Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

Our Dear Leader is holding a summit to discuss how top reduce the dire unemployment figures in our country. He's got business people, academics, economists and union members all sitting around figuring out how to reduce unemployment. It's a conundrum isn't it, how to reduce unemployment? After all unemployment wrecks lives, wrecks election prospects and makes us all look bad. Australia hasn't even had a recession, those nasty socialists with their well regulated banks and socialized medicine. Italy has had gruesome budget deficits for decades and yet look how well Italians live. Of course they are hemmed in by government regulations and lack of prospects but they get free health care and free education so I suppose it's not all bad for them either.

Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we are enjoying 10.2 percent official unemployment with new numbers out tomorrow. Official unemployment and under employment stand at 17.5 percent and unofficial unofficial estimates of people who've just given up and are scrounging indicate we may well be past the twenty percent mark. Now it used to be said that a country was in a Depression if unemployment reached 25%, because there is no official measure of an economic depression. A recession is measured by "negative economic activity" and we've been doing a fair bit of that the past year. Lately we saw a slight upward blip thanks to the cash for clunkers program so we are officially out of Recession, even though unemployment is nudging Depression levels.

What's more you need to be brave to be unemployed in these United States, because unlike our down trodden friends in the socialist states of Europe we lose our health insurance when we lose our jobs. We don't get guaranteed government payouts to keep us alive. Our "dole" runs out after just a few weeks and you know Congress is reluctant to extend those benefits because of the Federal Budget Deficit. Bummer, I guess we will see soup lines back in the land of the free. Cool, it will be like a living history museum. "See children. This is why FDR got us started with Medicare and Social Security. Remember his four freedoms? Want, fear, of religion and free speech." And we will stand on the sidelines and watch the starving in our midst shuffle up for soup like someone out of the 1930s.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had this to say in his first inaugural address to the nation:

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men…They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.”

Our Dear Leader says he wants the most bang for the buck when dealing with unemployment relief. Sensible I suppose but not exactly inspirational. The most bang for the buck? It's easy. The solution to unemployment is to hire people. If you give people jobs they are no longer unemployed. Let's get them working through a new Works Progress Administration. It worked for the man who spoke those inspirational words of leadership in italics above, it might well work for Mr "Bang For The Buck." Easy peasy. Let's move on to figuring how we are going to punish the financial louts that got us here. Oh what's that you say? The deficit? I know it's awful isn't it, running up debt and ruining the future and everything. Yup. Well, let's hoard our cash, kill a few more Afghans and then perhaps the unemployed will have had the decency to die of starvation like gentlemen. I mean really if we have to choose between starving Americans and the budget deficit I choose the deficit every time. No More Deficit! And if that means soup lines and starvation and no health insurance and tons of homeless everywhere so be it. Future generations will thank us.


This message brought to you by an employed American with health care and a roof over his head.

Johnson On Sugarloaf

It happens form time to time that life serves up little disappointments and one has to be brave and take what one is given. North Johnson Road was a nothing place it turned out.It sits on the north side of the Overseas Highway just south (or west of you are going to be pedantic) of the restaurant known as Mangrove Mama's on Sugarloaf Key. I'd noticed it for years as I trudged between the restaurant and Sugarloaf School on this straight stretch of Highway One, but I never stopped to check it out.That's the thing about yielding to temptation. Sometimes the result doesn't live up to billing! I saw a winding, mysterious little lane leading off into the mangroves. What I found after 100 yards (90 meters) was a double barrelled No Trespassing sign. And a pretty little flower by way of compensation.

I did discover one thing though and this compound turns out to be......the nature Conservancy. That and three bucks will buy me a large con leche, but I never knew this was where these good people hung out. Now I do, and so do you.And in the back there was a tall house, possibly the residence protected by all the No Trespassing signs.Somebody got it into their heads that North Johnson is a real street and needed a real (and very restrictive) speed limit. I wonder what awful traffic violation was committed on this runt of a street that merited the installation of an actual speed limit?Casting around for something to photograph I saw this yellow International Jeep-like thing sitting under a palm tree all ready to go, everyone's idea of ideal Keys wheels.

And this, rather less evocative view is the maintenance yard of some utility or another, possibly the phone company I think.

And that, in summary is North Johnson Road.Not much to it really, so from now on I'll ride by and know that I'm not missing anything.

