Alcoholic Honey

Over the years V has taught me how to pick-out the best papayas, 'chinitas', long and thin with a marked scarcity of pips - like these ones.

I used to think that eating papaya was a probable cause of the way that the weight just falls off me here in Guatemala - this time I've lost two stone since my arrival - but in the end it must be the altitude and the less sedentary lifestyle, because for various reasons I've eaten less of the fruit over the past month or so.

This pair, plus some incredibly succulent pink grapefruit, were sold to us by the fruit and veggie man who passes our street in his battered picop every Wednesday.

A less frequently-appearing vendor sold us three rum-bottles of locally-made honey last week, at least one of which tastes like they forgot to pour out all the rum first! This transparent, less viscous variety has proved an excellent additive for coffee, mosh and granola, fried plantains, French bean salads and those watermelon and vodka cocktails that V likes to knock up occasionally.

For one of our cats, Wizzy, there is no greater delicacy than the flesh and the skin of the papaya. The others weren't so sure at first, but are starting to follow her lead.

Another way to tell if a papaya is one of those class-act pipless ones is to pick it up and shake it. If it doesn't rattle it's probably a goody. 

La Misma Luna (Under the Same Moon)

Being such a Derbez fanboy, I had to see this, though I ended up with mixed feelings about his performance in a straight role. Perhaps I was expecting him to say 'preguuuuntale' at any moment! 

Writers on both sides of the border seem unable to tackle a tale of wetback hardship without over-sentimentalising their characters. The makers of this film didn't even try to avoid this pitfall and the result is mostly hackneyed, though there are one or two surprisingly affective moments. 

It is essentially an odyssey - that of young Carlitos who makes his way northwards in undocumented fashion in order to reunite himself with his mother Rosario, who has been working illegally in LA for four years. It is the death of his abuela that prompts this journey, with the moment of opportunity arriving in the form of America Ferrera and her brother, two ingles-only chicano students who are offering to carry young children into the US by hiding them underneath the back-seat of their van. 

From then on the moments of crisis mount up for little Carlos, but it helps that he - unlike his mother - can handle himself in near perfect English and is not at all prone to culture shock! Derbez's character Enrique is at his side, reluctantly at first, during the mid-portion of the narrative and I would much have prefered that his fate should have been left more open-ended than it was, as I think it would have been more intellectually satisfying to imagine Enrique wandering on, indocumentado, somewhere in the north of America. 

Espantapajaros

Soccer-minded individuals in the UK would perhaps be green with envy after learning how much free football one can indulge in on TV over here. 

While England fans back home had to fork out extra cash to watch the 4-1 drubbing of Croatia on Setanta, here it was one of several European qualifiers shown live on ESPN at no extra cost.

Other local channels showed the crucial CONCACAF games (Guatemala also thrashed Cuba 4-1) and some of the earlier South American fixtures. 

This Saturday - as is usual - nearly all the Premiership matches will also be shown live across ESPN, Fox Sports and Planeta Futbol. 

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to wonder what the effects of long-term insect repellant use might be.  I stopped using Autan liquid for fear I'd soon be looking like this chap in the picture, swicthing instead to Off! a creamier Argie brew which purports to contain some Aloe Vera...and doesn't feel as if it goes about mellting the epidermis in quite the same way. 

This Shrek doll was given as a present to a little Cakchiquel girl called Ruth whose parents maintain this mixed field of corn and guiskil just around the corner. She deemed it so hideous that she immediately donated it to her father for use as an espantapajaros.

The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

I'm not sure what it is - age probably - but I have trouble staying awake these days in films where the action is as relentless as this and the deeper stuff like complex character interaction is almost wholly absent. (V in turn hasn't made it past the half hour mark in any of the more recent Star Wars outings.)

Roger Ebert thinks this is the best of the Mummy movies, but whereas the first one, for all its silliness, is the kind of light action-entertainment I can happily watch again whenever it appears on the box, I had trouble even making it through a single sitting of this third installment from Rob Cohen.

