C'mon Randy... bolinhos de bacalhau are awesome. We spent our last few hours in Rio at a little watering hole, drinking chopps and emptying plates of bolinhos. We have made bolinhos de bacalhau at home a few times (it's surprisingly hard to find in England - I usually source it from an Italian deli) and it's usually a struggle for the soaked, milk-warmed fish to last long enough to find its way into bolinhos. The kids adore it. Reminds me I must see if I can find some for our Christmas Eve nibbles.

I came across this advert at Waterloo station last night. No words - just Obama standing in front of No. 10 Downing Street. Curious.

An interesting possibility is that the administration might agree to set up a tariff-free quota for Brazil. Currently a fair bit of Brazilian ethanol gets into the US tax-free by trans-shipment via Caribbean nations. The scary thing is that Brazil's cost base is quite low, while pressure on the price of corn runs the risk of driving the US cost of production so high that the arbitrage window opens and even taxed ethanol becomes economic in the US market. That certainly happened last summer when ethanol prices peaked over $5 - ethanol in Sao Paulo tends to run about $1.50 a gallon, and normally the price hovers just below the (Brazil + freight) price. An argument could be made that, rather than let such price pressure be put on corn it would be better to relieve the tariff and allow Brazilian ethanol to satisfy domestic demand.

I'm not sure he has a lot to worry about, Randy. US ethanol comes from corn, not sugar - the US cannot economically produce ethanol from sugar cane because US production costs are so much higher than in Brazil. Also significant, Florida is a refined product importer, so keeping fuel prices down by lowering the tariff barrier probably makes more sense for the state than any other economic protection benefits from the tariff. Now, if he were running in Iowa! It actually can't hurt in Florida either that he's in favour of supporting economic development in Latin America. I saw Jeb speak at an event in Texas last month. What raised more hackles I think was his strong support of a drilling ban in Florida's territorial waters. He said the environment and tourism were far more important to Florida than spoiling the landscape with rigs and pollution (fair point). "200 miles off, drill away!", he said.

We took our honeymoon in Venice in February 2000. From the photos, you obviously noted the same thing - its nice when the city is not full of tourists. Your comments on the market ring true for me as well. Why are markets like this so hard to find in the US / UK? We had a grand time at the markets in Barcelona. We're being "sold back" our farmers markets at a high price, when this should be the default.

>>He died on the steps of the nearby Hotel California as he tried to escape. Someone forgot to tell him that you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Sorry.

Probably... heh.

Damn, and here I thought after the Kevin Bacon post there was going to be something juicy about Reg and Pat Buchanan.

Obitfull Horizons

500 reais ($320) Man, I've been gone a long time. Missing the "good ol' days" when we'd have had twice that many reais (good, in this case, being relative). Daniel's 3rd birthday yesterday. He was born of a sweltering January's day in Laranjeiras.