Greetings, again, from the land where people can't seem to talk fast enough and can't seem to walk slow enough.

A quick case in point on why Chavez is so difficult to cover from down here. Again, every Sunday he broadcasts his weekly TV show, Alo Presidente, where he'll talk for six hours straight, at least, without commercial interruption because it's aired on state TV.



For the last several days words have grown tense between Chavez and Fox in the wake of the Summit of the Americas, with the two leaders trading jabs. Most of the past Chavez gems you might be familiar with weren't boldly proclaimed in some tight, succinct speech. Rather, they were thrown in off-the-cuff, buried among hours of the guy rambling into a camera ad-nauseam, during Alo Presidente.

Every news agency down here rotates their reporters each week, so one unlucky person gets to spend their entire Sunday carefully listening to Chavez on the chance he says something ridiculous. A guy in our office, Jorge, was telling me how once he forgot to pack his lunch, and suffered through Chavez' rant until nearly 8pm on an empty stomach. You can't look away for even a second because he could slip something in at any moment. A Sunday with Alo Presidente is more torturous than an afternoon with the CIA somewhere in Eastern Europe. Sooner or later, you're gonna go insane. It's gonna happen.

My point is that this developing story was far harder to cover than you'd think. And I mean for everyone involved - the diplomats, etc. - someone had to stay awake to listen to Chavez's mind eventually veer in Mexico's direction, and decide to tell Fox not to fuck with him.


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In other news, I lifted this shot of the President and First Lady off of Slate, today.



People who know my family back in God's Country...doesn't that lady look...uncannily familiar?

I mean, it's almost a spitting image, isn't it??

...

This has to be more than a coincidence. I deeply fear my family is harboring a dark, terrible secret of Star Wars-like proportions.

I fear that my uncontrollable tendencies to speak in psuedo-wordimisms, to make huge important decisions with far-reaching implications based on what God told me, to exploit the fears and blind patriotism of others, to bomb into submission people who are darker than me in the name of freedom and democracy, and to be generally not-that-bright - I think all of that could be...genetic.

*gulp.*