It's a testament to the kind of movie this is that with such fine acting talent like Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li, Brendan Fraser and Maria Bello on screen, the most watchable characters are the Yeti. Apart from them, the prologue is another mini-gem like the one in the original film, and is probably already available to watch 'stand-alone' on the Web somewhere.

Talking of great movie prologues, this one is a class act, not like some of those scummy ones you find on YouTube.

Sudáfrica 2010 (1)

Haiti lost 0-5 to El Salvador yesterday. They're on a bit of a roll at the moment.

Meanwhile, their penultimate tormentor Hurricane Hanna brought Saturday's tennis at Flushing Meadow to an abrupt close, forcing me to watch England's un-emphatic 2-0 victory against Andorra in the Olympic stadium in Barcelona.

Guatemala remains in third place in CONCACAF Group A, their hopes for the Mundial in 2010 just about alive after a 92nd minute equaliser by defender Gallardo in Trinidad. Group leaders USA beat Cuba 1-0.

Today's Belgian GP was a classic...but why are the 2008 F1 cars such mingers?

Celebrity Big Brother

BB may have come to an end along with the English summer, but over here the fun is just starting. Who can have installed all those little cameras and microphones in the Casa Presidencial? Colom is now speaking of "mysterious entities" and his dawning realisation about the extent of information leakage...

Hellboys 1 and 2

I followed the good doctor's advice and sat myself down to watch a Hellboy double-bill this week.

While the froth of fun and visual invention never really subsided in the first film, at times it felt a little bit like a pilot for an expensive new television series.

The same can't be said for the latest installment however, which is not only the best of the summer's super-hero flicks, it's also possibly one of the most creatively effervescent movies of the last couple of decades.

There's a clear debt to Star Wars, George Lucas's now creatively-moribun franchise, especially in the central Troll Market scene, which the studio apparently pressured Guillermo del Toro to drop. He was right to resist as it is probably the scene that serves to raise this movie up to classic status - though the final fight between Ron Perlman and Luke Goss on the moving cogs is pretty astounding as well (...and how great are those tooth fairies?)

If I have any criticism to make, it would be that Del Toro has left the character of Liz Sherman a little under-written, choosing instead to extract maximum comic potential from the other significant relationship in Anung un Rama's life, that with his pesco-mammal sidekick Abe Sapien.

An irreversible energy crisis?

Michael Klare explains in the LRB how conventional oil production has already peaked, and why this surely means that the current energy crisis can only get worse:

• In 1995 the world was consuming 69.5m barrels a day. Last year that figure had risen to 82.5m barrels a day.
  
  
• Nearly half of this intake comes from 116 massive fields. All but 4 were discovered over 25 years ago and many are already in irreversible decline. (Mexico's largest, Cantarell, has declined by 40% since 2006. Mature fields are declining overall at 5.2% p.a. up from 4% p.a. in 2007, so 3.5m extra barrels will need to be produced elsewhere to keep production levels steady. By 2013 the industry will need to produce 24.7m extra barrels per day to reach the predicted requirement of 94.1m barrels a day.
  
  
• China alone will account for a third of increase over next 5 years. In 1990 China manufactured just 42,000 cars. By 2002 it was making 1m, 2m a year after that. The number of privately-owned cars in China is predicted to rise from 27m in 2004 to 400m in 2030. Until '93 China consumed less oil than the other great powers and mainly satisfied its needs from domestic production. (2.9m per day compared to 17.2m in the US and 5.5m in Japan.) Yet in 2008 China's domestic production remains just above 90s levels - 3.7m per day - and its government continues to build roads and to hold local prices below market rates.
  
  
• Today the US accounts for just 9.6% of output, while the Middle East produces 30.1%, Africa 12.5% and Latin America 12.4%. Non-OECD countries now supply 3/4 of world's oil, and these are nations that are generally more susceptible to violent struggles for regional autonomy/secession, rebellion and ethnic strife, all of which tend to be exacerbated by the presence of energy wealth. Price spikes result from temporary reductions in global supplies and the major producers no longer have the significant reserves, like those the Saudis deployed in 1990.
  
