Nor was I helped by the neighborhood dogs barking on and off all night long.  Possibly I don’t notice when I’m sleeping sounder, who knows, but I sure heard them last night.  Not our own dogs, for the most part, thank goodness, but such is the price to pay for living in rural Costa Rica, in a subdivision with street lights and municipal water.  And we thought we were moving to the tropical jungle to listen to howler monkeys…  Actually, when we first moved to La Fortuna in 2000 we could still hear an occasional howler monkey off in the distance.  Alas, as the town has grown either the ambient noise level or the increase in humanity have caused the sounds of the howlers to disappear. 

In one of life’s true ironies, we dealt with much—MUCH—more wildlife at our home in rural California before we moved here…in fact we battled continuously with deer (to save our plants), skunks (to save our sanity) and even mountain lions (to save our kids and cats).

The thing we miss the most about living here is the ability to get technical things repaired.  Thanksgiving is coming and while we can now buy a frozen turkey, if we look hard enough, we still cannot get our oven repaired!

Here’s a line from Mark Leibovich’s NYT item this morning that caught my fancy:

How about answering with another hypothetical question, instead?  What if Mr Lieberman were to run as Mr McCain’s vice presidential candidate?  Lieberman has not ruled out switching over to the Republican Party and some people might even argue that he is at least as Republican as McCain…

Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column rants righteously about racism, something I touched on the other day:

Since I’ve seen and read about what can be described as racist remarks made by people of all creeds and colors, I wrote Robinson to ask him facetiously if perhaps his editors deleted his additional reference to “Hymietown” which was not made by a white man, as just coincidentally happens to be the race of the three perpetrators who so upset Mr Robinson.

My point would be if you are going to make an ethical or moral charge like racism, make sure you do not single out one race to make it against, especially when that race is not your own. 

Nor am I seriously charging Robinson or his editors with a deliberate omission of Jesse Jackson’s name or offense, I’m just pointing out to him that not even knowing what ugliness is there might also apply to himself, as well.

Either he has forgotten some of the prominent black comics who appeared on stage in the past or else he has decided that since they claimed to be comedians and the statements were part of their routine, then whatever they said was acceptable by virtue of that excuse alone.

In similar fashion, Robinson discards whatever the heckler (who happened to be black but that fact mattered only because it, ah, revealed the hidden racism) might have said, because:

And that, somehow, is absolution enough for the heckler.  Might it also have been a racist remark?  Perish the thought and hope we never find out.

Robert Kaplan, writing in the Washington Post about “Interventionism’s Realistic Future” says what I consider to be some rather questionable things: 

Can he really believe what he says about no chaos ensuing after the toppling of Milosevic?  As for the easy-to-make but non-specific charge of incompetence in Iraq being the reason that intervention was, by his definition, a failure rather than the calm success he considers Bosnia and Kosovo to be (a fact which might surprise many people living and dying there since then), what if a more, what’s the term…ah, yes, realistic…view might be the other thing he mentions almost in passing?

What other thing?  Uh, the fact that the intervention in the least-developed part of the former Ottoman Empire might have had a greater deal of effect upon the difference in results than those perceived (!) in the most-developed side than he cares to notice?

As others have recently pointed out, our culture today seems to believe that anything and everything are capable of being done, therefore the only explanation possible when something fails to happen perfectly must, of necessity, be because of incompetence.

And isn’t it interesting to note how the charge of incompetence has now carefully been removed from the invasion phase of the Iraq War, which clearly succeeded beyond any pundit’s powers of prognostication, and applied only to the occupation phase?  Same people in both cases, same administration and same armed forces, one minute competent yet the next not?

Ah, the difference between success and failure, huh?  As famous Realist Al Davis explained about life: “Just win, baby.” 

More on the subject of racism, brought on by a remark in Wes Pruden’s column:

Is Rangel’s comment racist, whether true or not?  Since I’ve seen (but cannot produce right now) statements to the contrary, what would Rangel—or Robinson—say about some white congressmen who stood up and complained that blacks and Hispanics were NOT carrying a proportionate burden?  Somehow I feel certain that that would immediately bring a charge of racism, whether the statement about proportionality was actually true or not.