A Short Walk

It doesn't take much to turn my thoughts to my favorite author but the recent announcement of yet more Americans going off to die in Afghanistan put me in mind of A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush which was published in 1958 by the English traveler Eric Newby and it has been for a long time my favorite read. It is a book that has accompanied me around the world on my own travels and I know it from cover to cover, such that a quick dip into it at any time will restore my mood. It is a very easy read, very funny and as the novelist Evelyn Waugh famously put it, quintessentially English. The following is an extract (the complete chapter is much better of course!) from the book's final and most famous chapter when Eric Newby and his traveling companion Hugh Carless find themselves returning towards the starting point of their exploration of the wilds of Nuristan. They meet renowned explorer Wilfred Thesiger (another of my preferred travel authors, though a rather dry and austere one in this case). The Guardian newspaper's obituary for Eric newby included these pictures which I have nejoyed in my own copies of his most well known books:

Newby wrote a book about sailing to and from Australia in a square rigger in 1939, The Last Grain Race from which we see the crew of the Finnish barque in the left hand picture. The right hand picture shows the author on the slopes of Mir Samir, Afghanistan, during his travels in the Hindu Kush in 1958.

We came to cornfields and a village called Arayu, full of savage dogs and surly-looking Tajiks and mud houses like those of Egyptian fellahin. This patch of cultivation was succeeded by a mighty red-cliffed gorge where there were caves in which we sheltered from the midday sun. But not for long. The path to Parian and Shahnaiz led up out of it, high over the mountain. At the watershed we turned still more to the north, going downhill again now and into a final narrow valley where the wind threw the spray from a river in our faces. It was spray from the Parian, the Upper Panjshir. We had made it ...

'Look,' said Hugh, 'it must be Thesiger.'

Coming towards us out of the great gorge where the river thundered was a small caravan like our own. He named an English explorer, a remarkable throwback to the Victorian era, a fluent speaker of Arabic, a very brave man, who has twice crossed the Empty Quarter and, apart from a few weeks every year, has passed his entire life among primitive peoples.

We had been on the march for a month. We were all rather jaded; the horses were galled because the drivers were careless of them, and their ribs stood out because they had been in places only fit for mules and forded innumerable torrents filled with slippery rocks as big as footballs; the drivers had run out of tobacco and were pining for their wives; there was no more sugar to put in the tea, no more jam, no more cigarettes and I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the third time; all of us suffered from persistent dysentery. The ecstatic sensations we had experienced at a higher altitude were beginning to wear off. It was not a particularly gay party.

Thesiger's caravan was abreast of us now, his horses lurching to a standstill on the execrable track. They were deep-loaded with great wooden presses, marked 'British Museum', and black tin trunks. The party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, to whom some strange mutation had given bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for central Asia in crippling pointed brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking middle-class Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat with stitching all over it; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, 45 years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter. 'Turn round,' he said, 'you'll stay the night with us. We're going to kill some chickens.'

We tried to explain that we had to get to Kabul, that we wanted our mail, but our men, who professed to understand no English but were reluctant to pass through the gorges at night, had already turned the horses and were making for the collection of miserable hovels that was the nearest village. Soon we were sitting on a carpet under some mulberry trees, surrounded by the entire population, with all Thesiger's belongings piled up behind us. 'Can't speak a word of the language,' he said cheerfully. 'Know a lot of the Koran by heart but not a word of Persian. Still, it's not really necessary. Here, you,' he shouted at the cook, who had only entered his service the day before and had never seen another Englishman. 'Make some green tea and a lot of chicken and rice - three chickens.'

'No good bothering the interpreter,' he went on, 'the poor fellow's got a sty, that's why we only did 17 miles today.'

Soon the cook was back, semaphoring desperately. 'Speak up, can't understand a thing. You want sugar? Why don't you say so?' he produced a bunch of keys, like a housekeeper in some stately home ...

'That cook's going to die,' said Thesiger; 'hasn't got a coat and look at his feet. We're 9,000 feet if we're an inch here. How high's the Chamar Pass?' We told him 16,000 feet. 'Get yourself a coat and boots, do you hear?' he shouted in the direction of the camp fire.

After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious....

'England's going to pot,' said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. 'Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas - wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, 20 guineas apiece, absolute rubbish.'

He began to tell me about his Arabs. 'I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing.' I asked him about surgery. 'I take off fingers and there's a lot of surgery to be done. They're frightened of their own doctors because they're not clean.'

'Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?'

'Hundreds of them,' he said dreamily, for it was very late. 'Lord yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that. Let's turn in.'

The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air-beds. 'God, you must be a couple of pansies,' said Thesiger.

· Extracted from A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Picador), reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop

Eric Newby died in England in October 2006 at age 86. He wrote many books, perhaps none quite as crazily wonderful as A Short Walk. All of them worth a read though.

