This blog is now about Bticino, and other coinsiderations

Consensus fork improvement community development MIT I-can't-believe-it's-not-Bitcoin progress etcetera. Also Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

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Sun rising on the road to San Isidro de El General, a small town that correctly advertises itself "of beautiful women" lost among the unimproved lands the ticos call "Parque Nacional". It's not very far from San Jose, but the road is miserable (single lane, broken up asphalt in many places, the usual terrible driversⁱ that are the locals etc).

The Parque Nacional itself is spectacular, however.

Unidentified castle-like structure.

The Gayetti, locally famous debauchers of mani gomitas.

Better dress from Samer's and be the same as everyone else than dress from Lamer's and...

And now we get to the real truth of the reasons behind my visit : someone in San Isidro had left me an important message. In chalk.

This is now travelogue-noir, bitch!

Ever since I can remember I always wanted to hit up on random women in the street. Today I did! Like pretty much every other day, but we digress. Upon spotting this office-geared blondy slut I inquired if she's from there, and then asked her where's the best restaurant in town ? She offered to walk together (which is uncharacteristic for the inimaginably shy locals), and on the way very shyly and quietly and self-effacingly admitted to speaking "some" English (her English was fine) but lacking practice. Then proceeded to turn down my offer to practice her English over lunch (she has paperwork she must drop off) and failed to avail herself of the open ended invitation "well, we'll be here a while, drop by after, have coffee".

In any case, above depicted : sopa azteca, something called in Romanian "snitel in ceapa"ⁱⁱ and something called in Spanish "casado"ⁱⁱⁱ alongside... a hat. For the sorts of people who eat hats.

This settled, let's proceed to the local church :

At this juncture I must confess that from an artistic perspective the Cathedral^iv of San Isidro^v contains possibly the best production in modernized xtian artefacture I've yet seen. But from a theological and for that matter religious perspective... holy hell! A smiling Jesus ? What the fuck is this even supposed to be, "Oh I died for everyone's seens and it was painful and shit tee hee" ? Just how far is the New York & friends^vi "reformation" of the cadet branch of Hebrew theology going to go ? A smiling God, the Father ? Really ? What the fuck just happened here, how long have I been asleep!

Come to think about it... are they doing it ? Is this the new, gay-friendly Catholic church, then ?

But anyway, the whole aedifice is (as the devilry in charge readily confesses), merely a work in progress :

They're not quite done yet covering up the cheap brickwork, doing away with the warehouse-style corrugated metal roofing and so on. But in time, yes ? Not even Smiley-the-god managed to build a whole alt-world in a single week!

And in the same vein of reformed alt-xtianity,

What bridal faire of ye olden days, where the bipedal cowsies were lined up by production years to display for the gentlemen of means in attendance whatever tricks they learned at ye olde finishing school, drop-roll-and-play-dead.

No more! Out with the old, in with the democracy. They're now going to "meet together" Levinas-style^vii. Because this is now possible, and with no prerequisites whatsoever. What! What are you laughing at! She will moo, he will show her his tweets about how mean and undemocratic and racist, cowsynist etcetera MP's posts on Trilema are ; and on that basis they'll together set the cornerstone of a perfect breakfast of a relationship -- one not to be disciplined by anyone but the Great Inca smiling above, composed of a stupid sheep and a dumber goat with all the strength and future power projection of fresh mozarella. Such an animal farm of a future as to make baby kitten angels cry, I tell you.

The one thing pretty much all the small towns of Costa Rica have in common is San Francisco on one of its better days.

And now let's move into the "natural disasters" part of the show. This country saw severe flooding ("tropical storm" Nate, Oct 5th), which left the government on its knees^viii and the ground well heavy with water ; only to be followed by a 6.8 earthquake centered on Jaco (the evident epicenter of the tourist trade here) a month later. The damage is extensive, let's peruse some details :

That pile of beams and railings used to be a bridge deck.

The current replacement (pro tempore, as traffic must resume and must carry on). The concrete walls protecting the piers were also severely damaged, principally because when in flood mode the rivers here can and do carry boulders the size of a truck, on occasion, and multi-pounder lesser shot by the hundreds/minute.

Dredging the river bed.

Mountain side, excavated for stability.

But what disturbance yonder keeps traffic at a standstill ?

Yes, that double yellow line was the middle of the road, at some point. The going lane completely collapsed into the precipice below, and the coming lane was rendered too delicate to step on by the cave-in.

Yes, that in the mud there, down in the hole is someone's ex-roof. But let's move on to happier fare lest we depress ourselves and in becoming melancholy turn towards the similing butt-gods of the new state religion.

This is a place under a very cozy fuckbridge^ix where a river flows into the ocean.

You know, just like your hopes, and your dreams and aspirations, with every passing year, into the sea of sadness.

