I heard on NPR last night that the Surgeon General says that 30% of troops returning from Iraq have some sort of mental problems as a result of their experiences there. I'm sure that's an understated figure, but it's amazing the White House let that be said at all. Anyway, even if it's only 30% that's a staggering figure. The speculation that went along with this number was that it might be one reason why the administration is starting to shift its direction toward an exit strategy out of Iraq.

My favorite mixed drink is the Mojito. A friend just emailed me asking for a reminder on certain details of the construction of a Mojito, and after answering her, I realized I should share this knowledge and more with the world here.

The Mojito is a hot weather drink, originating in Cuba, so it is prime mojito season right now, and hence the urgency of writing this blog entry, although here in Iowa for the last week it's been unusually cool, not the kind of heat where you have a desperate yearning for a mojito, like July and August usually provide.

Relatives of the Mojito include the brazilian Caipirinha and the mint julep from the Southern U.S. (In fact, I once committed the embarrassing faux pas of telling the parents of a cuban friend that the mojito is like a cuban version of a mint julep). All these drinks have the same goal of beating the heat but accomplish them according to local culture and with local ingredients, whether it be cachaca, whiskey, or rum. (speaking of Cuba, I just heard an interesting historical factoid on the radio: back in the late 60s, early 70s, there was NO security on U.S. airlines. you could bring a gun on board, whatever. There were so many hijackings of planes to Cuba that the Cuban government started cashing in on it - they started giving Cuban sandwhiches to the hungry passengers who'd made an unexpected trip to Havana. Then they'd send a bill to the U.S. State Department for $30 per sandwhich. The U.S. didn't start increasing security till some hijackers almost flew a plane into the Oak Ridge nuclear facility in 1972.)

I discovered the mojito accidentally in 1999 or 2000, hanging out with the video artists known as Animal Charm. They were visiting from Chicago and I was showing them a good time at one of my favorite neighborhood bars in San Francisco called The Skylark (16th and Valencia, the Mission), Suddenly a woman behind me put her hand on my shoulder and said, hey how's it going, you gotta have Pete make you his special. I turned around and didn't recognize this person, and she realized she'd made a mistake and had thought I was someone else, but by this time we were curious what Pete's special was. Pete was the bartender, and it turned out his special was the mojito. We were in love with it immediately and were so enthusiastic that Pete gave us his recipe, and even drew a little diagram on a napkin. (I scanned in the napkin years ago but I don't have the file handy, sadly.)

Anyway, that was the beginning of my apprenticeship and then mastery of the mojito. Since then the drink got really trendy, then a little less trendy. Most bars don't make them right if they make them at all, and charge too much, and the reason for all of this is that the mojito is very labor intensive to make. In fact Pete that night at the Skylark told us that after 9 he won't even make them because it's too busy and it takes too long. That's the sign of a true mojito purist. Rather than make a sloppy, substandard mojito, he just refuses to do it when he doesn't have the time. At the Skylark, a mojito is worth $5, but at most other places it is not. It's better and more fun to makek them yourself.

Now for the last few years my reputation amongst friends regarding the mojito has been such that at a party I'm usually cajoled into the kitchen to make them until the ingredients are exhausted. I enjoy it, usually, mostly because it's fun to show people how to make them, and people typically gather around watching and asking questions.

And I'm still learning. The thing i recently realized about the mojito with my newly increased spanish skills is that its name means "little wet one." i think that's cool.

Anyway, finally, on to the recipe:
1. squeeze 4 lime quarters into a pint glass. leave 2 of the quarters in. add mint.
2. muddle (mash up with a blunt instrument, preferably a muddler)
   It's important to muddle thoroughly. the idea is to bring out the oils from the lime rinds and mint leaves.

3. add simple syrup (see below) and light rum (2 shots for a pint glass)
4. fill with ice
5. top off with soda water
6. shake, preferably with cocktail shaker cupped over the glass, or if you don't have one, just by pouring back and forth between glass and another container.

Now simple syrup (don't buy it, it's easy to make, but you have to take time before hand) is just a supersaturated sugar solution. to make it i kind of just eyeball it. i take about 2 or 3 cups
of water, boil it and then start adding powdered sugar, a few spoonfulls at a time, stirring. just keep adding until you can't disolve any more into the water, till it starts taking a long time for the sugar to dissolve. then, let it heat lightly a maybe 10 more minutes, or more, if you want to make it more concentrated you can boil off more water. then put it in a squeeze bottle or whatever and refrigerate. preferably you want to refigerate it till it's chilled as far
as it'll get, like overnight, but if you're in a hurry, you can use it after a few hours, whatever. the thing about this recipe for simple syrup is it's going to be variable strength, so the first mojito you make with that batch of simple syrup will be an experiment where you figure outhow much of the solution you use to mamke it sweet enough. i like mojitos that are not too sweet, but sweet enough to just exactly balance the tartness of the limes and barely cover the
taste of the rum. it shouldnt be like drinking a mountain dew or something.

