Lightning Rod

Obelisco de Buenos Aires

I'm reading about a crew of young guys building reproductions of old sports cars. They've set up shop in Todd, Argentina, "located 170 kilometers from the Obelisk". Hey, I've been to Argentina but I don't remember anything about an obelisk, so I go checking. Okay, it's in Buenos Aires and Buenos Aires is a big city, so it's possible that I missed it. Reading up on it in Wikipedia I was struck by how it seems to be a political lightning rod:

1936 - The obelisk was built by a German company, which completed its work in a record time of 31 days, with 157 workers.
1939 - the City Council sanctioned the demolition of the Obelisco, however, the ordinance was vetoed by the municipal executive power.
1973 - decorated as a Christmas tree.
1975 - during the Peronist government of Isabel Martínez de Perón, a ring-shaped rotating sign was hung around the obelisk, with the motto El silencio es salud (Silence is health). Although it was allegedly geared against motorists creating excessive noise, it was widely interpreted as a statement calling Argentines to refrain from expressing their political views.
1976 September - La Noche de los Lápices (The Night of the Pencils), was a series of kidnappings and forced disappearances, followed by the torture, rape, and murder of a number of young students, during the last Argentine dictatorship, also known as the National Reorganization Process.
2005 - the obelisk was covered by a giant pink condom to commemorate the World AIDS Day.
2006 - To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the La Noche de los Lápices, the monument was converted into a giant pencil.

The Obelisk is about one-half the height of the Washington Monument.

P.S. Looking through my old posts about Argentina, I found I had posted a photo of the obelisk once before.

Via Just A Car Guy

Buenos Aires Buildings

View across the street from the kid's apartment in Buenos Aires. I put it together from three separate images using Autostitch, which I suppose is obsolete technology since omnivision lenses became affordable.
    Anyway note how tall the buildings are: two, three, maybe four stories. The kid's apartment building is no wider than any of these buildings but is 16 stories tall. It is really nice, in an archaic, made out of stone, fifty years old kind of way.  The apartments are small, but then so is the rent.
    This whole section of Palermo is like this: mostly short buildings with the occasional monolith shooting toward the sky. All these tall buildings are built with at least one, maybe two, blank walls, like they expected somebody to build another tall building right next door, but it never happened.  So it's kind of like a building boom got started fifty or so years ago and then collapsed.

There aren't any cars in the picture because I had been standing on the curb for five minutes waiting for a break in the traffic. The stop light helped. Don't worry, though. In another minute the thundering herd will return.

    The farther north you go (toward the sea / river / ocean), the greater the proportion of high rises, at least until you get to the Avenida del Libertador, which was definitely built to impress.

Rain, Part 2

6 AM Buenos Aires, Argentina

Yesterday, and for several days before that it was hot, hot and humid, and then boom, a cold front blew in last night and now it's 70 odd degrees and pouring down rain. Well, that was this morning. It's settled down now, cool, dry and partly cloudy. Part 1 here.

My Front Door

3671 Lavalle, Buenos Aires, Argentina

I had been here a week before I realized that I was staying in a fancy looking building. When we walked here we came around the corner on the same side of the street, so I was never in a position to actually see the front of the building. I only discovered what it looked like when I started playing around with Google Street View, which is where I got this image.
    The front door (center) is just a plain steel grill. Just inside the grill we have an all glass door with another lock and a modern marble and glass lobby with a stainless steel elevator. To the left of the front door is the electric car door, which opens onto a tunnel which goes back ten meters or so to a garage which holds half a dozen cars. It looks like a tight fit getting into the parking spaces, which are separated by pillars. The sidewalk is typical, made of tiles of some sort. Poured concrete sidewalks are rare.
    Now that I've looked at it, I think the front facade is all that is left of the original building. The rest of it has been replaced by a modern four story condo with a swimming pool in the back.
    The rent is pretty cheap, something like $35 a night, but then rent in general here seems to be very low. In the USA, one month's rent and mortgage is typically about one per-cent of the market value of the property. Using that rule of thumb here won't get you anywhere near the purchase price of an apartment or house.

Update May 2021. Corrected spelling of Buenos. Did spell checker not exist in 2015?

Pájaro Mierda, Tercera Parte (Bird Shit, Part Three)

Some random street in downtown Buenos Aires. I don't recall exactly where this was, but it doesn't matter, all the streets look like this.

