Category Archives: Uncategorized

Neil Armstrong, the first man to step foot on the moon was laid to rest yesterday, August 31, 2012. Coincidentally, there was a blue moon on the 31st. A Blue Moon is the appearance of the third full moon in a in a season with four full moons. It is never really blue. The term has also been used to refer to the second full moon in a month.

There won’t be another blue moon until July 31, 2015.

Mitt Romney’s campaign said on Tuesday that its ads attacking President Obama’s waiver policy on welfare have been its most effective to date. And while the spots have been roundly criticized as lacking any factual basis, the campaign said it didn’t really care. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said at a panel organized by ABC News. This is a different standard than the one Romney himself has held up for the election-season ad wars. Reacting to attacks by a pro-Obama super PAC, Romney recently told a radio station that “in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad.” The presumptive nominee’s top communications hand, Eric Ferhnstrom, was quick to make the case that the two instances were not comparable. (Source: Huffington Post)

At least they’re honest about being dishonest…

And for those of you who object to my putting political posts on MY blog then I advise you to come back after the election in November.

Mine is to have a mental illness named after me.

Most  21st century conservatives (including Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas) believe that all laws should rely on the strict interpretation of, and the original intent of, the framers of the Constitution that was written in 1787.

After careful consideration, and in light of the recent slaughter or innocents by automatic weaponry in the past few weeks, and the fact that there are over 30,000 (that’s right, folks, THIRTY THOUSAND!!!) homicides by firearms annually in the U.S., I believe those people are right and that a strict interpretation and the original intent of the Second Amendment to the Constitution should be made mandatory.

That’s what they had in mind, NOT this…

Okay, the 2012 Summer Games are over. I didn’t get to watch any of them since I don’t have a television here. Sure, I could sign up for a service that would bring 200 channels into the house and there’d still be nothing to watch.

Like everyone else I have a morning “to read” list of sites while I’m having my eye-opener mug of Finca Ruiz coffee. After checking my emails one of the first places I go is http://www.duckworksmagazine.com/. A fine place with lots of neat stuff about small, mostly home-made boats.

One of the regular contributors is a guy named Jim Michalak. He designs some pretty neat boats. In fact I bought a couple of his plans though I doubt they’ll ever get built by me. In his most recent newsletter he made some observations about the speeds attained by athletes in various sports. Did you know that a sprinter who runs the 100 meter dash in 9 seconds is hitting a speed of…well, go to his newsletter and find out for yourself.

http://jimsboats.com/#Olympic%20Thoughts

The ability to feed oneself, to be able to “live off the land” is a wonderful thing. I found that out in the hard summer of 1985 when I was living on my houseboat on Bayou Beinvenue outside of New Orleans. I’d been laid off from my job and only eligible for $55 a week in unemployment benefits supplemented by $85 a month in food stamps. I probably should have left the area then, but I didn’t even have enough money to buy gas to get me anywhere that would have been better. The thing that kept me going was the ability to feed myself well from the environment.

Surrounded by water as I was I did a lot of fishing. Once a month I’d buy a pound of heads-on, unsorted (various sized) shrimp for $5. Out of that pound there’d be enough large shrimp to get one good meal. The rest I used as bait, and since I didn’t have a job, and at the time there weren’t any jobs to be had, I spent many an afternoon fishing off my boat’s “back porch.”

I’d catch speckled sea trout, red fish and croakers. I’d fillet them up and freeze them. I also had five commercial crab traps and I’d bait them with the heads and remains of the filleted fish and string them out along the dock. The next day they’d be filled with dozens of delicious blue crabs and I’d spend the day boiling them up and picking out the meat. Though I was broke most of the time (dockage consumed two weekly unemployment benefits) I ate like a king.

When I pass through big cities where people live crammed cheek to jowl like sardines in a can the thought often occurs to me, “what will all these people do if things suddenly turn to crap? How will they ever feed themselves?” There are tons of dystopian novels, like Stephen King’s “The Stand,” where city dwellers flood out of the urban areas in search of food and shelter.

Here in Panama things are a bit different except for the half of the Republic’s citizens who live in Panama City. They’re in the same tough spot and it was brought out last year when the Ngöble Indians blocked the Interamerican Highway cutting the food supply from the country’s bread basket of Chiriquí province to the capital. No fresh vegetables. No milk. But in reverse, no gasoline and diesel fuel got through here, either.

But the people in the provinces are able to feed themselves from what’s around them. First of all, the whole country is filled with free-range chickens. Nearly every family has a flock, so there’s meat and eggs. And as I sit on my front porch here in Boquerón I see mango trees, avocado trees, grapefruit, plantains, yucca, papaya, ñame.

Ñame, which translates from Spanish as “yam” though it isn’t like the yams we know in the States, is, like yucca, is a root vegetable and is highly prized here in Panama. The plant is fast growing and huge

but isn’t harvested until late in the fall after the plant appears to have died. The edible part looks like this…

There was a bumper crop of mangos this year as well as tons of avocados. My neighbors kept bringing me more of them than I could eat. It was sort of like zucchini in the States. People plant a few seeds and then get so much that they can’t eat it themselves and give them away to everyone they know.

The most recent offerings I’ve been getting lately is a small, golf ball-sized thing called, pibá here in Panama.

It’s known by a host of other names as well. In English it’s the peach-palm.

In Trinadad and Tobago it’s called a pewa, peyibay(e), and pejivalle in Spain. and pejibaye in Costa Rica and Nicaragua. In Columbia and Ecuador it’s known as chontaduro or chantaduro, pijuayo in Peru, pijiguao in Venezuela, tembé to Bolivians, and in Portugal it’s pupunheira, while in Brazil it’s pupunha. The scientific Latin name is Bactris gasipaes.

