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Heist!
02.06.2006
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Penguins At Punta Tombo
02.07.2006
Chubut
However, after a few miserable initial winters, the settlers managed to build an excellent irrigation system and actually begin growing some food. The colony may not have thrived, but it survived, and as late as the 1970's the Welsh influence on this part of Argentina...
Two Dinosaurs
02.15.2006
I had come to see the paleontological museums in two little towns, Plaza Huincul and Villa El Chocón. Both are about an hour's bus ride away from Neuquén, in hot desert country that looks a lot like Nevada. Plaza Huincul is home to the largest herbivorous dinosaur ever found:...
Junin De Los Andes
02.26.2006
Apart from its scenery, which is what you would expect from a place called 'the lake district', the region is famous for its trout fishing (catch and release, a gastronomic lap dance) and a very strange kind of tree called the pehué, or araucaria, or monkey puzzle. The araucaria looks ...
Ruling Antarctica
03.07.2006
On first coming to Argentina, I was amused to find that every map of the country included a little pie-slice of Antarctica. Whether it was the bus map, the television weather forecast, or the Aerolineas Argentinas in-flight magazine, no map of Argentina was complete without the two dots of...
The Collapse of the Perito Moreno
03.25.2006
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Land Of Fire
04.03.2006
All of this is just for show. The island has a shockingly equable climate. It rarely gets hotter than sixty degrees in summer, or drops below twenty degrees in winter. The rain may be blowing horizontally, but you will never face a hard frost in Tierra del Fueg...
Argentina On Two Steaks A Day
04.13.2006
Juan Díaz de Solís, a Sevillian and a gentleman, arrived in the Freshwater Sea in February of 1516, when none of this existed yet. He voyaged in three ships, as is fitting, and when some shameless natives made him a signal of welcome, he readily l...
Las Torres Del Paine
05.04.2006
Condors love this place. The are gigantic birds, with exceptional eyesight that lets them soar high overhead, and a lazy fondness for the kind of high winds that let them soar without flapping their wings. At times they descend low enough that you can se...
El Chaltén
05.28.2006
Just when you thought nationalism had nothing good to offer the world, along comes a wonder like El Chaltén. A town with no conceivable economic or geographic purpose other than sticking it to the nearby Chileans, El Chaltén (Spanish for ) is an accidental hikers' paradise in what used to b...
On Bilingual Ballots
05.31.2006
I've always thought of George Will's columns as a standing reminder of the dangers of overtightening a bow tie, and been content to leave it at that. But occasionally he manages to produce an essay that rises above this very high threshold of provocation, and his Washington Post column last we...
The Day That Nothing Happened
06.05.2006
As the excellent special on the company explains, the opening of free trade with China had approximately the same effect on Wal-Mart's retail business as the parallel introduction of steroids did on American baseball. The retailer swelled to enormous size by creating an ex...
Black Letter Days
07.26.2006
In my college days I remember a few close encounters with the , a postwar French literary genre created by French authors who wanted to score with as many chicks as film directors did. My memory now glazes over a lot of the texts, but I do remember the books dispensed with plot and linear tim...
I Spy
08.05.2006
My only in a police van had been marred by a somewhat tight suspension and a feeling of vague unease connected with the large number of guns sliding back and forth under the seats, whanging against the van walls. The Beijing police van, by comparison, was an oasis of comfort and safety....
Five Friendlies
08.15.2006
The Five Friendlies ( ) are the 2008 Olympic mascots whose reign of terror over Beijing will soon spread to all of China and then the world. Their cutesy doubled names collectively spell out " ", or "Beijing welcomes you". The air outside any metro station is thick with the cries of merchants...
So You Want To Be A China Sex Blogger
08.31.2006
Sometime this May there appeared a weblog called , detailing the adventures of a British expatriate seducing various ex-students from his English classes. The blogger, who called himself chinabounder, was in his mid-thirties and had been living in China for five years. His sexual experience pr...
Hong Kong
10.06.2006
When it comes to the future, we were robbed. Raised in anticipation of the new millennium, we let the grown-ups fill our ears with sweet promises even as they failed to do any of the basic or applied science needed to make them a reality. The year 2000 was supposed to bring us flying cars, flying...
Nobody Likes Moon Cakes
10.08.2006
WalMart is my reliable early-warning system for Chinese holidays. Three weeks or so before any main event, various special exhibits start popping up, and more and more floor space of the store is devoted to lanterns or or whatever the item of interest might be, similar to the Halloween and...
Bedbug Fever!
11.18.2006
Bedbugs are shaping up to be hot new blood-sucking parasite of 2007. To get ahead of this trend, my friend and I have started setting up a , where you can submit bedbug reports and look up hotels and addresses throughout Canada and the United States for reported problems. If you've come...