Dog whistle politics of the left – travel website edition?

Spotted this scene with a little dog-whistle for gay rights supporters in a recent Orbitz ad:

I guess we know how Orbitz feels about Prop 8! This isn’t the first time Orbitz has slipped the gay friendliness into an ad, by the way. You wonder when the radical clerics of the Southern Baptist church are going to call for a boycott.

Single issue blogging I can believe in

If you want to know about people’s experiences with the recent visa waiver agreement between some Caribbean countries and the EU, check this out. I’m going in September, and I’ll be keeping a close eye on which countries seem to have informed their immigration clerks!

I went to Barbados with a camera – #3

Part 3. This might be a 3-parter; we’ll see.

Barbados is pretty British, and one reflection of that is Bridgetown. I don’t know what it is that the British have against grids, but they seem to hate ‘em. While the Spaniards gave Port of Spain a nice orderly arrangement, in Bridgetown, the streets meet at odd angles and generally seem to lead nowhere in particular. Makes for a more interesting walking (and driving) experience. The picture above shows Broad Steet, the main shopping strip, looking towards Parliament and “National Heroes Square” (formerly known as Trafalgar Square; I told you they were British). Also, The Cave Shepherd in this picture was one of my favourite places in Barbados as a child. I think I really liked the in-store cafeteria.

I went to Barbados with a camera – #2

Part 2 of a series of indefinite length

Back when I would visit Barbados a couple times a year, I feel like you didn’t have to spend half your beach trip asking vendors to leave you alone. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that when I was a kid, we avoided the tourist beaches. Well, don’t tell anyone I told you, but Brownes Beach, pictured above, is just south of the capital, filled with the white sand and turquoise waters of tourism ads, and vendor-free. It’s where I spent many a school vacation years ago, and it continues to be a locals’ beach today. Check it out if you get sick of being offered “ganja” (they are so brazen about it, I swear it must be oregano).

Perhaps I should head back

I recently read a quote from someone (I think it was Paul Kedrosky) who called California a Latin American economy in the US. Struck me as quite an insult at the time, and the rating agencies can back me up — Trinidad and Tobago now has a much better credit rating than California.

I went to Barbados with a camera – #1

Part 1 of a til-I-get-bored part series.

This is the Animal Flower Cave, which is along Barbados’ stunning but also dangerous north coast. I remember it being closed for a disconcertingly long time during my childhood, but it appears to be operational these days, complete with admission fees and personal tour guides and the odd sea anemone (from which it got the name – there used to be several).

I’ve got my philosophy

The “School of Philosophy“, last seen making the odd choice to advertise their “classes” on the NYC subway, apparently runs a primary school in Trinidad. And, apparently, that school is doing well:

A fledgling school that sent its first batch of pupils to the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination this year has achieved tremendous success.

Seven pupils of the Trinidad Renaissance Preparatory School at Vistabella, San Fernando, sat the exam.

All passed for the schools of their choice.

Personally, I find any organization that claims to be all about answering life’s most burning questions to be highly suspect –hence my lapsed Catholicism — and these folks look particularly questionable. They don’t even have paid employees – major red flag in this cynic’s book. Still, you can’t argue with results (unless you pay attention to sample size, of course), and I must say that I found their techniques intriguing:

“We offer swimming, dance, music, karate, Spanish and Sanskrit and homework is done at school in the homework club,” he said.

I’m very big into the idea that our schools would perform a lot better if we made the students spend more time in them, and so the idea of keeping kids around for an extra couple of hours to complete their homework seems appealing indeed.  Probably not the most scalable approach, but certainly worth investigating further.

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161500944

Don’t go blind in California

This is pretty upsetting, though not shocking. If you’re blind or metnally challenged, well, I hope your bank (you have one, right?) is nice enough to accept IOUs. No cash for you! But if you are a legislator who failed to pass a budget, or a prison guard in California’s overbuilt prison system, here, have some cash!

The blind better form a union if they know what’s good for them…

Also, California is officially paying people with IOUs. That’s pretty damn crazy.