Hoarse Speak

I need to put some pictures up, but not today. We've been in Sobradinho (the small town on the south and west, near the dam) for a week now (Ana's been here since last January), and tomorrow we head eastward for Paolo Alfonso and a couple of other Rio São Francisco towns before hitting the coast and turning north to follow the coastline as far north as São Luis - which will be the closest I've ever been to the equator.

For the most part, Sobradinho is a pretty poor town made up mostly of people displaced by the dam (built in the late '70s early '80s) as well as people who worked on the construction. It is about 50 km from Juazeiro (where I'm writing from) which used to be a bustling river trade town, but dams and roads have changed that a bit, it is still a agrocultural hub. Juazeiro's current claim to fame is the birth place of João Gilberto.

Ana's mother had given her $150 to help out some of the families in Sobradinho for Christmas, so Ana with the help of some of the nuns she had been staying with earlier in the year, had arranged for a bunch of boxes of food to be put together. The nuns knew some of the neediest families through their work in the town, and we went on Monday with Cida, one of the nuns, to deliver a couple of the boxes. The first place we went to was a woman with her 7 year old daughter. The woman was probably my age or a little older, but looked like she was in her 50s. Their house was two rooms, dirt floor, had a single rope bed for her and her daughter, and no electricity that I could see. I'm not even sure if it had running water at all. Ana handed her the box and Cida was very explicit with saying that the food came from Ana, to avoid the politics of any favoritism by the nuns in the town. Part of how this woman was chosen is that she had come to the Nuns' house begging for a single piece of bread as she probably hadn't eaten in days. The woman started crying when Ana gave her the box and hugged her. Ana had also brought a little doll for the daughter who she knew from one of the child care programs she volunteers with. Many of the families in the Vila where Ana lives are really really poor with not much work and no land to till. Others are better off and have a car and some land. We spent the rest of Monday morning packing food for another giveaway for 400 of the neediest families that the Church and the Police were cooperating on to make happen.

We also went to a couple of Christmas celebrations on tuesday but somehow having Christmas in the middle of summer just feels completely absurd. Then of course, the water or chicken stroganoff I ate took its toll and attacked me viciously yesterday - I could bearly leave the bed. Hopefully getting on a bus for 8 1/2 hours tomorrow won't be something I'll regret…

Ok, day one - I'm here and it's really good to be here with Ana. So far the temperature is only in the high 80's but the mosquitos have been murderous - luckily I was too damned tired to care last night.

Best thing about getting bumped to business class? They warm your nuts you and serve them in a little bowl. They also give you a 3 course meal, all the wine you can drink and the seats? you can actually sleep in them.

Also met the military attaché to the U.S. ambassador, he sat in the seat next to me on the flight from D.C. to São Paolo. Uhh, Mad Irishman was that your doing?

Faith in NC restored…

Just when you think Chapel Hill has been destroyed by yuppies, you have to go to see Donnie Barnes about some Honda Tailights. D. Barnes' yard is down 15/501 off Lystra Rd. Just past Cole Park plaza. Off of Lystra Rd is also the Governers Country Club - an old-school-very-rich-white-southern type of place, but around the corner not 1/2 mile away is Sam Jones Rd on which the first building is Barnes Auto Repair, but that isn't our D. Barnes. So I asked the only person around who was a man, probably 50ish wearing a black cowboy hat who drove up in a 66 2 dr Chevy Impala (that was cherry I might add) where I could find D. Barnes. He kindly pointed me further down Sam Jones Road he said that it was "'bout a 1/2 mile look for the log cabin and a big rock - If you hit the pond or you've gone too far." Ok, turns out a LOT of Barnes live down that road, in fact, there is a Barnes road a little bit beyond the pond. Seems like every house is inhabited by one Barnes or another. So at said rock and cabin was a sign that read "Donnies ->" and further down a dirt road was Mr. D. Barnes and his junkyard. Unfortunately no Hondas that had the same taillights, but I had a good time spending a sweaty hour wandering around a junkyard with a bag of tools crawling through doghair infested wrecks, proping hatches up with the old carburettor that someone pulled off and decided they didn't need, pulling off taillights that don't fit what I need, and trying to pry open hatchbacks with no key. My monday lunch.

Or Guizi lai le in the original Chinese. Best flick I've seen in awhile. See it if you get a chance and haven't yet.

