Scratch paper can still beat a Blackberry in a fair fight

People keep chuckling at me for writing stuff of bits of recycled paper instead of tapping it into a sleek digital device. They can keep chuckling. For the all the breathtaking advances in telecommunications technology, it’s still paper that comes through in the clutch.

Somehow, she found me

When friends visit my apartment for the first time, there’s nothing I enjoy quite as much as pointing to the paintings on the walls and saying “Isa did that.” Her glorious rendition of Venezuelan painter Cesar Rengifo’s Them and the city, with its dramatic Caracas skyline, is always a crowd pleaser. As is the copy of Mexican cartoonist Miguel Covarubias’ image of 1930s lindy-hoppers. The untrained eye is unlikely to notice her ceramics in our kitchen, the home-made lamps in the living room, the couch pillows she quilted herself.

Such an artistic streak often leaves people surprises that she’s also an electronic engineer. Perhaps nobody is quite as surprised as Isa herself.

Life by the Drop

Sometimes music is moving and inspiring even when I don’t get it. A song can strike me at some particular moment of my life or resonate with a given circumstance until it sinks into my mind, and I stop trying to figure out what it means. From time to time the question sort of nags me – what are they really talking about?

Bogota

It’s been nearly a month of strange limbo between visitor and business traveler in Bogota, maybe unusual enough that I’m only now sitting down to write what seemed like an obvious thing to blog about from the outset.

Bogota feels like the Andean sister to my adopted Caribbean hometown. The cleaned-up and orderly place where service is impeccable, streets are clean, poverty is well-hidden, history is visible and present. I’ve grown to love how it always feels like something between a warm fall day and a cool fall day, how the air feels fresh from constant rain, how bogotanos walk through a heavy drizzle without batting an eyelid or reaching for an umbrella, as if they were born waterproof.

Saudade redux

It was easier for me to leave Brazil than I had expected. Emotionally that is, discounting all this nonsense.

At times I try to remember the last time I walked the dog along the Aterro de Flamengo, watched the sun set over Pao de Acucar, or took a dip at Posto 10 in Ipanema. Truth is our last week in Rio was so horridly overcast and rainy that Isa and I were spared those last moments of sighing as we sipped a coconut juice by the water, pining to ourselves – the famous “saudade” that permeates Brazilian music – and wondering “how could we ever leave this place.”

It’s funny how saudade can catch up with you at unexpected moments. Listening to my Pilates teacher’s samba mix was one of those.

The existentialism of decaf

You never know what you might find at the bottom of a cup of coffee.

I rediscovered the marvel of decaffeination on my last trip back to the US, and I suddenly felt freed from the inherent constraints of being an inconsistent and somewhat repentant coffee drinker. No matter how much I love the aroma of a coffeeshop, the tingling sensation of a strong espresso on my tongue, or the richness of foamed milk, the caffeine is too much for me.

I broke my coffee addiction a couple years back, and can now drink a marron pequeño from time to time as long as I don’t get back into the habit. But the coffee buzz still goes to my head. It gives me a surge in the morning and then leaves me needing a nap by the early afternoon. In Venezuela I’d come to accept that these were the rules of the game, since asking for decaf is an invitation to a blank, uncomprehending stare.

Can the US and EU really tighten the screws on Iran?

After nearly a decade of hearing the same back and forth between Iran and the West, the situation has heated up as the US and the EU look to clamp down on Iran's oil revenue. Tough talk from the Bush Administration for years amounted to sanctions that Iran was largely able to ignore; the routine newsroom joke during that period was that Washington was blocking imports of Iranian dates, prunes and carpets. This time it's for real, this time it's oil.

All over the newswires I read that Iran is in panic, people are lining up to buy dollars, and the currency is collapsing with the threat of the new sanctions. But I'm still confused at how the mechanics of this would work in the long run, because not everybody is on board. China, which is a major buyer of Iranian oil, has already blown off the sanctions. Russia, which is a major oil exporter and therefore not a buyer of Iran's crude, is using its diplomatic clout to warn against the sanctions and is now raising the specter of potential war by Western powers.

The issue here is that oil is a global market. If one country, or group of countries, decides not to buy from a particular seller, that simply rearranges the way the oil is traded but does not affect either the production or the consumption -- and therefore the supply and demand -- of the product in question. This came up over and over when Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez repeatedly threatened over the years to cut off oil exports to the United States. His detractors pointed out that that would just mean Venezuelan oil would go to another country, displacing the oil that country was buying from Saudia Arabia, Indonesia, or Libya, which would in turn end up in the United States.

The same thing strikes me as happening here. The US, EU and Japan all band together and put their foot down about Iranian oil, and start to buy it from somewhere else. OK, that in the short term will make the price of oil go up because of the uncertainties involved, bringing speculators into the mix, and at least temporarily roiling the markets. The logical next step would be for China to simply increase its purchases, some of which it can do through barter exchange (oil for ipods?) and absorb the slack. If the fundamentals remain the same, the prices would go back down, with a system that's probably less efficient because it would have to be based on politics rather than the geography.

At the same time, both the EU and Japan are seeking to get three to six-month wavers to give them time to figure out where to buy oil and petrochemicals. Makes sense. But would it not also stand to reason that Iran could use that three to six month window to figure other places they could sell their oil?

The only obvious effect I see would be giving the Chinese a buyer's monopoly (or monopsony in fancy econ-talk) over Iranian crude. They are already negotiating pretty steep discounts from Tehran. Helping the Chinese get cheaper oil seems like a bizarre way for Europe, the US and Japan to halt Iran's nuclear program. But I would wonder how long even that can last. And I would guess there are plenty of small African or Eastern European countries that the big powers pay scant attention to that would be happy to start taking some cargoes from Iran under the table. China wouldn't be the only buyer, at least not for long.

Something doesn't add up here ...