Why Bollywood will never take over the world

This Bollywood version of Thriller is amazing. If ever you enjoyed the original, you have to check this out: clickity-click

Kudos to Claire for passing this one along.

Three months ago who would've thought?

This is going to be quick since the shit is hitting the fan in terms of getting everything ready for our big questionnaire push through November, but I just thought I'd mention that I'm now doing cold-calling in Spanish. Marguerite and I spent an hour or two today calling random people from our database to see if we could set up interviews with our big-ass questionnaire, and it actually worked! Margot is way better at it, but I had a few successes. I think people take pity on my poorly-expressed earnestness. But I'll take whatever I can get if that means a few more data points for the graphs and tables we'll be slaving over in a few months.

Go Ramon!

There's hope for American foreign policy yet! My friend and poker nemesis Ramon is going to be representing the US in Saudi Arabia as a political-economic officer for the State Department. Sciences Po people who remember him, go have a look and show the love at his blog Start the Journey

Research notes from Colombia

As I hope you all know, this trip to Colombia is not just about tropical juice drinks and faking salsa moves, it's actually the key to me getting out of school with my damn Masters degree. So recent developments have been really exciting (for us, at least).

A few times in the last three months (omg I've only got 2 months left! Unless I change my ticket ...) Marguerite and I have interviewed people at the SENA, el Servicio National de Aprendizaje (aprendizaje = learning, for you monolingual philistines! Love y'all, of course). For people from my masters, it's essentially the Colombian ANPE. For anyone else, it's the national professional development agency that trains people in an incredible range of activities, from cooking to sales to graphic design (all for free). We've been talking with them because they oversee one of the legal migration programs with Spain that we're studying. Unfortunately, hard data on who left, when, what they're making in Spain, etc. has been hard to come by, despite the impressive array of other services the agency provides. Until this week ...

For whatever reason, they have now decided to let us pick through their archives and create a database of information we need. But since they also need this database (and we'll be working on it for free), they're giving us unlimited access to the documents we need, access to database engineers to make sure we do this right, helping us with data entry (we're gonna have our own interns!), giving us essentially unlimited access to an office, and in general just being incredibly cool. So this is a good thing, although it will mean tons of work over the next few weeks.

Now this isn't just any government bureaucracy, this is Colombia!

First off, I can't imagine bureaucrat in the US or especially in France opening their archives to two strangers who just happen to claim to have spoken with a bunch of people they know (at the IOM -- International Organization for Migration, at the Spanish embassy, the ministry of foreign affairs, etc.). I mean, we're looking at people's resumes (CVs) and copying down their national ID number and phone number. It's academic research and we would probably eventually be able to get access to this information through the university or the IOM, but damn, this is incredibly easy.

Second, every month they have a special lunch and party and concert featuring food, dance, and kiosks with local products, all from one of the regions where the SENA has offices (they're all over Colombia). Today happened to be Santa Marta's turn, which also happens to be where I went for vacation -- and I'm still planning to put up pics, by the way. So I got some good food and was pushed out of the audience to dance with one of the women from the department I'm working with, and then tonight, they were passing around rum and dancing (really well). Can you imagine this happening in the US? Or France? Rum? At a monthly party for technocrats?

Third, I was invited to a two-hour spin marathon. Spinning is a ridiculous (and exhausting) sport where you go to a gym and ride stationary bikes (SPINning the pedals really quickly) with a bunch of other people while listening to bad techno and trying not to look like you're dying. Oh yeah, and this was going to happen in the SENA's gym, which I now have access to as well. The marathon might not seem like much, but I'm just amazed that I was invited, and that I'll be able to go to the gym. These people are so damn nice and cool!

So that's it. I managed to survive the two hours of cycling but I'm fading fasssssssssssssssssssssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ha ha, what a good joke, eh? Of course, if I'd really fallen asleep I wouldn't have been able to click on the button to post this. God, I'm so hilarious though.

Does this sound familiar?

Ramon quotes Tolstoy (click for his commentary):

War and Peace: Book II, Part III, Chapter VI

'During the first weeks of his stay in Petersburg Prince Andrei found all the habits of thought he had formed during his life of seclusion in the country entirely obscured by the petty preoccupations which engrossed him in that city.

'Every evening on his return home he would jot down in his notebook four or five unavoidable visits or appointments for specified times. The mechanism of life, the arrangements of the day so as to be punctual everywhere, absorbed the greater part of his vital energy. He did nothing - he neither thought nor had time to think, and whatever he said in conversation, and he talked well, was merely the fruit of his meditations in the country.

'He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the same remark on the same day in different circles. But he was so busy for whole days together that he had no time to reflect that he was doing nothing.'

Commentary

Perfect weather, not so much

I'm sitting here in an internet cafe in Medellin because a) Margot has my lonely planet as well as the list of things to do, and b) because there is a torrential downpour going on outside. As much as I love getting soaked to the bone, I'm really digging the thunder. If there's one thing wrong with California (besides the traffic, housing prices, and Modesto), it's the fact that there are almost never thunderstorms.

