Quito Approach

Quito Approach - Lufthansa MD-11F [English Subtitles]
There is no air at 10,000 feet, but Ecuador has a whole city up there. Denver, the mile high city, has an elevation of only 5,000 feet, half that of Quito's. What's it like trying to breath at high altitude? Ask the guys from Top Gear. They can tell you.

The aircraft is a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, not to be confused with the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 or the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar. Via Posthip Scott.

Switchback

Steam Train on the Devil's Nose Switchback, Ecuador
Reading about the railroad over Stevens Pass in Washington, I discovered that the term switchback originally referred to a railway that used a switch to reverse direction when going up a hill. "Well, strictly speaking, railways do not consider something a switchback unless they have to "stop, switch, and back". The original railway over Stevens Pass incorporated eight or nine switchbacks.

Update December 2016 replaced dead link with one that leads to a 'local' copy.

Clinton's Blacklist

Envigado F.C.

Looking for pictures to go with my last post, I stumble over this article about how a Colombian football club (soccer to US'uns) has managed to get themselves on Clinton's backlist because they are suspected of laundering drug money for the evil drug cartels.
   The Clinton List? That would be Bill Clinton, who set up this list back when he was President. It is apparently still hanging around despite a couple of Federal courts declaring it unconstitutional. (At least I think it's Bill, or Will, not Hill. I couldn't find the origin, The best I could find was a list of revisions going back to 1994, which, along with rumor and innuendo, kind of points to Willy.) Is the ACLU working on this? If not, why not?

US Embassy in Lima, Peru

Short refresher on South America:

• Brazil is the big country with Rio de Janeiro and the big fuss about the World Cup.
• Venezuela elected chubby Chavez, a populist who made friends with Cuba and pissed off everyone who had any money. He's dead but his policies live on.
• Peru, a poor mountainous country famous for being the home of Peruvian Marching Powder. The US Embassy is the biggest building in the capital, funded almost entirely by the DEA.
• Argentina and Chile are back to back across the Andes mountains. They are the southernmost countries, have temperate climates as opposed to tropical, and might almost be considered first world countries. They both also have a history of mass-murder carried out by right wing death squads. That seems to have gone away, but it's still a feature on most of the rest of the continent.
• Columbia is trying hard to be a first world country, mostly by emulating the USA by fighting the commies (FARC) and the druggies, which may be the same thing. They pursue this course because we give them a lot of money to do so.
• Bolivia, which is also famous for Peruvian Marching Powder, probably because both here and Peru are mostly high elevation mountains, and coca leaves are what people use to in order to function at 15,000 feet without oxygen.
• Uraguay and Paraguay are smaller countries on the border between Argentina and Brazil. Uraguay is on the Atlantic Ocean, Paraguay is land-locked.
• Ecuador is a small country on the Pacific Ocean.
• The Guinea states, three small countries on the northeast coast. France has a space launch port there.

So once again the War On Drugs is distorting world affairs like nothing since the U.S.S.R. collapsed, or the Saudi Oil Embargo, which got me to wondering why, if the War On Drugs is so manifestly evil, do we continue to pursue it? Which brings me to money, movies and conspiracy theories.

    There are people in the USA who are making billions of dollars off of the illicit drug trade. I'm not talking about the gang bangers shooting each other on downtown street corners, or flashy blacks with their gold chains and their pimped out Escalades. I'm talking about the guy in the big house. He wears a gray suit, drives a Mercedes, might have an office somewhere, but he doesn't conduct any real business in it. He is totally invisible. Might even have friends on Capital Hill. I mean what better way to influence legislation?

    This-guy / these-people really like having all that money coming in and if anyone even thinks about changing the law I'll bet they get a visit, a very discreet visit from a nobody who manages to convey the message that they should drop any attempt to change the law or . . .  Whatever-it-is is left unsaid, but you can bet that the message is crystal clear, something along the lines of "nice kids you got there, shame if sumthin' were to happen to 'em". Now they might get all self-righteous and call the cops. That might protect his family, for the moment, but all it really means is that a little more political arm twisting will need to be done to see that no reform bill ever makes it to the floor.

Update November 2016 added caption to top picture so that we have a reference to the name of the club. Wikipedia has an article about the Envigado F.C. (Football Club), but it does not mention being blacklisted.

Downtown

Thursday night I took the Max (the local train) downtown to a software developer's get together at the Thirsty Lion. I got off the train at the Oak Street station and my short walk to the pub took me by a couple places I knew. I would never have guessed that I would find so many places I knew all in one go. First was McCormick & Schmick's (Seafood Restaurant). My wife and I eat there occasionally, but I have never been able to find it reliably. I know where it is approximately, so I drive to the general area and then wander around till I stumble on it. Practically next door is Apple Music. I was just down there with my son looking at guitar amplifiers. I bought one of those $100 specials they throw in when I bought him an electric guitar. He has outgrown it. He claims the sound is terrible. I wouldn't be surprised, but I really have no idea. After all, the sound of screaming hot rod engines is music to my ears. I don't claim to appreciate the finer nuances of actual music.

Around the corner I find a whole bunch of TV news vans pulled up along the curb. Oh, s**t, this must be the "Zone" where we had several people shot the other night, two fatally. What an effed up thing to happen. One of the girls who was shot goes to my son's high school. She is an exchange student from Ecuador. She caught a bullet in the thigh, but she is going to be okay, physically anyway. They released her from the hospital and she is planning on staying on.

The shooting was a friggin' disaster. Near as I can tell, the shooter wasn't a gun nut, wasn't even a nut case, just an ordinary guy who went off the deep end.


View Larger Map

In the next block was the pub, where SAO's DevSIG was meeting. I stayed for an hour or two, talked to several people, and then walked back to the train station. Took me about an hour and $2 each way, door to door.