  
• Klare describes the intent behind the Bush/Cheney's National Energy Policy of May 2001 as "the perpetuation of the Petroleum Age by any means at any cost." US consumption has risen by 1m barrels a day through the Bush Presidency whilst output of the country's domestic fields declined by roughly the same amount. Meanwhile the US is taking, shall we say, a more active role in securing access to foreign energy reserves.

Lining up...

Deber haber...

"Algún traidor hijo de la gran...hijue su madre," noted Guatemala's President Álvaro Colom sagely at a press conference this afternoon following the discovery of seven small telephone bugs and video recorders in the Casa Presidencial. He immediately fired his long-term security chief Carlos Quintanilla. (Video Link)

Meanwhile, on Tuesday it was revealed that the cell-phone blocking system installed last year around Guatemala's more populous jails at a cost of around $3m is still not functioning.

Colom has also decided to increased the size of the army by 9000 soldiers - a significant augmentation as there are currently some 13,000 employed by that branch of the armed forces.

Restless

The plot for Boyd's Costa Award-winning novel has been spun out of the little-known history of British manipulation of American public opinion before Pearl Harbour.

There were perhaps some 3000 British 'BSC' agents in the US at the time (amongst whose number was Roald Dahl it seems) focussing their activities on bringing this isolationist nation into the European war. HQ'd at the Rokerfeller Center, they took over radio stations and news wires and fed anti-German stories and miscellaneous misinformation into the American media. A BSC document unearthed in the 1990s explained why Britain believed that their allies-to-be were ripe for such covert persuasion:

"The simple truth is the United States is inhabited by people of many conflicting races, interests and creeds. These people, though fully conscious of their wealth and power in the aggregate, are still unsure of themselves individually, still basically on the defensive."

Boyd alternates between the third-person narrative of Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigrée recruited to a unit on the fringes of BSC in Paris before the war, and the first person narrative of her daughter Ruth, a junior academic and English-teacher living in Oxford in 1976.

As the novel progresses Ruth's story becomes something you have to get through to reach the next installment of Eva's. Neither strand contains particularly beautiful prose or well-developed characters, but the overall thrust of the story remains fully gripping until the rather lacklustre finale where they are combined and wound up.

I suppose I'd have to say I was ultimately somewhat disappointed with Restless. I'd read Brazzaville Beach and The Blue Afternoon when I was in my 20s and remembered having enjoyed both of these earlier novels. There's a good deal of interesting detail about the British spy networks of the day, but very little in terms of detailed exploration of the intentions and emotions of the 'crows' themselves. In a tale where betrayal plays such a significant role you just need to feel the action a bit more.

Anyway, William Boyd has himself written an article in the Guardian describing some of the fun and games perpetrated by our secret services across the pond:

"BSC invented a game called "Vik", described as "a fascinating new pastime for lovers of democracy". Printed booklets described up to 500 ways of harassing and annoying Nazi sympathisers. Players of Vik were encouraged to ring up their targets at all hours of the night and hang up. Dead rats could be put in water tanks, air could be let out of the subject's car tyres, anonymous deliveries could be made to his house and so on. In the summer of 1941, BSC sent a sham Hungarian astrologer to the US called Louis de Wohl. At a press conference De Wohl said he had been studying Hitler's astrological chart and could see nothing but disaster ahead for the German dictator. De Wohl became a minor celebrity and went on tour through the US, issuing similar dire prognostications about Hitler and his allies. De Wohl's wholly bogus predictions were widely published."

America at War...with the weather

Fox News talked up Gustav as much as they could, but by around 8am local time yesterday it was clear that we weren't going to have the pleasure of seeing Geraldo up to his neck in water in the French Quarter. Still, Hanna, Ike and Josephine are queueing up in the Caribbean...

Coverage of the US Open from Flushing Meadow seems to feature a lot of that patriotic music so beloved of the producers at Fox. Roger Federer may be No2 in the tennis world now, but the Argentinian commentators on ESPN still want to have his babies.

Group-psyched

(With thanks to 'Damn Cool Pics')

La Nave de los Monstruos

What a discovery!