And shouldn’t the question of ‘intent’ ever enter in somewhere?  When my brother and I were young boys we used to torment our 3-year-old little sister, whose name was Suzanne, by calling her “Stupie Sue”.  She objected, the wrath of our parents descended, so rather than simply stopping we changed our tactics, as little boys often do.  While carefully not directing our remarks at her, we would say in a derisive tone of voice “Soupy Stew”.  This likewise brought outraged howls, and my defense that the words referred only to the liquidity of a bowl of Dinty Moore’s cut me not an ounce of slack.  My mother knew that the intent was to torment my little sister, no matter what the actual words used were. 

I think today’s sometimes all-too-common and casual charges of racism and discrimination, not to mention the similar situations when the charges perhaps ought to be brought but are not, only serve to obscure the much more important issue of intent. 

My mother refused to be fooled and so should we.

I’m gratified to see Tony Blankley feels the same way I do, but also worried that he does because he’s a damn savvy guy:

I’d be happier if he disagreed.

Thursday the 23^rd

As The Stomach Churns: a tale of drama in the extended lives of los gringos locos in far-off exotic Costa Rica, paradise except when it is not.

Those of you who have read about Tony know that he is adopted from an out-of-wedlock birth here in Costa Rica by an undocumented Nicaraguan mother.  That’s not all that uncommon, of course…what is, though, is the fact that she also has no documents in her home country of Nicaragua.  We do not know the whole story, only that the lawyer we hired here (who happens to also be a Nicaraguan, only a legal one) hired an attorney firm in Nicaragua in an attempt to get her documented and the project has failed.  Apparently she was born at home to poor people who did not register her birth, perhaps, or for some reason I cannot understand she just fell through the bureaucratic cracks.

Well, anyhow, our present problem is that because of the unusual circumstances surrounding our adoption it was necessary—and probably not a bad thing for Tony—that he not only know who his mother is but also that she gets to come and visit him when she gets the opportunity.  As an undocumented Nicaraguan citizen she finds it difficult to get legal work (does this sound familiar to you people up north?) but she also has some legal rights (I am uncertain how many, but I get the impression that she cannot be forced to leave Costa Rica) as the recorded mother of a Costa Rican citizen by birth.  At least Tony’s birth was documented in a CR social security hospital and recorded in the national registro, which has been amended to show me as his legal birth father (no one knows who he actually is but that’s a long story), and the long-and-the-short of it is that we have sort of acquired her as part of an extended family…

…which, being the poor and uneducated young girl that she is (barely of legal age when she had Tony) she is in the process of extending still further.  She had another child without any responsible father on the current scene.  And since she is still the same rather irresponsible young mother she always was, not entirely by her own choosing, the baby is poorly cared-for.  This morning brought an early emergency call from the mother…the little girl is REALLY sick, and can we help?

So off Carol went on her errand of mercy, more than half angry from worry about the baby’s condition with the other half angry at the frustration of our not knowing quite what to do in this whole situation.  We neither want to nor can adopt every child this girl-woman seems destined to have during her productive lifetime, we don’t really even want to get overly involved and acquire the responsibility by default...but, on the other hand, what is a person to do? 

Among the selection of available answers, sort through them as we will we cannot seem to find “nothing” among them.  Carol drew the chore since her Spanish is so far superior to mine, so off she went to find mother and child.  First we called our native saint, a local young doctor of inestimable value to both ourselves and his community, and he said to bring the child to him (since she probably has no papers which would admit her to the Caja clinica) and after that we would find out what to do next. 

So here I sit, on pins and needles, waiting to hear what happens next.  Thanks be to whatever genius invented the cell phone and got it as far as Costa Rica (although there are still vast stretches here without service) so that I know Carol can get in touch with me easily if she needs more help.  I knew when the phone rang so early that something untoward was about to happen but I suspected the worst it would be was that Lis, who has also been flirting with what we call here la grippe, was unable to come to work this morning.  She is here now, however, which frees me up if I have to leave.

