02 February 2002

New New Thing I really ought to got to bed, but one last thing. I haven't digested this at all yet, but Ping is all about digital identity, and it's supposed to be the latest, hotest idea. And it's bubbling up from the bottom rather than imposed from the top.  Remember you saw it here first, unless of course you saw it at Doc's, which is where... oh never mind. 2:22:39 AM

Ecuator Hey guys, you didn't call me on this.  I have proudly been "Blogging from the Ecuator" these last months. Damn. There is a name for that.  When I first came to South America it was as an English as a Foreign Language teacher. It was a good crack. Got to live like a student again for a year or two. So I learned then that this phenomenon is called interference - when you don't quite manage to keep your different languages seperate, and a bit of one seeps into another by mistake. Usually your mother tongue interferes with the language you're learning, but ecuator is a Spanish spelling that I didn't notice in my English, as I say, for months. Come to think of it, you guys haven't called me on anything else either. I saw in the referrers that people from Greece, Finland, Turkey, Mexico and France have come by here, as well as from the more obvious places. I know people don't feedback, but we're blogging here, this is supposed to be different.  Say hi :-) 1:50:18 AM

On the Equator So what's with the Equator, anyway? (As in "Matthew Blair: Blogging from the Equator"). OK, that's fair enough, although I'm kind of feeling my way here, writing about this, so bear with me. The Equator in my case means Ecuador.  I have lived here for six years, interrupted by a spell of a couple of years in Chile. Bill Bryson says in his travel books that you learn more about the place you leave when you travel, rather than your destination. This in the sense that you are too close to what you have always lived with to even be aware of it. And then when you travel and you bump into something different, there's a frisson of recognition for the familiar at home, belatedly recognized. Or something. Anyway, I've learned a whole lot about the value of the rule of law and transparency and a meritocracy since experiencing life with a lot less of them than I was used to in England. But what I was going to mention just now was ants.  When we first got to Guayaquil I noticed we had great big ants in the garden, and they were carrying slivers of green stuff.  Hey!  That's just like on the tele.  We've got leaf cutter ants in the garden, I thought. Cool! That started getting a bit stale when they got a bit over enthusiastic in stripping the leaves off half the new plants we'd just had put in.  And then it got a lot staler when they ate the pumpkin flowers on the plants we had grown from seed with the kids before Halloween.  So I've been digging holes and buying noxious chemicals to pour down them.  I have to tell you the ants are winning so far. Next installment - mosquitoes (also winning). 12:46:24 AM