I flicked over to De Pelicula last weekend and bumped into this insane Mexican flick from 1959, described on the IMDB as a science-fiction/horror comedy, singing cowboy musical."

It features a block-like robot which looks like it was put together on Blue Peter that makes whirring noises and delivers lines like"Ay mamacita".

Here's a couple of clips:

The Britishness problem

In case anyone had been unduly cheered up by our recent 'great haul of China' up pops Chancellor Alistair Darling last week (just as the British summer was grinding to an already inauspicious end it might be added) to remind us all that the UK is still basically screwed, as the country now faces what he described as the worst downturn in sixty years.

The irony is that although the mess the world is currently in is - on many different levels - largely the fault of the Yanks, they may already be showing early signs of lifting themselves out of recession. Britain on the other hand has too many of its economic eggs in the financial services sector and its general population are comparatively over-exposed to the housing market.

None of this of course leads me to regret my decision to ex-patriate myself earlier this year.

Last week I watched Panorama's somewhat jocular take on the Labour government's suggestion that the August bank holiday should be upgraded to a regular jamboree when we collectively celebrate our Britishness. The programme included an interview with the BNP's Nick Griffin, a politician who says he would 'restore' Britain to the whites and other 'assimilable' groups.

As a recent immigrant myself in a foreign land I was led to reflect on what I might have to do to assimilate myself more in Guatemala. Ignore more red lights, turn up late for more meetings...eat more Tortrix?

If you are wondering what kind of place a BNP-restored type of GB would be, take a trip to somewhere like Playa las Americas in Tenerife. There the chain-smoking, chip-eating, beer-swilling, Bingo-playing, white working classes - themselves the world's worst migrants - have created a prototype monocultural paradise in their own image. Ask the Canary Islanders how assimilable this lot are! (Or indeed how yummy their food is...)

The members of Scotland's chattering classes interviewed by Panorama of course poured scorn on the idea of a Britishness day. Scottishness is all they really need it seems; the English are the only members of the Union with a void at the heart of their sense of national identity, they cackled. Nobody seemed to ask how many of Scotland's substantial Asian Muslim community are amongst those waving the flags of St Andrew so obsessively at Murrayfield. I'm sure they'd all have been choking on their haggis if they'd seen how the Mexicans referred to Team GB as 'Inglaterra' throughout the Beijing Olympics.

It's hardly clear to me anyway why American-style patriotism is the solution to all our problems - for it makes it all too easy for individual citizens to associate their own interests with those of monolithic military and economic power.

The issue of England-Britain and its team spirit probably needs a more nuanced solution than New Labour are capable of coming up with. The uniqueness of the situation is that of an empire that has collapsed in on itself just as the world has been expanded by the forces of globalisation.

How much of a mess the country seems probably depends on how long a memory you have. I've been concerned of late about how long mine has been growing, and certainly sensed the national entropy for some years before I decided to depart.

Part of the problem is the sheer quantity of migrants of a lower cultural level who are no more interested in participating in so-called British values than the ex-pat residents of the Spanish costas are in attending bull-fights and sitting down to dinner after 10pm. They just want to live in their own little ghettos of bloody-minded crapness.

One also wonders whether the lack of a guiding recipe behind the British melting pot is one of the things that makes all these different ingredients want to jump in. It's going to be hard to re-provincialise a nation that has become one of the most convenient generic access points for the globalised economy.

Anyway, roll-on 2012. Let's see if they can come up with something better than Beckham, buses and umbrellas to represent two millennia of shared cultural history.

Batman: The Dark Knight

Why so serious indeed. The plot here appears to have been constructed as a kind of moral adventure playground in which each of the three main male characters can explore whether there might be a place for them in the real world, and not just in some DC Comics alternate universe.

Heath Ledger's Joker is the most successful participant: a very disturbing and indeed very realistic personage - and not just because of what we know of the actor's fate during post-production.

Bayle's Dark Knight is more of a misfit in this narrative environment. In costume he's just that freak who keeps popping up at key plot points, and out of it he's Patrick Bateman again.

Who he?