The weather remains unseasonably cold, which all of the locals are deciding is the excuse for a rash of illnesses.  At 8:30 this morning the temperature indoors is 72…you may laugh at that, y’all up nawth, but down here that counts for somewhere between ‘cool’ and ‘cold’.  And even though the morning is virtually dead calm, I am still well aware of the air moving in the open door on the far side of my room.

Update: Dr Randall said he did not have the medication the baby would need so they elected to try the local clinica first.  Before that happened, however, Carol had to locate mother and child, who had moved from their last known location.  As it happened, the neighborhood was one in which one of our previous ladies, Juana, lived.  So Carol went to her house and she knew where Isaida (the mother) lived…small town life…and off they went to the clinica,, which Carol said was chock full of mothers with sick babies.  Good fortune doing what it can for us, one of the nurses on duty was our neighbor lady from across the street, the one with the three girls Tony plays with, so she took them in hand and they’re waiting their turn.  Apparently young children have coverage no matter what their situation, so Carol left them in good hands and came home to wait for the next call.

Another discovery she made while at the clinica is that they carry sumatriptan (brand name Imitrex) but not eletriptan (Relert)…but the first is free and the second is VERY expensive, so Carol is going to go back to trying the free stuff for a while.  They are essentially the same kind of migraine headache drug, but some studies have said eletriptan is slightly more effective.

I say “free” but of course I mean it is included on our Costa Rica state medical plan, which costs $33 a month for our family.  Her Relert alone averages about four times that much!  Costa Rica has some combination of the state semi-socialized medicine plan (you or your employer does have to pay a premium, although modest in comparison with the services included) which survives somehow in semi-cooperation with a private medical practice (still very modest in cost versus the United States).  Or maybe I should put that the other way around…the private doctors somehow survive in competition with the state plan.  But some doctors are accredited both ways…like my Dr Max at CIMA in San Jose, a first-class private facility better than what we had in Jackson, California, and our own Dr Randall here in town, who writes all of our Caja prescriptions for us, no charge.

Prescriptions are required at the Caja but not always at the commercial drugstores (farmacias), except for some serious drugs, and even if you have a prescription it seems more in order to get the name and dosage correct, because they always hand it back to you afterwards and the date on it doesn’t seem to be important. 

Hospital insurance is curious, too.  There isn’t really a private plan because insurance is a state industry here, but it acts like a private plan in competition with the Caja plan.  However it is MUCH more expensive (I don’t have recent numbers but something like $150/month for the two of us), has deductibles, and will not cover ANY pre-existing conditions, which is the eliminating factor for us.  Still, we probably should think about a policy for Carol to cover future major unknowns, after our budget increase comes through.  In my case, if that happened I’d simply have to return to the US and the VA hospitals in order to handle things.

Speaking of travel, we saw on last night’s Katie News that Thanksgiving travel is really a mess in the US, with delays of hours in major hubs and zillions of lost bags.  Sure glad to be staying home.  We’ll probably go out for lunch, although I doubt if turkey will be on the restaurant menu.

Ah, politics.  I love this Washington Post item, from which I have taken some snippets:

And here you thought only corrupt Republicans dealt with lobbyists, didn’t you.  Hmmm, I wonder how in the world you ever got that idea during this year’s election’s little-truth-in-advertising campaign?

Nonsense.  Only if they were corrupt Republicans would you need to worry.

I have to tell you that this item cracked me up!

Uh…wouldn’t that more-properly be referred to as irreconcilable samenesses?

I liked Quin Hillyer’s thanksgiving speech in American Spectator:

What more can I add to that?

Okay, if you were counting, that was 13.  I was really surprised, myself, and really disappointed.  I think there isn’t much more that both houses of congress could do that would any more clearly point out the benefit the country would gain if term limits were enforced all across the board.  There are too many old pols who are just exactly both those things…and little more.

Because Quin makes a good point about the Republicans, but also about the Democrats, who are bringing back the same crew who led us up to this point.  And further back yet, now we have to endure Baker one more time.  And, I swear, if I hear Jimmy Carter tell us one more time how he would have done it…

Ha!  To those of you readers who weren’t with me in the St Ives days, blogito is written in “real time”…that is, like a conversation, I’m reading the items and inserting my comments as we go along, I don’t know what the author is going to say next, so I was really tickled when he continued:

Ah, yes.