Or if you're in a real hurry and you want a substandard mojito, skip all that and just mix powdered sugar right into the drink, but it'll be hard to dissolve it. Once when some friends and I were toiling away over editing a video one hot summer, we were slugging down lots of mojitos and ran out of simple syrup, and then out of sugar, and we tried using honey. This is not advised! Using honey means risking the dreaded "honey clumps" as honey has even more of a problem than sugar dissolving into ice cold liquid.

Oh, and how much mint? well, i usually put 3 or 4 large leaves, more if they're smaller leaves. And the fresher the mint, the better. Grow some in your back yard, it's easy.

Well, there you have it, everything you need to know about the Mojito. Enjoy!

Well, the film is really coming along. Translations are slowly trickling in from various people helping out, thankfully, though there are still several clips left to do. Now I'm busy making subtitles from the translations I do have, and as I go, tightening up the editing. Hopefully I can still reduce the total length, but I've decided not to be so worried about that anymore. It's about 72 minutes, and I wanted it to be more like 57, but we'll just have to see. I thought it might be interesting to list here the different sections of the doc, not neccesarily in order:

Participatroy Culture's video publishing software, Broadcast Machine is a free and open source content management system that handles publishing of video content and even acts as an automated bittorrent seeder. Pretty cool. I've been looking for something like this. ibiblio also has something called Osprey that is simliar, it looks like.

There's a lot of exciting "participatory" or "independent" web video projects sprouting up all over. Blogging was a first wave, then the podcasting wave, and that seems to have touched off a still-embryonic video casting/bloggin phenomenon. The interesting and scary thing is that the power of Hollywood and television is so great that some of these internet video sharing ventures are hybrid or not so hybrid tv networks, and some are closer to traditional distribution and business models than others. It's a weird time where it's hard to tell what will happen.

Will "vcasting" make television irrelevant? Or will the television industry taint vcasting? hard to say, but it reminds me of when I worked for ZDTV during it's launch (later TechTV, and now I think it's called G4?) - I and some other idealistic employees thought it would make TV more like the Web, but it ended up helping to make the Web more like TV. Disillusioned again.

Well, the republicans just barely squeezed CAFTA through the House last night, 217-215, apparently after lots of threats to reluctant partymembers. What a shame, after all the fighting and all the people standing up against it. 15 democrats even voted for it. To add insult to injury, I get this clueless email from this Guatemalan guy I met in Chiquimula, a celebratory message about how how great it is that CAFTA finally passed and how good it will be for his country. What a fool. I met this guy through a complicated connection I won't go into but suffice it to say he was interested in my efforts to get computers to Bolivia, and he wanted some computers for some schools in Guatemala. He works with Habitat for Humanity and his city is a sister city of Port Huron, Michigan and he's been up there a few times. He was a nice enough guy but now I'm really doubting his sanity, and the fact that he's an evangelical minister makes me sort of shiver, too. Here's what he said:

All right!!!!!!!!! the CAFTA was finally aproved by the USA congress, this will bring more
and better opportunities for both countries especially for ours.

It just seems like such a no-brainer that CAFTA will be a fucking disaster for everyone. All you have to do is look at NAFTA. That's all you have to do. It's like a big 10-year old sore thumb, a big sign sitting there saying hey, look at this huge failure, this monster that's put 8 million people under the poverty line and destroyed millions of jobs, etc etc. I mean, how clueless do you have to be? You have to be either stupid, or rich and evil. I know this guy isn't rich.

suspira....

Well, I am slowly but steadily progressing on my film about the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. Some days I feel like, yeah, sure, I can wrap it up in 2 weeks. Other days I think, omigod there's still so much to do.

Definitely though, the big thing that is holding me back is translation. I still have several bits of interviews that I can't accurately, fully translate myself into english, and hence, can't really even make a final decision about what to use or how to cut. A few people have responded to earlier requests, and 2 have actually followed through, and it's been great to get back those translations and feel like I can now fully take advantage of the corresponding footage.

