when i left for my cuba adventure, on july 5th, i spent a couple of days in seattle waiting for the caravan to commence. i attempted to purchase a wandering wifi system to attach to my beloved mac, so i'd be able to update my blog and my friends from anywhere in the excited states of amnesia. perhaps because i was in seattle, home of the microsoft mega machine, i learned that no such product exists off the shelf for macintosh. there are ways to purchase the capability online, but i didn't have time for that.
so i put my "i hate cell phones" philosophy aside, and bought one of the (hereinafter known as) damned things. (sorry, gorillas in the jungle whose homeland is devastated for some mineral necessary for them.) the damned thing turned out to be rather convenient in a number of situations - travelling on buses, trains, for radio chats with chris and his gorilla radio listener, to let friends know my arrival times, to describe where i landed so they could gather me up after a long journey and take me to their lovely welcoming homes (thank goodness for friends). but now that i'm home in canada, the damned thing won't function. neither will the calling card i purchased in the usa thinking (as it turns out, incorrectly) that it'd be cheaper to call long distance from the card rather than the phone. damned things.
and what's up with the iphone only being available in the usa? and, apparently, japan? and perhaps other nations. but not canada. when i was in san francisco i phoned the apple store, just curious about how much and which plan they work with in canada. for whatever reason apple set up an exclusive contract with at&t so the damned things will only work with that phone company and you can't even buy one unless you have an address in the usa. an address, and a usa credit card. wtf? this is one of those examples of how capitalism just completely doesn't make sense. there are 30 million people in canada, mas o menos. why, i asked the apple representative, why doesn't apple want to expand its market? she didn't know.
here's another crazy thing. last night, at my friend's vancouver home, i learned that if a canadian company is bought up by a usa corporation there are a list of countries that formerly free company can no longer do business with, one of which is cuba. but the legislation goes further, with regard to cuba, than it does with other nations (iran, north korea, etc). not only can the formerly free company never again do business with cuba, neither can it do business with any cuban living anywhere in the world. so if a cuban lives in france, and works for a french company, that formerly free canadian company (now owned by a company in the greatest fascist nation since the history of humankind), cannot do business with the french company.
who, in good conscience, would sell a company knowing those conditions would apply?
a different friend, working for a canadian company, told me they recently turned down business because they didn't like the ethics of the company that wanted the contract. they didn't want to offer services to folks who fly corporate executives around in private jets. too many greenhouse gases. gotta draw the line somewhere.
is it any wonder so many of my yankee friends long to escape? i tell them we're trying our best to hang onto canada ....
my friends went to bed early, it being a sunday night before a work day, and i retreated to my little room with the intention of watching an episode of "monk" on the newly discovered hulu.com. but alas, those particular programmers have decreed that the wonders of hulu will only be available in the usa. i searched around and found someone had discovered a way to set up a fake ip address to fool hulu .... but further investigation determined that hulu had already been configured to block that. nice neighbours, eh?
i think i forgot to mention this little story previously .... one night early on in havana, a friend of mine from last year's caravan (he's formerly a military guy who worked at guantanamo bay and hated it and left and joined the honourable team) and i wandered into old havana. on our way back, wandering along the malecon, many many young people had gathered. there was music and large crowds we had to make our way through. i followed my friend's trail as he gently made his way and, to my delight, not a single body or portion thereof touched mine. not a single one. it was a huge crowd. i realize the cubans are an educated people, with respect for women. i also realize i'm getting old and undesirable, but i've never in my life (even these middle-elder years) walked through a crowd like that without someone "accidentally" brushing up against a part of me. but not the cubans. they're too polite.
maybe that's why the government (and its supporting mafia) of the unintended states of perversion hates cubans. and, it seems, canadians. we're just too polite.
more likely it's because we have socialist tendencies. we're fighting to keep our water resources wild and free rather than let ultra wealthy greedy desert dwelling citizens use it all up watering their lawns and filling their pools. we canadians can travel freely to cuba and we do, all the time, comprising half of their tourist industry. we love cuba, we want them to be able to determine their own future, as we want to determine ours. we try to honour the history of the indigenous peoples who were murdered by colonialist ancestors who wanted to rule the land, and we want to stop the colonialist capitalists from taking over everything that's precious to us.
for this we're punished with corporations who buy ours and then dictate who we can and can't be friends with. we're denied the opportunity to participate in the destruction of african wilderness for iphones. and our dollar, which the cubans value more highly than the greenback, is artifically deflated to further discourage us from visiting our southern neighbours (not to mention their border guards like to feel us up, threaten and intimidate us, just because we helped some usa friends bring goods to cuba).
as if that's not enough reason to just stay home, now there's this:
U.S. unveils new rules on border searches of laptops
Fri Aug 28, 2009 10:03am EDT
[SORRY I CAN'T PRINT THE ACTUAL ARTICLE .... SOME, IN THE "NEWS" BUSINESS, THINK THE BEST WAY TO DISSEMINATE INFORMATION IS TO PUT A COPYRIGHT ON IT. DAMNED THINGS. "FAIR PRESENTATION AND DISCLOSURE OF RELEVANT INTERESTS" MY ASS]
(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky; Editing by John O'Callaghan)
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