And then this good one on the same page, by Andrew Cline:

We’ve now come full circle back to Vietnam and not trusting the generals, again.

Lawrence Henry, same venue, touches home on a lighter note:

That hit home with me because of young Tony, now 3 years and a bit more than 7 months.  He has lived with us, at least most of the time, for 16 months.  During that time we have had a teenage maid, a middle-aged woman we hired temporarily just to help watch over Tony before we ever knew he was going to turn out to be ours and thought he would be with us only a month or two, plus a slightly older woman whose major preoccupation was helping look out for Dad.  All of them spoke only Spanish, two with Nicaraguan accents.  Carol speaks fairly good Spanish and I speak some, but of course we speak only English to each other.

Since Dad died, now nearly 5 months ago, which seems incredible, we have had only our maid Lis.  Although Tony understands almost anything we tell him in English, and sometimes now he will say both words (as in “luna…moon” and “blue…azul”), he speaks essentially Spanish all the time, which proves to be a problem with me occasionally. 

Anyhow, for reasons I’ve never figured out, when I teach him an English word or when he uses one that he has learned from hearing us say it, it comes out with a Spanish accent!  Since he doesn’t read yet and doesn’t associate letters with sounds, how does he take a word he has only heard and apply an accent to it that he hasn’t heard us use?

Odder yet, Lis tells us Tony speaks Spanish with an English accent!  (She is too polite to say what we sound like.)

Then there’s my all-time favorite, Billy Kirk Reed (and if you are reading this, BK, you are still one of my all-time favorite people!).  I met BK when I went to work for Standard Oil of California down in La Habra, where BK worked as a geologist.  He had arrived there from Oklahoma, just as I arrived from finishing college in Utah, and he was a native of Altus, Oklahoma.  Billy’s accent was very heavy and he got teased continuously.  “Billy Kirk,” everybody would kid him, “you talk funny!”

When we weren’t calling him Billy Kirk, in southern fashion, or BK, his nickname was “the Okie”.  It was all in fun, I don’t think he ever met a soul who didn’t like him, plus in those days and in that part of California the Dust Bowl Okies from a generation or so earlier has pretty well been amalgamated into the vast tide of immigrants from everywhere else in the US (only a few of us in my office were native Californians, which by that time, the early ‘60s, was true just about everywhere in the state, it seemed) and few of us remembered or even knew of those earlier animosities.  (When I was transferred to Oildale some years later, however, I quickly learned that same integration no longer applied!) 

Anyhow, poor Billy Kirk would just grin and bear it.  His life-long dream was to get transferred back home again, and finally, after several years in California, it came true: he was transferred to our office in Oklahoma City.  He hated to leave all of the friends he had acquired but he was tickled pink, otherwise, to be going home.

So of course he no sooner got back there and introduced around than they told him…”Billy Kirk, you talk funny!”

And another one he mentions:

When Carol and I were first visiting Costa Rica a couple of times a year, producing our small magazine about our travels, I was invited to dinner in San Jose at the house of another American expat who specialized in home-stays for people spending weeks or even months in Costa Rica learning Spanish.

One of his students wanted to meet me (for some reason I forget now, I was alone on that trip) and was included in the dinner party.  He was from North Carolina and spoke a variety of regional English that was so labored and tortuous that I had my own problems understanding him.  Almost every vowel was a dipthong, if not a tripthong, and he contorted his mouth into extreme shapes while forming the incredible mixture of sounds.  It took quite a while for him to say even a short sentence.  I guess something must have shown on the face I was attempting to keep non-committal, because he read my mind (“what in the hell must his Spanish sound like to them?”) and grinned at me.

As best I can tell you, he said something like this:  “Ahh, no-uh, thay-uh kawl mee ka-wun-vay-er-say-shun-al-lee chal-ungd.”  My mouth got tired that night just from listening to him talk.

I can’t even figure out how to write down the way he said “call”…”kawl” doesn’t even begin to put the number of sounds into it had he did plus you’d have to have seen the action his mouth required in order to get them out.

