Cambios del Año Nuevo

Things in the city of Heredia are changing without warning. Garbage is picked up in the daytime, instead of at night like it used to be, or sometimes it is left on the street until they get around to it. The other day I heard the garbage truck and realized we hadn’t put our trash [...]

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Common Thread

This comment by Gilighan Qabista deserves not only a reply, but a post of its own:
“I think you ought to make a habit of comparing your observations of the world (via
blog) to the time you were a taxi driver. That way there’d be a common thread
uniting all of your posts. But what do I know? [...]

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Return to “Reality”

I suddenly realized my blog was turning into sort of a “Best of Boing Boing” and I wanted to reverse that tendency. Today I’m going to write about the world outside of the web.
I didn’t remember many dreams this morning, only one about a magnetic toy race car that kept crashing into the other cars. [...]

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Hilarious fast food pictures and reviews

This morning when I read that Obama had selected a secretary of agriculture, I went to see if he was one of the ones on the list of the petition I signed. Alas, he wasn’t.
But while I was looking, I found something so funny I had to stop reading, since I don’t like to be [...]

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Make clean water a human right

In 1948 every country in the world signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Here’s a petition to add Article 31, the Right to Clean Water.
Water is a key ingredient in many of our favorite things, such as coffee, beer, and showers.
If you think everyone deserves access to these, please sign the petition.
Thanks!

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Links / Taxis

A long time ago, when I was still driving a taxi, I drew a comparison between blogging and taxi driving. It wasn’t too nuanced, just a quick observation.
Today, I’m noticing the similarity again, as I add taxi blog links to this blog. I noticed how one taxi blog had a list of other taxi blogs, [...]

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Biodiesel from Coffee Grounds

Science Daily has an article today about recycling used coffee grounds into biodiesel. The scientists, Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi, estimated that “spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply” (per year?).
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081210171900.htm
Wikipedia says coffee is “one of the world’s largest, most valuable, legally traded commodities [...]

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Obama’s Secretary of Food / Agriculture

I read a good article about Obama’s choices for Secretary of Agriculture, suggesting that he change the name to Secretary of Food and assign it to someone who is not involved with industrial agribusiness.
There is a link to a petition at http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/
Everyone who cares about quality food should sign this.

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Summer in Costa Rica

I took a taxi to the orthopedista on Monday. The driver talked about how it was getting dark so early now. I said in Spanish, “Because it’s Winter now.”
The driver replied, “It’s Summer.”
Monday, December 8 was the day of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.
The church in the center of town is called Inmaculada, [...]

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Great Post on Boing Boing

This is incredible. The link between money and value is explained in a simple cartoon video. Watch it!
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/03/where-money-comes-fr.html

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