While cleaning out bookmarks on my laptop, I came across this post by Trish. It brought to mind an old post of my own, Modern Gypsies, which has little to do with culture - but has everything to do with culture. People, such as Trish and myself, see things in ways that are different than most.

Take for instance a few days ago, when I was in South Oropouche. I had just come out of the 'garden' after checking on my corn when I stopped and said hello to a neighbor. He told me that he had been invited to a Hindu pooja but had no way to get there, so I took him. Along the way we piled 4 more people into the pickup, got them to where the prayers were held, wished people well (after I changed into a less sweaty shirt) and then sat to eat - customary for some poojas. So while eating, I was introduced as a surveyor from Suriname. { Read more }

A random thought that has been wandering through my head for years knocked on the doorway of my consciousness a few days ago. There has been something about 'Collective Intelligence' and the derivative 'Smart Mobs' that has always bothered me. Factor in issues of communication, democracy and the ever buzzworthy term 'Social Networking' (which is nothing new), and things get pretty complicated because they are all written of separately. Oddly, that reflects exactly what I am writing about now.

We can concede that things that are worked on collaboratively have a chance of being better than things that are worked on by an exclusive subset of people. Open Source projects such as Linux and Apache Web Server demonstrate this. Despite itself, Wikipedia does the same to, in my opinion, a decreasing extent (perhaps following the rule of diminishing returns). Yet there are literally thousands of collaborative software and content projects that fail all the time. It is troublesome to consider how elite the successful collaborative works really are. The DotCom boom demonstrates the contrast quite well - for every successful web project during that period, such as Amazon.com, there were about 300 failures. Those are not good odds. Granted, they were not all collaborative projects - it is quite likely most weren't - but it demonstrates a disparity in statistical representation when we talk about success in conjunction with technology. { Read more }

When Barry Became Barack is an interesting article, and it is the first article that I've linked to on any site that has something to do with a possible future President of the United States. But that isn't why I've linked to it, and it also isn't the misspelling of 'reluctant' within the very first paragraph (come on people - spell check!).

The reason I'm linking to it is quite simple. I can sort of relate to it. Being of multiple cultures makes for some interesting times, and the fact that a human can't be striped has its own penances. For me, I was thought to be:

• Mexican in Texas
• Cuban or Puerto Rican in Florida - even being refused gas at one place in the Panhandle once.
• Cuban/Puerto Rican/Dominican Republic/Colombian in New York
• Filipino in Japan
• Mixed Samoan in Hawaii
• 'Red', 'White' or Venezualan in Trinidad and Tobago

Identity is simply something you either have or you don't - it isn't something that other people give to you, but as a younger man traveling around I quickly learned to use what other people thought of me to my advantage where possible. I've been called a greaser, spic, howlie and many other things. Over time, I learned that wherever I went, I was a minority in numbers - and because of my own weak personal identity at times, I wasn't respected here and there. What was worse was that the minorities I was identified with didn't see me as a part of the whole. A very odd existence. { Read more }

A chance phone call took me down to Seon's Beer Garden on Royal Road, where I was to meet a friend to chat about a few things. We had accidentally bumped into Breed's birthday party, with a lot of old-style Calypso (none of the wave-your-hand-in-the-air nonsense) and really ended up having a great time. A lot of positive energy there, with some of the calypsonians lyrically striking out at Crime in the country and reminding us of the political satire inherent in Calypso. Unfortunately, Calypso loses something in commercial packaging - it is something that strikes at the issues in a way that people involved with the issues can understand.

A thought occurred to me as I was listening to one particular calypsonian take on the government from the magic circle of the stage his feet made. That no one seems to think that there should be 1.5 million Prime Ministers in Trinidad and Tobago, not one.