Anyway, Medellin really is cool, and if you don't count the occasional, random buckets of rain the weather is great. There's a nice two-line metro system, something of a mix between BART and Paris' regional transport system, as well as one of those gondola systems that you usually see at ski resorts. Instead of taking you up to snowy paradise, however, this one takes you up into a random shanty-town. It's very impressive.

Well, that'll have to do for now. My time's up and I'm hoping things have calmed down outside.

Oh yeah, one last thing: so far, Medellin's reputation as the capital of plastic surgery has so far been severely exaggerated. I'll keep you posted though, maybe the massive fake boobs only come out on Saturday nights.

La Ciudad de la Primavera Eterna

Tonight we're going to Medellin, the city of eternal spring, to enjoy the best weather in the world for a weekend.

So how was work today?

Damn!

I'm off Google again. These last few posts pushed those keywords into the archive so the front page doesn't get me in the top-10 for 'mtv the grind robin dancers' anymore. Oh well, a few minutes of glory. I should have taken a screenshot. Sigh ...

Olivier, then and now

For Eco de developpement people: Can this really be the same Olivier?

On my 26th birthday:




On vacation a few weeks ago, the night of our massive sunburns:

Seriously, this is it

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds this shocking:

One reason the US is virtually the only developed nation projected to grow rapidly during the next few decades is its high fertility rate. Indeed, the US has the highest teen birth rate in the industrialized world: 22 percent of all women become mothers before age 20.

By contrast, the rate is 4 percent in Sweden, 6 percent in France, and 11 percent in Canada. At the same time, 35 percent of US births are unplanned, a figure Population Connection president John Seager finds "astonishing."

Page three of How America grows: A tale of two cities

One last thing

Off to bed now, but in case you need something to read at work tomorrow, here's an interesting article:

The next 100 million and the face of America [csmonitor.com]

The predicted 24% hispanic population by 2050 makes me glad to be learning Spanish now. Not that I really need to. Only if you're a jackass like Samuel Huntington do you think that hispanic immigrants don't learn English. Indeed, if you feel like checking out this excellent book review, second-generation immigrants are essentially bilingual, while 60% of third-generation kids only speak English at home.

[source: Douglas S. Massey, review of Huntington's Who We Are in Population and Development Review, September 2004]

Um ...

By the way, what the fuck?

[Crossing fingers and hoping this was just a big stack of dynamite mimicing a nuclear explosion]

So much for the Cold War being over.

...

...

...


[Don't say it! Noooo ... self control please!]


So why did we invade Iraq again?


[Damn! If you're not with us you're against us]


It's nice to know that our focus on a totally winnable, all out war on terror at the expense of everything else was clearly the right decision.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the November elections.

I'm on MTV The Grind!

I was just checking the traffic on the ol' blog (yes, I stalk all of you, my dear readers) and noticed that someone came to the site from the following keywords: mtv the grind robin dancers

Check it out

I think this is hilarious. Especially because you won't stumble upon my blog if you search for robin, colombia, and bogota.

More photos, because I'm a slacker

Photos by Noemie

Random photos -- not Caribbean paradise

Just to catch up a bit with photos, here are a few more photos for you. I have a whole stack of stuff from the vacation but I'm a stickler for chronology.

A shot of the complex we live in, complete with gym, pool, and bullfighting ring. Well ... the bullfighting ring is real, except that I saw a rock concert there. I've never seen a bull there. Our building is barely in the picture on the right.

Another shot of chez nous, but this time from Monserrate, a church on a mountain at the edge of town. It's an hour of absolute misery going up, a brief respite at the top, and knee-killing steps all the way down. Good times. Or chevere (cool), as they say here. See the tall brown buildings in the middle? We live in the short one on the left. Does anyone else remember Sim City?

Here's a photo of Monserrate from outside our building.

Another shot from the top, just in case you don't remember Sim City. It really did look something like this, but with better animations.

For all you économie de développement nerds, here's an example of a so-called 'problème de développement' from the path up Monserrat. My expert translation says this means, 'Watch out, falling stuff!, go around on the right.' Problem is, it says to go to the right on both sides, so going up the mountain you risk getting killed by falling stuff because you stay to the right, which is the side where stuff is falling if you're going up ... nevermind ... it was funny at the time.

Speaking of which, all this fruit and veggies and milk in plastic bags cost about $12. Mmmmmm ...

Totally unrelated: A photo of the gang plus some of Vania's (Mexican girl in my masters) cool friends.

Now for some random photos from our first trip outside Bogota. Note the positive image of the US abroad, sighted in a Bogota shanty town. Yes, that's Colombia and the world dangling from each of the puppetmaster's hands. Following, a random mountain village, just to show you what they're like.

And now a few from my first research trip with Margot. Indigenous village + thatched roof + nice views = nifty.

And here is what the Colombian countryside looks like.

Actually, most of it looks nothing like this, the country is unbelievably diverse, which you'll see in the next week as I finally get around to posting vacation and other trip photos.

And in case any of you are still reading this far down, I apologize for being so damn slow about replying to emails: pure laziness and an excessive taste for tech web sites and other miscellaneous, pointless distractions. That and trying to do research, and learn Spanish, etc, of course. But I will get to it, I really will.