Vamping

There really is a post coming, I promise.

Many, in fact.

Blame it on Spanish ADSL, too much work, too little time and a muse who took August off (like a good Spaniard) and seems not to have heard it's September already. Or maybe she just has a Mediterranean sense of punctuality.

Meanwhile, a few quick links. Here's what I've been reading lately:

Ellen MacArthur, yet another woman at the top of my list of "Women I´d love to Meet for a Cup of Coffee" (or a pint of Murphy's, as the case may be) is in standby mode in NYC for a new try at the west to east transatlantic solo record (sailing, that is.) The current record was just set in July by a pesky record-setting Frenchman named Francis Joyon, and she's got her work cut out to beat it.

And the Spanish are doing OK in the Louis Vuitton competitions leading up to the America's Cup in Valencia in 2007! They've been bouncing around 5th place. Impressive, considering they arrived late to the game (like a bad cliche about Spanish punctuality), finally pulling together a boat and a team a few months ago, years after the most of the other challengers. Might be a root for the home team thing, might be the same undying love for the underdog that lead me to 2 heartbreaking and wholly dysfunctional relationships - one with the Boston Red Sox, the other with my poor Chicago Cubs.....but, whatever it is, I am ready to see Spain come out in the final 2.

And yes, these appear to be the wistful wanderings of a sailor landlocked in the rainless plains of Spain. Bear with me.

This cracked me up.

And last, a link in Spanish with no time to translate. An El Pais columnist wrote a fabulous column about Chicago last weekend. In Chicago he found Mies can der Rohe and Al Capone, and Saul Bellow and Hugh Hefner, and Carl Sandberg. He revelled in the lovely contradictions of a city of bewildering extremes - frozen in winter, hell in summer, men in suits mixing with leather at Buddy Guy's blues bar, alternating neighborhoods with the some of the country's largest communities of African Americans, Latinos, Ukrainian Americans and Polish Americans.

In a followup column this week, he headed south from Chicago in search of the Mississippi(I like the way this man travels) passing through through Louisville and Graceland, planning to reach New Orleans. He never made it.