Second Day In Bobo-Dioulasso

Not much to report today. I went to the Bonne Miche Pâtisserie and got better pastries than at the Sorbètiere but the coffee still sucked. Next, I spent 2 hours on the internet where my screen froze up on google reader with a Stranger Slog post promoting Hump! 4 with 3 men in underwear--one with a video camera--making their Hump entry. There's NSFW (not safe for work) and there's NSFBFIC (not safe for Burkina Faso internet cafes). They are pretty much equivalent. [[BTW, if any women are interested in making something for Hump! 5--call me. ;-) Parents, aunts, and uncles are advised to not google "Hump! 4"--just be content to know that it's a Seattle thing. Just kidding. Sort of. ;-) ]]

Ahem....Anyway, so after that, I went to La Marguerite where I had a shawarma (with basil--an interesting flavor) and a plate of fries and a totally yummy slice of chocolate cake with fruit. I got 3 beers and stayed past closing watching the French news--even in France they report on OJ's guilty verdict. Of course the big news in France is--the American financial crisis. I read quite a bit about it in the internet cafe (my google reader subscription to Salon's How The World Works my link to economic reality). Speaking of NSFBFIC, normally I quickly scroll pictures of George Bush off the page in Africa, but they were all really horrible pictures of him so I let them linger so the Burkinans could see a man deservedly devastated. It must be hard presiding over the end of the era where your philosophy of life has dominated and is now imploding in such spectacular fashion. It really shows on the recent pictures of Bush that my bloggers are showing. Unlike Gorbachev who presided over the end of a failed system by trying to guide it out of the depths of its rot, Bush and the Republicans seem too stubborn to actually recognize the grand failure of their system of letting the deregulated marketplace have its way. Maybe it's because the communist system breeded skepticism while the Republican system is founded on anti-scientific faith. I don't know what it is, but to a guy on the losing side of 2 decades of political trending, it's nice to start to feel vindicated. What have the Republicans come to when their faith-based economic system is so far offset from where they thought it would be that the the ability to look gorgeous while hunting moose is the most important criterion for choice of a VP. When a parent continues to believe in abstenance-only education even after her daughter gets pregnant by some redneck who is not really given a choice as to whether he wants to marry her or not, I guess that means you have the right kind of blinders to head up the party when the 5th melanoma is malignant.

After that, I came back and had a nice beer on the terrace of my hotel, the Cocotier, reading La Route and The Road. There was a table of about 5 or 6 French girls--each stunningly gorgeous. They eventually left and the last one out said "au revoir" to me as I was reading, but I didn't catch it in time to respond. I was concentrating on the meaning of the encounter with Ely which is the most cryptic part of The Road. It's not it's the first time I froze in front of pretty women. And it surely won't be the last.

October 4, 2008 16:29 Burkina Faso local time