Dowbrigade

The tenuous
truce between political and social sectors here in Ecuador,
for the purpose of presenting a civilized facade for the duration of
the Miss Universe pageant (next Tuesday, June [...]

The volcano
was angry last night. On our last night in Banos, through a light but
persistent drizzle, the loud booming blasts echoed up and
down the valley as Mount Tungurahua, still in activity [...]

Today’s Boston Globe has an interesting piece on how Catholic politicians
(mainly the Kennedys) have handled thorny issues (mostly abortion) and
how that might apply to the Kerry candidacy.
The Dowbrigade takes an anthropological point of view on this one. In
[...]

LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - A fortuneteller told Peru’s disgraced ex-President Alberto Fujimori (news - web sites) to flee in 2000 and warned him of the huge corruption scandal that caused his government to collapse, a videotape showed on Wednesday.

 
The video was given anonymously to lawmaker Anel Townsend and partly shown on Peruvian television.

It showed [...]

The scandal of the day (all week, actually) here in Ecuador concerns the Ecuadorian Minister of Social Welfare, Patricio Acosta, whose wife, despite carrying a diplomatic passport, was denied entry to the United States over the weekend at the Miami airport and unceremoneously put back on the next flight to Ecuador.
The rumors about the how and [...]

Our escape from Quito and bus trip to Banos was as exciting and as exactly choreographed as a chase scene in a blockbuster action flick, except, of course, no one was chasing us and we never broke 50 miles an hour.  We arrived at the Quito bus terminal, a vast, multi leveled cement catacomb seemingly [...]

Our escape from Quito and bus trip to Banos was as exciting
and as exactly choreographed as a chase scene in a blockbuster action
flick, except, of course, no one was chasing us and we never broke 50
[...]

In 1972 a decidedly hippyish and dangerously adventure-addicted Dowbrigade arrived at the mystical and legendary town of Ba

Although the natural beauty and fantastic food should be enough
for anyone, the Dowbrigade has unfortunately been so jaded by our decades
in so-called "civilization" that we often feel the need for more sophisticated
[...]

In the dream we are sitting in the audience of a conference of super
computer geniuses, covering it for the Dowbrigade News, although we understand
almost nothing of what is being said in the presentations.
After the current presenter, who resembles a [...]

The
question of why our culture has a morbid fear of some insects (spiders,
roaches, and locusts, for example) while cultures in, say,
Africa do not, is an interesting one. In [...]

We
are forced to admit that President Bush’s address to the nation on
his Iraq disengagement was pretty damn good, at least by his standards.
Never a Praetorian [...]