The Power and the Money

Chillin’ like it was 1999

  More like 1989, actually.  Or even 1984.  I’m putting the final touches on two cases (one on Pemex, one on the Iraqi oil industry) with a little blue pen on paper printouts, drinking Busch Light from a can, and switching between MTV Hits (you know, which still plays videos) and the Pittsburgh-Chicago game.  Break was eating my wife’s wonderful noodles.  After a week where sleep really has been optional, this is the way to work. 

One way in which digital technology is inferior to the old is in channel switching.  Analog cable televisions would go bam! instantaneously from one channel to another, especially if you had one of those multiswitch remotes that plugged into the set.  These new ones take a few annoying seconds to make the change.  Strangely, I find myself disappointed to know that said new inconvenience will not be a permanent part of the future’s video experience. 

Anyway, I had to turn on the internet and ruin it all.  Thus, this post.  More on the Canadian oil industry forthwith, but I need to finish these two cases.  Sometimes deadlines are hard, even in academia. 

Whatcha y’all doin’ on this not-so-lazy Sunday, gentle readers?

Comiendo los alimentos en la madre patria

Somebody ... probably my mother ... once described Spanish food as “letting the ingredients speak for themselves.”

“Hearty peasant food,” Amma says.  “Solid presentations of uncommon meats.  Satisfying to the stomach, but not so much to the tongue.” 

I wouldn’t call it bland, exactly.  But comida andaluza does, I think, explain the Philippines.  The Philippines got the full force of a cuisine that liked to “let the ingredients speak for themselves,” only without the ingredients.  Philippine food is, perhaps, Andalucian food before the conquest of Mexico brought the ingredients to the peninsula.   

Or not.  It’s a hypothesis, anyway. 

Anyway, Spanish cuisine is just plain food — alimentos — more than a “cuisine.”  Maybe I’m just too used to it, having grown up on a faintly Americanized version of the stuff.  Meat-heavy fried food with very light seasoning. 

Overcooked venison is actually pretty good once you get used to it, and I’ve already mentioned croquetas.   

Plus, tapas are fun, although much better in America (or Catalunya, for that matter) where the substance comes from Mexico and Southeast Asia but the style is español.