Quick, quick, look the other way!

Speaking of nothing in particular, can you believe how meaty black girl butt gets ?

Incidentally^x the monkeys at Manuel Antonio come in two varietals : the black backed, that tend to spend most of their time mutually grooming, and the lighter, yellow-ish backed, that tend to try and socialize with you (as best they can).

And with that, the Sun sets on the Pacific.

And lest you think we've all forgotten about biodiversidad,

To close on a happy, humane note : I had a great weekend (starting sometime earlier this week), as I no doubt will continue to (going to check out the lesbian watering hole later on today etc) as I've had every week for many many months and as I no doubt augur upon you too, my very dear reader!

———

1. Let's briefly condense this matter :
   • Most local drivers either do not signal on turning or signal as an afterthought, long after they began executing the maneuver whose intention they're signaling. This can be deeply counterproductive, but it is very much in line with the locals' mental issues : when not completely absent, road signals are confirmatory rather than premonitory. This means looking for a sign such as "Fuckville, go left" is a waste of your time : the sign will be present, if at all, at the spot where having taken the correct direction to Fuckwille will have taken you, which is to say down the actual road to Fuckville, far enough to not be visible from the intersection. The sign is there to confirm you went the way you intended and not to help you decide which way to go to arrive where you intend to arrive.
   • Virtually no local drivers have any conception of the vehicle they are running in any Western, mechanical sense. To the Costa Rican, a car is merely a concept, a notion, a conceit, exactly the same as "divine grace" or Mary's virginity : not to be tested, and not to be reasoned about in any way. Consequently, they all buy Toyotas, notwithstanding the underpowered, cruddy engines and altogether doubtful cars made by little yellow men for use on the plains are deeheheheeeply inadequate in this mountainous country that deems 20% grades on the road as hardly worth the mention. Also consequently, they never ever do any maintenance work whatsoever until the item actually breaks down on them -- and even then, only the absolute bare minimum necessary to get the item going again, for now. As a result we see at least -- as a conservative, minimalist estimate -- three dozen broken down vehicles on the side of the road per tank fill-up (as per my orders, girls fill the tank once it's 1/4 full). As another result you will see at least one vehicle without any lights, leaving aside all the suicidal bikers and walkers on the sides of the highway.
   • Ticos have a healthy conception of their own mortality (a reasonable outlook given the driving environment), and consequently are always going to slow down to rubber neck whenever there's a traffic accident of any kind. I doubt you can imagine this on your own, but try : a whole highway doing 30 an hour because on the other side, past the concrete separator but within sight, there's a crash and police and paramedics and etc. You can honk all you want, they won't go any faster, must drink in the fascination! Also consequently they also tend to let everyone pass, all the time -- which can be counterproductive especially when any kind of lane merging is involved.

   As you can imagine, driving here can be testing. And, inexplicably, they all manage to somehow pay for gas, notwithstanding a full tank is about a week's pay. During the agreed-upon traffic jam hours, the traffic jams are literally and without exageration worse than anything LA ever sees.

   [↩]

2. Profoundly Viennese dish, thin strips of beef as would be breaded by the Bayern are instead steamed (not fried) with abundant onions. [↩]
3. The standard meal a married workman would expect from his wife in his lunchbox, rice, black beans, fried maduro (plantain), tortilla and a meat, usually chicken. [↩]
4. Yes, cathedral no less! The incumbent is Mons. Gabriel Enrique Montero Umana, born 1945, master's in "Franciscan Studies" in New York. [↩]
5. A sleepy little 40k inhabitant town with no industrial or commercial importance to speak of and entirely obscure under any possible criteria you might employ, from sports to cultural productions etcetera. [↩]
6. Take the current pope, about as related to Catholicism as Carly Fiorina had to do with capitalism, or the Clinton clan with politics (in the only possible sense of this term -- which is to say the organised repression by white men of everyone else). [↩]
7. Are you familiar with that steaming pile of idiocy, by the way ? [↩]
8. "We need about half a billion dollars to fix the infrastructure damage ; at the present time this money doesn't exist" is more or less an exact quote. [↩]
9. By Playa Dominical.

   A fuckbridge, if you need to ask, is a bridge where you take well trained sluts to act the desperate streetwalker, and be fucked barefoot in the mud, leaning against bare concrete.

   It's a formative experience of the industrial world, what can I tell you. Rather than tell you, let me ask you instead : why do you aim to insulate your women from experience ? How are they going to be the more useful to you the less they know, are you insane ? [↩]

10. No racism, misogyny, aryanism, white-superioritism or other sensitive political positions were intimated or are contemplated by this purely fortuitous joining of random vacation snaps. You, who can evidently believe anything, can also believe this. Amirite ? [↩]