plays made by the U.S. government in Latin American politics during the Cold War era. The stories of American imperialism that he told, most well-documented and others less so, are repetitive and form a single deeply disturbing trope: an idealistic, populist Latin American leader rises and threatens to unify Latin America against U.S. imperialism. Fearing the spread of communist ideology in the “backyard,” the U.S. government assassinates said leader and replaces him with a military dictator, who in nearly every case ends up being a homicidal lunatic. But, that isn´t neoliberalism itself, I thought but didn´t say aloud. These Cold War-era interventions paved the way for neoliberalism, provided a fertile ground for the economic language of open markets and free trade.

Like all master narratives, the typical telling of this “story” is somewhat flawed, not because the deeply disturbing events provided as evidence are historically inaccurate (we know that they aren’t) but because these events – which happened unbeknownst to most – are chosen selectively and confuse the actions of the CIA with the beliefs of ordinary Americans. I like to tell myself that the average American citizen was complicit in acts of terrorism only in his or her laziness toward understanding and engaging with the world beyond our borders – not out of malice. These moments of friendly confrontation always make me feel very uncomfortable when I am living in someone else´s country. While both Ricky and I know that Americans have done a lot of good in the world, I have to admit that I don´t know how it feels to have a president I admire assassinated by the Panamanian government.

Oh, and then last night i saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (with Spanish subtitles) on TV. More on that soon.

The Underdog Complex: On Why Panamanians Love Brazilian Soccer and Americans Hate the Yankees

As most of you know, I am here doing anthropological fieldwork. My research is basically about the historical relationship between people, politics, and the environment in the region surrounding the Panama Canal. Interesting stuff, for sure, but the World Cup doesn´t happen every summer, so I have been heading out with friends to catch some games. If this was formal research and I was asking you for money, I would call watching sports at a bar participant observation, a term used by anthropologists to describe a research strategy based on the idea that you can learn a quite a bit by hanging out, talking with folks, and paying attention to what they say and do. As ethnographers and journalists have learned, this type of non-scientific research works; it helps us to better understand how others know and behave in the world. And, in doing so, it can sometimes call into question ideas that we take for granted, providing a glimpse of the cultural baggage that we all carry.

To undermine our understandings about the way that the world works can be disconcerting, but it can also reveal what my grandpa called ¨the damndest things.¨ In this case, I am thinking about the sports we watch and our investments in these games. I am thinking about cultural attitudes towards winning and losing, towards places we live and those we don´t, and towards ourselves and others. While much has been written about the decades of losing endured by fans of the Red Sox, Cubs, or Buffalo Bills, people don’t really ask why the American fans of these ¨losers¨ don´t change sides and support perennial winners like the Yankees or Lakers. In Panama, by comparison, soccer fans turn out en masse to support Latin American powerhouses Brazil and Argentina but show markedly less interest in more geographically proximate countries like Costa Rica or Mexico. Now, granted, to compare U.S. professional sports and the World Cup may be a little unfair. In American baseball or basketball, next season always looms on the horizon, providing hope -- the talented first baseman rising from the minor leagues or the All-star shooting guard who is about to become a free agent. The World Cup, on the other hand, is a competition of nations that occurs only every four years. But this only seems to reinforce my argument – shouldn’t fans be even more national- or regionalistic, more connected to nearby places, when flags become involved and a bad loss lingers for nearly a half decade before it can be properly avenged?

For those of you who haven´t been following the World Cup, Brazil, a perennial powerhouse and favorite to win it all, was upset 1-0 (and generally outplayed) by France in the quarterfinals the past weekend. But I am getting ahead of myself here. I need to back up another week in order to illustrate what I am thinking about. On June 22, several days after arriving in Panama, I went out to a bar in downtown Panama City to see the Brazil-Japan game. Japan went ahead early and only two people in the bar – a Japanese student in the blue national jersey and me – stood up and cheered in a sea of yellow and green. To everyone’s surprise, the first half ended with Japan ahead 1-0.

The Brazil that stepped onto the field to begin the second half was a different team. They played the fluid, creative soccer that they are known for -- el JUGO BONITO, or the ¨beautiful game,¨ the call it in Portugese and now in the global Nike marketing campaign. The goal Brazil scored to tie the game was a beautiful thing. Two-time FIFA World Player of the Year, Ronaldinho, struck a loping cross from the left sideline over the penalty area to an open Cicinho, who played a perfect header back across the goal face to a waiting Ronaldo. Header...GOOOOAAAAL. The bar goes nuts. I look around and people are on their feet, high-fiving, dancing, yelling slurred messages into their cell phones.

This game was probably Brazil´s best game of what was, by their standards, a below-average Cup (i.e. they didn’t win it all). As the crowd spilled out of the air-conditioned darkness and back into the bright, humid afternoon, I was confused about what had happened. On the surface, I had no more or less at stake in the game than anyone else. So, why did I naturally root against Brazil, while everyone else was cheering for them? “Maybe it’s just me,” I thought at first. But that didn’t make much sense. I flashed back to watching the Yankees-Red Sox World Series in a different bar – this one in Chapel Hill -- a year and a half before. We were united over pints that night, not necessarily in support of the Red Sox (though that was true for some), but hoping against hope that the Yankees would lose for once (see Steve´s article on Yankee-hating). And, what´s more, that they would lose to the ultimate losers. But this all makes sense, you might say – it comes down to geography. Brazil, like Panama, is a Latin American country. True. And I would agree with you if I hadn´t seen neighboring, but less dominant teams, like Costa Rica and Mexico play and receive little to no support. I would agree with you if vendors on the side of every major road in Panama City weren’t doing brisk business in Brazil and Argentina jerseys, with nary another nation’s jersey in sight. Panamanians, to make a gross generalization, like Latin American soccer teams, but love the best teams.

How can we make sense of the seemingly very different ideas held by Americans and Panamanians about who are “our teams” and how they came to be? Any theories?

Read www.dirtysnell.blogspot.com

If any of you are interested -- and you should be -- in delving into the day-to-day life of an itinerant young law student in China, peep my brother Nick´s blog. Recent posts have included some classic pasages, including:

¨Headed out and ran into some tall "girls" who were staring me down. Went over to the room and the security guy was pointing them out to me and telling me to head over but i had a bit of a funny feeling. Brad, our team leader, sauntered over and asked if i wanted to talk to them and went to bring them over. They came over and we found out through our context clues - big hands and feet, low voice, cheekbones, and being from Thailand that they were ladyboys. What a surprise. Through sign language we figured out one was pre-op and the other post-op. Had a good laugh with them and they went back to their dancing. Now, Anni comes along and i tell Mike to tell him the girls want to dance with him. He's all for it and after about 10 minutes of grinding it's just too much. Have to tell him and he tries to play it off and hugs them and kisses them even more. In the cab on the way home he makes fun of us southern boys but the easy response is that we weren't dancing with dudes.¨