Yesterday I put on my brand new, light weight, light green sport shirt to go shopping with my daughter in downtown Buenos Aires. The streets here are lined with great big, beautiful trees, many as tall as a ten story building. Bear this in mind as you read the rest of this story.
    Determined daughter wanted to buy an air conditioner for her apartment. We didn't have to go far, maybe a mile or two, just from one part of downtown to another, where all the streets are lined with great big, beautiful trees (just in case you forgot). It took a while to complete the sale, but the eventually the three of us ended up on the sidewalk in front of the store with the two box set that contains the air conditioner. The air conditioner comes in two pieces, one smaller, light weight unit that goes inside the building, and a larger, heavy one that contains the compressor and goes outside.
    Osmany is trying to flag down a cab, but we aren't having much luck. Cantankerous stinky pants blames the taxi drivers for being lazy. Can't say as I blame them. Who wants to get out of their air conditioned car into this 90 and 90 weather and help load this great big, heavy box into the trunk?
    Eventually a kid stops and he and Osmany have a wrestling contest with the big box trying to stuff it into the cab, but it's not going to fit and leave room for the rest of us. So they abandon the effort and we go back for looking for a station-wagon-type taxi cab. I've been standing around for what seems like hours, so I suggest I take the lighter box and just walk back to their apartment. It's only ten blocks, I should be able to do that.
    We have a bit of discussion over this but eventually I start to pick up the medium size box and that is when some foul bird drops a king sized bird turd on my head. It splatters all over me, the air conditioner box, and worst of all, miss stinky pants.
    Christ on a crutch. We wiped up as best we could (a gentleman always carries a clean, or least semi-clean, handkerchief for just these sort of events), and packed stinky pants and the boxes off in the next taxi that came along. Osmany and I took another. Naturally, the taxi O-man and I caught was a station wagon and could have carried all of us.

Merde

Buenos Aires, Argentina, is supposed to the Paris of South America. I dunno, it could be. There is one thing though, that it has in common with Paris and that is dog shit on the sidewalks. I thought Paris had cleaned up their act, but it seems to still be a problem. It's definitely a problem here in B.A., but maybe that depends on your definition of a problem.
     Jack has a theory that there are two kinds of dog owners: those who are poop-phobic, and those who aren't. Those who are poop-phobic simply look away when their dog is pooping and ignore it while they go on their merry way. People who aren't afeared of poop will invert a plastic bag around their hand, pick up the poop, revert the bag, tie it off and carry it away.
    I am thinking there is something else going on as well and that is cultural conditioning. People who have grown up with dog shit on the sidewalks see it as entirely normal and so see no reason to do anything about it. In effect, they don't even see it. That doesn't mean they will step on it. They acquired dog-poop avoidance techniques at a very young age and by now it is automatic.
    Paris is trying to clean up their act again with stiffer penalties and more rigorous enforcement. That might work, but I expect it will become a big fight before it manages to effect any change in people's behavior.
    I suspect the only way to really fix the problem is to make dog care a required elementary school class. In about 20 years you should start to see some progress and in 80 years, when all the old poop heads have died, dog poop on the sidewalk should be a rare event.
    In other words, watch your step.

B.A. Pics #1

Buenos Aires automotive wheel shop, Now With Turntable

Ordinary Shopping in Buenos Aires

You can't see the dragonflies in this image, and I don't understand why not. There certainly were enough of them, and I think they should be big enough to be picked up by the camera. Oh well, I've been wrong before.

Went shopping with the kids this afternoon. First stop was the furniture store, which was closed. Second stop was a bedding and patio furniture. They had a very nice yard with green grass, red walls, green ivy, colorful furniture, more dragonflies than you could count and a young woman singing covers of American pop hits playing over the sound system. A very pleasant wait while K-girl picked out pillows and fluff.
    Walking down the street we passed a hardware store, so we had to stop in and inquire about a hammer drill. All the walls here are made of concrete, so hanging anything on the wall takes a little more oomph than punching a hole in sheetrock, hence hammer drill. They wanted 1900 pesos, or roughly $190 for the smallest Bosch unit they had. We did not buy one.
     We tried another shop for furniture but it turned out to be a school. The headmaster (or head janitor, I couldn't tell) turned up while we were pondering our next move, which K-girl decided was to move on. I thought we should have stayed and talked to the guy. Obviously my opinion is worth less than zero.
     Stopped at a couple small grocery stores and spent $271 (pesos) for a dozen or so items.

U-Boat 977

Type VIIC U-boat, same type as U-977

U-Boat 977 is Heinz Schaeffer's account of his career in the German Navy. It's short, very readable and very entertaining if you are a gear-head or even if you are not. There is an introduction by Nicholas Monsarrat. I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them immensely. He isn't too happy with Heinz, but then he'd been on the other side.