It is commonly boiled; in fact, it is customary to boil the fruits for 3 hours in salted water, sometimes with fat pork added, before marketing. Boiling causes the flesh to separate easily from the seed and usually the skin as well, though in some varieties the skin adheres to the flesh even after cooking. It is only necessary to remove the skin from the cooked flesh which can then be eaten out-of-hand. The pre-boiled fruit is sometimes deep-fried or roasted and served as a snack garnished with mayonnaise or a cheese-dip. It is also mixed with cornmeal, eggs and milk and fried, and is often employed as stuffing for roasted fowl. Occasionally it is made into jam. Oven dried fruits have been kept for 6 months and then boiled for half an hour which causes them to regain their characteristic texture and flavor. Peeled, seeded, halved fruits, canned in brine, have been exported to the United States. Dried fruits can be ground into flour for use in various dishes. A strong alcoholic drink is made by allowing the raw, sugared flesh to stand for a few days until it ferments.

Since it needs to be boiled for so long it’s not something I want to do very often, burning off that much gas, but practically every household around here has an outdoors shelter where my neighbors cook over a wood fire.

It has a wonderful nut-like flavor that I couldn’t quite put my finger on the first time I ate one but I’ve finally settled on it being a bit like an artichoke heart. They’re yummy.

That says you’re better off without a wife because “You never have to be wishing when you want to go out fishing, and you never have to ask for the keys.”

Well, from the web site Bits and Pieces I think you can add this one, too…

Last week when I was coming home from a shopping trip a group of my neighbors were sitting on the porch and, as so often happens, they asked me to join them for a while.

One of the first things that came up was the cherry-blueberry cobbler I made for Lleya’s birthday and they wanted to know how to make it. It’s a very simple recipe and, surprisingly enough, I was able to tell them, off of the top of my head, how to make it and I was able to do it in Spanish, too! My neighbor told me that she wanted me to make it for her Mother’s Day party. Well, that’s a way a way yet. Mother’s Day, which is a very big deal here in Panama, isn’t until December 8th.

Then, somehow, the conversation turned to music. I don’t know how that happened since while everyone says I speak Spanish very well, I have to tell them that I speak it better than I hear it. I try not to translate everything I hear, but sometimes I can’t avoid doing that and I end up lagging behind in the conversation. Let me give you an example of what I mean. When someone mentions the river that runs by the house and they say “El Rio” I don’t translate that. El Rio is el rio. It just is and there’s no reason for me to translate it in my head. But I get hung up on the verbs and while I muddle along trying to figure out the translation for a verb tense the conversation has now gone on and I have to rush trying to keep up.

Anyway, one thing I find rather amusing is that the Panamanians are always amazed that I know so many of the popular musicians here and that I really enjoy the musica típica. I mentioned that I’d been to see Samy y Sandra last month and how much I enjoyed watching watching the girls dancing the cumbia.

My neighbor’s sister-in-law, Amelia, said there was going to be a dance program the coming week and asked if I’d like to go. Naturally I said I would, and so, last night, Amelia, her friend, Fela, and her young nephew, Llasmin, and I went to see the 1st International Folkloric Dance Festival sponsored by the Academia José A. Corella. It was to feature dancers from Panama, Costa Rica and Argentina.

The program was supposed to start at 6:30 but the group from Costa Rica was held up at the border so the start of the program was put on hold. But no one who had come to see the show was upset since this is Panama and time here is different than it is in the States. Here, a starting time is simply a suggestion, not something set in stone. So our little group went to a cantina across the street for some refreshments.

The show got underway about an hour and fifteen minutes later and that’s when I learned that my replacement camera sucks. It takes a second or so from the time you press the shutter until the camera reacts and by that time what you’ve wanted to capture has vanished and you’ve got something else. I’m not even going to try and show you the pictures I got. They suck that bad.

Some observations:

The Argentinian men had their version of Gaucho pants, shirts, straw hats and scarves. The women had rather drab, in comparison to the Panamanian, dresses. The first number was a wonderfully executed tango by a young couple. The other dances included a lot of foot stamping by the guys and graceful twirls from the women.

The Panamanian dances were presented by groups of different ages and also represented different regions of the country. There was Caribbean garb from the Bocas del Toro province and then the more traditional Panamanian dances with the women in their Polleras. What I enjoyed the most were the youngsters ranging in age, I’d guess, from about seven to twelve or so. It seemed to me, though, that while the girls were having a great time, the boys were probably either brothers or cousins of the girls and their moms had said, you’re going to dance or else. The older guys, though, were there because they loved to dance. Period.

Also, it’s all about the girls, and it’s all about style and fashion. The pollera is an elaborate dress with about umteen gazillion pleats and fancy decoration. Typically they can take as much as a year or more to make one and they can cost hundreds of dollars. There are several styles. The youngest wear the pollera montuna.

This is an example of the more elaborate polleras

You’ll notice the elaborate hair decorations of the women. They’re called tembleque.

The guys, on the other hand get to wear brown slacks and a plain white shirt and a straw hat. Like I said, it’s all about the girls.

The Costa Rican group finally showed up, but since the show was running long they only did three short numbers. The girls weren’t nearly as elaborately costumed as their Panamanian cousins but their skirts somewhat resembled the pollera skirts though without the decoration.

Both the Panamanian and Costa Rican troupes has live music and they did a wonderful, spirited job of backing up the dancers.

Here’s one of many YouTube videos of the Academía to give you an idea of what the program was like…

As the old saying goes, a wonderful time was had by all.