A post from Brazil (or Brasil as the Brazilians spell it)…

We are in Diamantina waiting for another wonderful 6 hour bus ride to Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, on our way to a national park about 120km from B.H. Diamantina is one of many gold and diamond mining towns in Minas Gerias, Brazilian Deadwoods where slaves built the churches, worked the mines, built the roads (858 km to Rio de Janeiro) by hand and white men made all the money. Lots of gaming/story ideas here. Tiradentes or "tooth puller" was the nickname for some dentist with a last name of Xavier who was the leader of one of the revolts that were of course put down brutally by the Portuguese masters by hanging and quartering.

Tiradentes went on to become a dark elf who continued to pull teeth in another world, but that is another story that some will not know…

Diamantina is a town where except for electricity and cars, time stopped about 70 years ago. The colonial center is very well preserved and the streets are still un asphalted, rather they are paved with large flagstones mixed with sand and concrete. The houses have a slight chinese pagoda influence unlike some of the southern mining towns from the imported chinese labor… hmm… Located on the edge of the Sertão, the country is dry and scrubby with little water and stark rocky mountains. I'll put up pics when I get back.

Gotta go, more when I get back…

Today, Sassy and ’dib and I went to the Triangle Bloggers Conference and it was much better than my "wanting to sleep self" thought it was going to be at 8am. There were discussions of community, building community, what the roles of 'blogs were in community, what the purpose of 'blogs were w/r to journalism and mainstream media, etc. I actually took notes for part of the conference and learned a new word.

The quote of the conference was by Anton Zuiker, he said "I'm here to learn from you and become wealthy" - ok, not exactly what I would have thought I'd hear at a blogging conference, but I come at this thing a little more personally and non-commercially oriented. A cool blog/concept was at http://trixieupdate.com/ where Ben MacNeill has embarked on what he describes as a "somewhat anthropological" project of documenting his kid's life. He's got a diaper count (lifetime and daily) including daily mess, sleep meter, breast milk stats, etc. He built simple little web apps that track some of this stuff where he can just click (the computer is always on) and register when she sleeps and when she wakes. Idea one of the things that just occured to me is that we could track game stats/interactions using similar tools then analyze them over the course of game genre's and years i.e. #fights per session, #riddles, problems solved (the types of problems), etc. - I'm sure we could find lots of different things to measure that might be of use to role playing analysts.

MacNeill also talked about some of the things he did intentionally to keep himself sane and set up the expectations of the readers of trixieupdate so that everyone kind of knew what to expect. His intent was to document what raising a kid was like by merging a statistical and ethnographic method and share this information (hopefully with parents). A narrow focus blog.

Sid Stafford (aka. BigWig) talked about driving popularity and The LongTail (and longtail.typepad.com) as it pertains to blogs; especially as blogs represent "niches" in communities and thus provide a lot of reward for a few folks. He also talked about the Carnival of the Vanities which originated as a way to game Google to and Blogdex to get more hits.

Ed Cone talked a little about how to get flow through your blog and how he actually pushes out interesting posts to people via email. His good quote was to get people to read your blog "know something and don't suck" - simple and succinct.

Another good quote "blog like no one's reading" from the man who blogs in a bathrobe.

There was a lengthy discussion in the last half of the conf. about the role of blogs as they pertain to keeping stories alive in the media or raising awareness such that things "bubble up" to the NYT or CNN. There was also significant discussion of local (geographically) oriented blogs such as orangepolitics.org but for the most part, the conversation wandered all over the place with a degree of self-importance about how blogs influence the media. Blogs do influence the media and I think that they can play an ever increasing role in acting as a media watchdog as well as bringing things to the surface that would never get discussed by mainstream media. I think though that to rely on blogging to reform the media in anyway is silly. Dan Coleman said it best when he said we have to look at what is behind the journalists, meaning the media companies who play by the rules of capital and thus are money making organizations at the core. What makes money for them is what they will sell. It was followed up by someone else and it cannot get lost. Capital's role in our society and in the media will influence the way we think and get entertained. "Most people get their goods at WalMart and are entertained by TimeWarner, Viacom, etc." (this is kind of paraphrased, but that was the gist of the quote).

Capital's position in U.S. society allows it to dominate what we conceive of as "Common Sense." Another point raised was the lack of critical thinking taught in K-12. These two things are not unrelated, but I'm off topic and will make them part of another post at some point.

Overall, the conference was great. I enjoyed myself and learned a new word:
"Blogmaster" Since 'dib operates in this manner for us out of his own good nature (and vehement hatred of comment spammers) I nominate him as official Meekmok Blogmaster.