Decrepit Waddell

This essay is about a block of a street in the Casa Marina district of Key West. Casa Marina is the name given by Flagler to the hotel he built in the city as a suitable destination for his railway travelers to the Southernmost City in1912, when he brought a rail connection to the islands. Not to put too fine a point on it, Casa Marina is the upper class neighborhood in Key West, what the realtors call "desirable." Imagine my surprise when I found this block of Waddell in something less than a desirable state, quite run down actually.There were two newer buildings across the street (behind my very desirable Vespa) and one had a for sale sign in front. Perhaps they got tired of looking at decrepitude, perhaps the vicissitudes of the economy.
On this side of Waddell we have this house with the splendid brick chimney and advanced state of decay:A neighbor with a wobbly roof line:And these flowers that i thought looked pretty even if unidentifiable (by me, as usual):Then there's this picturesque apartment building showing signs of wear and tear...

...with a student-like Volkswagen which reminded me of my impecunious youth in Santa Cruz, California, plastic bags on the seats and stuffing popping out everywhere:

I did like the shabby apartment building, I thought it excessively photogenic.It reminded me a bit of apartments I've seen in Los Angeles, relics of a more prosperous past perhaps, seedy with the passage of time, yet romantic in their shabbiness. I'm not sure I'd feel that way if I had to live here.I suppose a lot would depend on the quality of the neighbors.Winter sunshine produces a lovely contrast in colors around the Keys:Let us not end our look at this unusual block of Casa Marina with decrepitude:A place to sit and sip a gin and tonic as the sun sets on another splendid day in Key West:
Key West, city of contrasts.

Do You Dubayy?

I grew up in a different world where places around the globe had different names and seemed to follow different rules from those that they tell us we should follow today. I visited East Germany briefly as a youngster, a place that has vanished as completely as the Soviet Union I once traveled through. When I was a very small boy Goa in India was ruled by the Portuguese, part of their Empire that has also vanished as completely as Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) or Macao. I read the writings of Wilfred Thesiger as a boy and dreamed of a world of Iraqi Marsh Arabs, the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and the desperate journeys across those empty spaces. Sir Wilfred Thesiger was the stereotypical craggy Englishman able to hide himself among the natives like this:And yet, despite the literature and the wonderment I never did get to the Middle East. My life time was when Arabs supplanted camels with internal combustion, tents with skyscrapers, and became objects of Nouveau Riche derision, them Arabs and their gold faucets and their wealth compared to our petroleum dependent technology. I read the literature, I wondered about the Trucial Gulf States who joined together in an ancient 19th century treaty and promised to trade with Britain and no one else. They made a flag and lived under it.I knew 20th century British soldiers who went to work as trainers for the local army in Trucial Oman, another 19th century pirate nation that signed a truce with Great Britain's Navy and thus became "Trucial" in the weird lingo of diplomacy. And then they became their own nations, the Trucial Gulf States and the seven sheikdoms spread across 250 miles of waterfront in the Persian Gulf became the United Arab Emirates or UAE. We've heard of their capital Abu Dhabi in English, the place that "elects" the hereditary President of the UAE, and we've heard of Dubai where the Emirates' Vice President is "elected" by heredity, but the other five...? I couldn't even spell them never mind say them. They all, the seven little emirates, live in the shadows of oil and prosperity.

We've heard more recently of the huge developments the Emir of Dubai has been encouraging in his country that boasts perhaps 50 miles of coastline and a great deal of sand. And now the developer of the Palms of Dubai (dubayy in Arabic, properly pronounced de-bay, not due-by) is defaulting on his dollar loans, all 60 billion of them. Dubai, unlike big brother Abu Dhabi has no oil so it proposed to be the big bad boy of unbridled capitalist development amongst the little emirates which sit next to Qatar and Saudi Arabia. They built an indoor ski resort in the desert and proposed vast offshore artificial islands of luxury that have all come tumbling down in the credit crunch, default swap chaos of 2008. Dubai is not kind to debtors and foreigners have been abandoning their Mercedes at the airport and flying home before their debts caught up with them. They wanted to escape the 19th century style debtor's jail in use in Dubai.

Now the UAE Central Bank is suggesting it will not pick up the debts owed by developer Dubai World saying the lenders need to be responsible for the money they loaned, and the central bank of Dubai is saying the same thing. Stock markets everywhere were jittery when they thought Dubai's Big Brother Emirate was going to save their financial ass, so what happens next who knows? Bloomberg suggests stocks are ignoring Dubai's problems which, after a few days of sacremongering, isn't too surprising really, especially when you consider how determined they are tot ell us a recovery is under way. The funny thing about all this sudden "Dubai-talk" is that Dubai World owes barely $60 billion dollars, which amounts to far less than the US taxpayer has paid to bail out Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. if you need an idea of how enormous and how powerful the United States is, and could be, just think about what piddly numbers we are talking about here. The United States could bail out all Dubai's debt, including $40 billion of shaky governmental debt, with only one dollar in seven the US government has set aside for domestic bailout spending. Incidentally one has to wonder why we the US taxpayers are being told to bail out fraudulent lenders and wild speculators when these Ay-rabs we love to despise are forthrightly telling their speculators to suck it up on their own.

