Hotel Guancascos now has wifi!

I was just in Honduras for a conference and a few meetings, and one of my stops included the town of Gracias, Lempira. It's a small, charming place and popular with backpackers traveling around Honduras.

By far the best place to spend the night there is Hotel Guancascos. A room there is about $12/night, and the hotel's operations include a fantastic restaurant that serves the usual backpacker fare along with Honduran comida tipica. Rooms have hot water and satellite TV.

It'd been a while since I stayed at Guancascos, so I was surprised to discover they now have wifi! I remember opening my computer a year ago and searching hopefully (but ultimately in vain) for a wifi signal. Fully expecting to be disappointed again, I repeated the process a few days ago (in October '08) and saw the "linksys" signal! This eliminates the need to schlep down to one of the few internet cafes in town with their ancient computers and sluggish connection speeds.

It's interesting how even tiny towns accessible only by old, imported school buses and whose dirt roads aren't being paved anytime soon still sometimes have a nice hotel/restaurant/café with reliable wifi.

México DF

Disappointed

Well, it looks like this is it. Obama won more states. But no matter how much John King might play with that fancy touch-screen computer on CNN, it looks like Clinton will be the Democratic nominee.

I'm starting to shift to Clinton, anyway. She's stronger on the crucial progressive issue of universal health care, for example.

I'm seeing some parallels in support for Obama and Latin American populists like Chávez, Ortega, Fernández de Kirchner, and López Obrador. We dislike Clinton more than we like Obama. We're so disappointed by "politics as usual" -- for us 20-somethings, read: Bush -- that we're drawn like June bugs to the shining pop star.

We'll see what happens mañana.

I hate the L2 bus

Now, something regarding a decidedly mundane part of my DC existence: this is the third time in as many days that the DC Metro's L2 bus has failed to show up at all. Twice this happened in the morning, and the third was this evening in downtown.

Luckily for me, I've had extra minutes in my schedule each time the L2 has disappointed me this week, and I think I've learned to rely on, say, the S1 instead.

Anyone else have trouble with this line?

Turned off by the Clintons (or, rambling thoughts on the candidates through rose-colored glasses)

I don't write about the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates as an expert -- just as someone who talks about it a lot with his friends. And what I've been talking about a lot lately is both Gloria Steinem and Maureen Dowd's articles in the NYT.

First -- here are my overall thoughts, which are nothing earth-shattering. I'm a huge fan of Barack Obama. I like his biography and the possibilities he represents. When I think of Hillary Clinton, what comes to mind is her campaign's post-Iowa angry rhetoric (from her and Bill, especially).

Having said that, a line about halfway through Steinem's piece on Tuesday ("Women Are Never Front-Runners") gave me pause: "But what worries me is that [Obama] is seen as unifying by his race while [H. Clinton] is seen as divisive by her sex." It prompted me to worry that perhaps I'm one of those people who dislikes Clinton because of her gender (Steinem says "sex", but I'll stick to "gender" here). Sexism, like racism, can be so deep-seated that it's sudden manifestation might catch you unawares.

But as good writers and thinkers tend to do, Dowd helped me clarify my thoughts in her column ("Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?") on the New Hampshire café crying thing, which irritated me from the beginning because it seemed completely calculated (and yet, a brilliant political move all the same).

I dislike Clinton and her political baggage because of her arrogance and use of tactics like the crying -- that is, throwing the 'gender card' back out, like a boomerang, and having it play favorably for her. If people criticized her for crying -- they'd be attacking her as a woman and would be accused of sexism. For the rest, it worked because it 'humanized' her, etc.

What's more is that as Dowd points out, she cried for us out of self-pity and because she was so upset that we didn't realize we need her. The emotion might have been real, but it came from a place of extreme arrogance.

On the other side, we're expecting a lot from Obama's candidacy -- and if he's elected, some of us will almost certainly be disappointed in one way or another. But from the point of view of someone who came of (political) age under Bush, I can't help but be more willing to roll the dice with Obama than go "back to the future" with Clinton.