The book itself has a number of technical details I was unaware of, but those are only there to help explain the circumstances of what's happening. He talks about all aspects of life in the Navy, good times and bad, interactions with subordinates, superiors and peers. People's attitudes were the most interesting / curious. I was going to put up a couple of quotes, but it felt like I would be quoting the whole book. Let's see if I can find one by just opening the book at random.

Chapter 5 - Christmas Eve 

For four weeks the wind had been howling from every quarter at 55 to 60 miles an hour, with heavy rain and the thermometer only a few degrees above zero, I was up on the bridge. There was of course no protection there, just the icy steel bulkheads, so it was impossible to work up any warmth. Lashed to the rail as I was, the leather safety-belt reinforced with steel bit deep into my ribs. It had been known for the watch on the bridge to be washed overboard in heavy seas -- in one boat the relief had gone up to take over and just found no one there. The force of the seas breaking over us now was terrific, but the boat shot on like an arrow, with very little pitching or rolling and the waves going over us like a breakwater.

Update: Forgot to mention the main reason for dragging this book with me all the way to Buenos Aires. Herr Schaeffer's last voyage as Captain of the U-977 brought him to Mar del Plata, Argentina, which is just down the coast from B.A.

Buenos Aires

Went for a walk around the neighborhood yesterday afternoon. B.A. is fabulous. The variety of buildings is a constant source of fascination. Old, new, trashified, sparkly neat and clean, It's just like any big city in the USA except everything is slightly different. And in Spanish. I would post some photos, but that would have required taking some, and if I started that I would still be out there. So much cool stuff, so much going on.
    Daring daughter kept reminding me to keep my voice down so as not to attract undue attention. Whether this is from a genuine fear of thieves or her more personal fear of being embarrassed by her father is up for debate.
    I didn't notice anything frightening. The vibe was calm, people just going about their lives. Old people, young people, mothers with children, couples with babies. I did see policemen standing on street corners on the busier streets, and this is a semi-upscale neighborhood, so I guess that's about right.
   We did come across one group of a dozen or so young men standing by their motorcycles on the sidewalk, but they appeared to be just getting together on a Friday evening to talk. My impression was probably colored by the fact that they all appeared to be clean-cut young men. Nothing scary about their appearance.
    On our way into town from the airport ($50 US, plus tip) I did see one burned out car sitting on the street. It appeared to have been there for a while, all traces of the fire had vanished to be replaced by rust. Rumor has it that the mayor is trying to improve trash collection. That would be a good thing, as long as they don't go overboard, which is one of the things I don't like about the fascist neighborhood where I live in the states. Nobody is even allowed to think about making a mess there.
    Compared to sterile U.S. suburbia, B.A. feels alive.

Tierra del Fuego

Arakur hotel in Ushuaia, Argentina, where the Top Gear team stayed

It got a little warm today here in Buenos Aires so I'm walking around the house trying to sort out remote control air conditioners and I notice one was made in Tierra del Feugo. What? Tierra del Fuego is like the end of the world, to put it politely. It's the last stop before Antarctica. Why would anyone build a factory there? You don't suppose tax breaks have anything to do with it, do you?

Top Gear caused a bit of a stir here recently. I blame 'but-I-did-not-do-anything-I-swear' Jeremy what's his curls.

Attacked!

Buenos Aires Sunshine. See also Rain.

Walking back to house from the all-beef-all-the-time Chinese dinner, we were set upon by a barking spider. This sent Osmany into a paroxysm of laughter. It was so violent that I thought we might have to A) abandon him, or B) call for an ambulance. After umpteen hours the paroxysm subsided. God forbid we should ever be attacked again. I am afraid he might not survive another attack.
      Which reminds me of a story that what's-his-name told about his time in Afghanistan when the Afghans were fighting the Russians. He tells us that a barking spider attack is both the rudest and the funniest thing that can happen.
     Osmany is from Cuba. I don't know whether this has any bearing on the matter or not.

Update 2015 August. Corrected a typo.

Buenos Aires

I didn't know God even made purple flowers, at least not like this.
Update: dutiful daughter tells me they are jacaranda trees.

See the building half way up the left hand side with the oval hole in the middle? That's the MUSEO RENAULT - PALACIO ALCORTA. In a previous life it used to be the Palacio Chrysler and the oval was a  test track, like Fiat's 1923 rooftop test track that they built in Turin, Italy. This one is much smaller, which may be why it got converted to compartments.

 Museo Renault Main Entrance

I like the way this building looks. Not sure why. The trees out front, maybe, or perhaps the brass frames around the big display windows.Or perhaps because there are fancy cars behind those windows.

Rain

Buenos Aires, Argentina