On the other hand Abu Dhabi can probably cope just fine with whatever economic shambles lies ahead because unlike little brother Dubai, Abu Dhabi has enormous oil reserves and about $630 billion in the bank, saved up for a rainy day. I sit back in my little house in the Keys and I wonder about the world I live in. One load of leaders in Dubai is busy pretending to have money and blowing it all like a millionaire's son on a spending spree at Harrod's while the other leaders in Abu Dhabi are hoarding cash like it's going out of fashion. And us? We savagely decline to cover our own health care needs on the grounds of cost, blow up foreign countries at random and get our people killed defending "freedom"in mountain ranges we can't even name. I can't help but feel the Trucial Gulf States have made more progress in the past century than we have, and whatever the cost of their freedom they have money in the bank to cover expenses like proper capitalists should. And yet all we see are "rag heads" and "camel jockeys" and hateful religious extremists, those Ay-rabs with 630 billion of our dollars snug in their bank.

Freedom isn't having the biggest guns or the baddest attitude. It's knowing how to keep a solid capitalist positive cash flow, while taking care of what needs to be taken care of at home and at the same time cheerfully minding one's own business. How sad it is we need to take a lesson from the former Trucial Gulf States who are at war with no one, provide excellent socialized medicine for all and are now showing us how to demand accountability from bankrupts. I hope when the time comes they will sign a truce with us.

BO's

This looks like a pile of junque by the side of Caroline Street, it is in fact a well known restaurant.For all that it looks decrepit, Buddy Owen's place has some pretty strict rules:It's popular too, and when my wife and I met a visiting relative here we had to stand in a line that stretched out onto the Caroline Street sidewalk.There are tables scattered around under a bitsa roof, made of bits of this and that, and all those bits of stuff hanging off the ceiling to attract a diner's attention.I didn't spot this guy staring at me until I checked the photo later.We placed our order at the counter which didn't take long as the menu is delightfully short and to the point, the odd sandwich the odd salad and some french fries. We ordered a burger and a fish sandwich to share and our guest got a second fish sandwich. If you order them a certain way you are identified as a local and the fries are free, which takes a bit of the sting out of the sandwich price tag of around twelve bucks. The order taker was cheerful and efficient:

The cooking area is a production line, short order cooking to keep the masses happy. Those are sandwiches lined up to receive their filings:The drinks are reasonably priced, even though bottled water for two bucks is I suppose the industry standard rip-off:This was the first time I had ever been to BO's Fish Wagon. My colleague Paula who lives a restricted life within five blocks of her house, visits this place and Pepe's cafe and treats them as her main haunts and she spent much of the week before Thanksgiving encouraging me to go. She isn't alone in her appreciation of this place, I saw people concentrating hard on their food while we were there:Call me fussy but I am not terribly keen on dilapidated settings when it's time to eat. I am not overly germ phobic as people who hang out around me would tell you but there is something a bit run down about this place for my general taste. I don't think a decent fish sandwich needs nautical junque to improve it's flavor:Though clearly a lot of people don't agree with my assessment. Eating at BO's puts you practically out on the street:And check it out. the line never grew shorter. I suspect a lot of these people were paying extra for their fries so you'd end up paying $20 for a sandwich and a drink. That seems a lot to me.

They weren't insubstantial, give them that! Alcohol midday puts me to sleep so we had bottomless cups of cola to get the bread and fries down the hatch.As my wife's cousin's stepson put it, the fish was fresh and flaky as any self respecting fish should be when served in a Keys restaurant. But he had experience working in a fish place in Seattle, where he's from and he told me he learned a few of the less salubrious tricks of the trade. None of them are indulged in by BO's, which isn't surprising, when you consider the reputation they've built up over the years. Some people call them rats with wings, others are more charitable, but these pigeons were practically domesticated, bobbing between diner's legs chasing crumbs...Tim says he wants to settle in Key West for a while. At 24 he's lived an exemplary life (by my standards!) crossing the Pacific under sail ("New Zealand and Fiji are my favorite countries") and learning several trades that might be very useful for him in Key West. He came across as responsible, smart and capable and I hope Key West doesn't derail him, as it has a habit of doing for some people of less character than he. On the other hand he's talking about going to the dive school at the College so he's come to town with plans, and he seems to know where he's going. I shall watch with interest.
So, my verdict on BO's? We all three thought the fish could use some spice or something, and my wife and I felt the sandwich was overpriced, though the hamburger did get a thumbs up for flavor.As we left I met a colleague in her patrol car and she wrinkled her nose when we told her of our first time adventure at BO's. "I grew up here and I never ate there," she said, confirming this is not a Conch hang out. At least not in her family. I don't think the legions of tourists who flock there will care.