I think I had been living in southern Utah for several years by the time I first heard a recording of my own voice (remember, this was half a century back, recording technology was not commonplace) and I was both astonished and shocked!  I spent most of my first dozen years in different parts of California and Arizona, so I was well aware that the rural southern Utah natives talked funny, I just hadn’t realized how much of it I had picked up.  Whenever I go back to visit, too, some of it returns.

Carol says the same thing happens to her when she goes back to visit family in Texas.  She’s really an Okie from Muskogee, I kid you not, but she didn’t live there long enough to have even the slightest hint of an Okie accent.

I haven’t any idea what either my English or my Spanish accents sound like by this time.  I try to say Spanish words the same way I hear them, the problem enters in after I know how the words are spelled.  I don’t know about you, but I “hear” every word I type on the keyboard, or read in a book, or even think.  When I read them they get English sounds, even when I know better, which is frustrating.  For instance, the simple Spanish word sin, meaning ‘without’ and pronounced like our word ‘seen’, always trips me up.

There’s a tv program down here titled “Sin Ton Ni Son” (no, I’m not sure what that means) and I have to stop and think hard before I can say that using Spanish sounds.  Assuming I get all of them right when I try.

To make matters worse, THEY have regional Spanish accents, too.  Costa Ricans can detect Nicaraguans, for instance.  Well, sometimes I can, too…I can’t understand a word they say.  I understand a modest amount of Spanish, and while I can understand some friends quite well, others baffle me almost completely.  The gardener we had for a while, for instance, was almost incomprehensible; but his daughter is our maid now and I understand her fairly well.

My son, now, is somewhere in between. 

Charles Krauthammer expands on something I touched on with you earlier, and for my same reasons:

I think probably most of us know that Simpson intended this as a boast and a brag, taunting us about how he did it and got away with it.  I figure his bragging will eventually include something that will make it clear even to his doubters, finally, that he really did it. 

Except for the fact that what I wrote hasn’t been posted, I’d almost think Krauthammer was reading it, we come so close in our desires:

I think that I probably think like many white people, that the jury didn’t really necessarily believe OJ but wanted to indulge in some perhaps-justified payback, even if only to the LA Police Department.  A kind of get-even for previous wrongs.

Hardest for me to buy was the suggestion that the LAPD was out to ‘get’ OJ because he was black…like Rodney King.  How in the world could anybody seriously believe that idea, in their hearts?  OJ was a hero football player to black and white alike, he got star treatment from everyone.  I mean, I’m willing to seriously consider an argument that the LAPD was generally prejudiced against blacks, I’m even willing to hear an argument that Furman was prejudiced against blacks, I’m even willing to look at some poll that says that 80% of white people are prejudiced against blacks…but those would all be generic black people, not specifically OJ as a person.

For one thing, it is extremely difficult to be prejudiced against someone you know personally, especially if you like them.  I had a business partner who was as prejudiced about gays as we all were until his daughter came out, which caused some abrupt reevaluations in a whole bunch of people.  When I was a young Marine, straight from rural Utah (Salt Lake City was so small then it would be a rural suburb today) we were VERY anti-gay.  Then my best friend in the Marine Corps was considered by many to be gay, even if nobody ever knew for sure, I didn’t and he lived with me for several years, but he was still my best friend, just the same.  Attitudes change when “those people” become faces you actually know.

And it’s a curious thing about males, but we bond with sports “heroes”, a funny word to use for someone exceptionally physically talented, and get the idea that we actually ‘know’ the best ones, especially the personable guys.  Nor does color matter.  We didn’t know Hogan very well, but we did Arnie, and who doesn’t love Tiger?

I certainly was never prejudiced about OJ, I hoped he was innocent.  I didn’t think so after the trial, though, but a guilty verdict would have made me more sad than anything else, I don’t think I would have applauded anything about it.  What a shame, what a waste, what a loss for all concerned.

But the travesty of justice, in my opinion, reversed all of that feeling where OJ, as a person, is concerned..

Still, their remains even in my mind that tiny element of doubt…did he do it, really?  I’d feel better if he’d write and say something that would help convince me entirely one way or the other.