When I signed up for both SKY and Turbonett I had to provide the names of several personal references. When SKY rang these individuals up they proceeded to deny even knowing me. This is one of the difficulties you face in a country where everyone is severely paranoid about the threat of kidnappings. I myself rarely answer the phone to an unknown number, preferring to let it roll to voicemail.

In Mexico a firm called Xega has started selling microchips which can be inserted - chucho style - beneath the skin so that one's loved ones can keep real-time track of which car boot one happens to be in at any particular time.

I read today that an American woman has been charged with attempting to kidnap in real life a bloke she had met in Second Life.

A spanair in the works

I recently discovered that my father has kept - for over twenty years - a Swissair ticket in his old work briefcase. It pertains to the flight where there was a sudden loss of cabin pressure, the masks came down and the 'plane descended 20,000ft in the space of a few minutes.

Ryanair's Michael O'Leary was on the Today programme this morning answering allegations by polar explorer Pen Hadow whose family had just suffered a very similar upset on a flight from Bristol to Barcelona.

O'Leary explained that the crew can't make announcements in this situation as they too have to don oxygen masks. However, when the same thing happened to my father in the 80s, they immediately broadcast a recorded message over the PA system, which repeated the standard pre-flight instructions on how to get the oxygen flowing and generally explained what was happening...exactly what Hadow felt was missing during the mid-air emergency yesterday.

What with the Madrid crash last week, the burning 'plane in Munich yesterday and now this near miss with Ryanair, our collective fear of flying is very much headline news again. Spain went into three days of national mourning for the 150 or so victims of the Spanair disaster. That these might be the only Spaniards to die this way all year when thousands in fact perish on the country's roads didn't come up in the media coverage.

The circumstances of that crash last week would appear to have been somewhat similar to the crisis that struck my AA flight from Miami to Guate a few years back. That plane was also one of the old-style designs with two engines attached to the rear of the fuselage. When one of the engines caught fire on take off - after V1 - the pilot had no choice but to switch it off while continuing the initial ascent. This is clearly a very tricky situation, as we both banked sharply and slid downwards to the port side for several terrifying seconds until he was able to regain control of the aircraft manually. As with the Ryanair flight yesterday, communication from the cockpit and on the ground afterwards was minimal...which can indeed be highly agitating for customers who are already in a state of shock.

Revolto

We've been watching the chefs on Galicia TV this morning. Whilst a revolto may sound intrinsically less yummy than a revuelto, the visual presentation of this dish with fresh green asparagus has left us with our mouths watering.

In comparison the native cookery shows are a bit depressing. There are only so many times you can learn how to make a pepián, after all. Cocina Sal y Pimienta on Canal 3 features seventies-style muzak and the dirty aluminium pans of superannuated Chapin cuisinier Luis del Cid, who can barely knock up a decent spag bog these days.

Then there's the blatant product pushing on Secretos de Cocina, where no dish is complete without Mirasol margarine or salsa Natura's. At least they have replaced that mudo Carlos with the likeable buffoon Coque. Best of the bad bunch is perhaps the high-camp indigene Chef Humberto, a regular guest on Al Filo de La Noche.

Still, since signing up for SKY, we've also had access to an excellent Argentinian foodie station called el Gourmet, which is in many ways superior to British digital channels such as UK Food or indeed anything on the Beeb. So far our favourite show here has been that of Buenos Aires-based Japanese chef Takehiro Ohno (pictured) with his signature line "hmm...que lico".

The most exciting development on SKY though was the arrival today on channel 203 of BBC Entertainment. (All the effort I put in to getting the iPlayer running out here may after all have been premature...)

Here out of gringos

Was a great piece of graffiti I spotted whilst walking through Guatemala City a week or so ago.

Unfortunately it appeared on a wall in one of those areas where one tends to think twice before whipping out a smart little digital camera...especially if one might appear to be a member of the particular group that the locals are experiencing a temporary shortage of.

Here however is a selection of the images that I was able to capture on my recent jaunt up to neighbouring Belize:

Puerto Barrios (Guatemala) - click here
Placencia (Belize) - click here
Punta Gorda (Beliz) - click here