But I need more help! So if you are good at spanish and english and would like to help, go to the Backpack page I've set up to manage the task, and follow the directions there. If you're fluent it should just take a few minutes to do one clip, more if you want to do more. If you have questions email me at steev AT detritus.netNOSPAM or leave a comment here.

gracias!

From Boing Boing we have a renactment of the first round in the War on Terror, Unix-style. And I'm so glad they spelled Unix right, not all in caps (it's not an acronym! - that's one of my pet geek peeves). Anyway, I'm trying to think how one could continue it, but they might have stopped just in time (avoiding the Saturday Night Live Syndrome where every joke just gets driven into the ground). Ooh, but one funny thing might be something like:

$ cd Iraq/reasons_to_invade
$ ls
oil
$ ln -s oil democracy
$ ln -s oil  WMDs
$ ln -s oil regime _change 
$ ./saddam_connected_to_911
./saddam_connected_to_911: Command not found.

ha ha ha. there's all sorts of other sub-jokes possible. like maybe the media could somehow be used as a compiler/linker to build the binary called "concensus." etc etc.
but, like i said, it's probably gone on enough. or, wait, too far, now.  i'm sure there's leftie geeks all over the world furiously thinking up more, but i can say i've spent enough time on it.
(thanx jos&eacute)
update:  erp! i found the original blog where this was posted.  They take it a lot farther, especially the commentors.  still funny though, with some of the same ideas I just had above, basically.
    

      
steev's blog
    
  

Interesting new article in the El Paso paper about how teenagers keep going into Juarez even though they know it's dangerous. Two El Paso high school boys were offed in the last 10 days. Meanwhile as usual we got Juarez officials saying, nah, Juarez isn't violent, it's about as violent as, say Houston.

Uh, yeah, but in Houston the police probably actually investigate and solve some violent crimes.

URGENT- PLEASE CONTACT
THE COMMERCE DEPARTMENT
YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVES,
EMERGENCY NETWORKS AND PRESS CONTACTS:

SPREAD THE WORD FAR AND WIDE!
http://www.commerce.gov
202-482-2000

Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez
cgutierrez@commerce.gov

As of 1:30 pm EDT, The Pastors for Peace Friendshipment Caravan to Cuba
is being held up at the US-Mexico border by US Commerce Department
officials.
They are threatening to search every vehicle and every item of
humanitarian aid. They are telling us that "only licensable goods will be allowed to
cross into Mexico."

Pastors for Peace does not accept or apply for a license to deliver
humanitarian aid to Cuba.

There are 130 US citizens traveling with the caravan. They and the
humanitarian aid are traveling in eight busses, a box truck and two
small cars. It will take days to inspect the 140 tons of aid. We are prepared
todo whatever we need to do to deliver our humanitarian aid to Cuba. Stay
posted...

I just heard a great program on Odyssey, a public radio show that I've frequently found interesting, though suprisingly highbrow or academic - you don't often hear, even on public radio, phrases like "post-modern conception of representation," especially from a caller!

Anyway, today's show was about Reality TV, and the 2 guests were both academics and cultural critics, one of them being the eminent Henry Jenkins, who is pretty well known for his study of fan culture and his book "Textual Poachers."

There was a lot of great stuff about the role that reality television is playing in society, but there are 2 things in particular that I was most interested in. First, the idea that reality tv programs promote an idea of individual agency and responsiblity that is in keeping with the current rise of neoliberal ideology in politics. Where before people could look to government social programs or their community for support, they're encouraged now to be independent individualists and compete, like in Survivor and other reality contest game shows, and look to private sources of charity like the Extreme Home Makeover show.

The other interesting thing that Jenkins brought up is the phenomenon of the spoiler community. These are viewers of a reality show who get together on the internet and investigate the show to find out what will happen before it goes on the air, or to find out extra details that don't appear on the show itself. They're like investigative journalists, only they don't investigate weighty things like corrupt politicians or corporate wrongdoing, they investigate whether Joey will be voted off the Island next week, or whatever. They even pool their money sometimes to send one of their group to physically investigate the filming location, interview people, etcetera.

Hmm. sounds sort of like Indymedia.

Jenkins basically explained that he sees this as an activity motivated by a desire to use new information tools to learn more about the world than what is being told to them by the media, and he mentioned how this is connected to some forms of activism going on now or that will go on.

Wow. Isn't it incredible, there's people out there put time and energy and money into being amateur investigative journalists, but their subjects are completely useless, unreal elements of constructed corporate mass culture. Just imagine if they could be swayed to participate in Indymedia instead!