As I write, CFR’s house band 3canal is in Washington DC preparing for the World Premiere of an original musical called “Caribeana“. So if you happen to be in or around the beltway between July 13 and July 30, why not check it out?

Over at Global Voices, Alice Backer summarises the reaction in Haiti to the arrival of Irish telecoms service provider Digicel, which started serving the Haitian market in May. Some of it would sound quite familiar to us here in Trinidad and Tobago.

A few days ago, ArubaGirl briefly noted the effect of Digicel’s entry into the Aruban market at The Pancollective.

With both parents facing health problems this week, today was probably always going to be a day of mixed feelings. Our gathering was quite low-key and our resident Limey even refrained from celebrating too vociferously at the end. Jonathan was joking earlier that — were it to come to that — in the absence of a chicken to behead, we could simply sacrifice Alistair. But by the time Crouch’s head came into the mix in the 83rd minute it was already too late, and, as it turned out, none of us would have had quite the stomach to do the deed anyway. Besides, England and its fans would probably not have survived a defeat at the hands of minnows like T&T, and heaven knows Nuremberg has seen enough horrors for a lifetime (bad joke, I know).

This is not to take anything away from the Soca Warriors, who played a more than respectable game this afternoon. Looking forward to Paraguay beating Sweden this afternoon, then T&T beating Paraguay on Tuesday.

The author of the blog featured above left this nice comment today at Caribbean Free Photo:

“What a game, T&T against Sweden. Leo Beenhakker [Trinidad & Tobago’s Dutch coach] rules! But you know what the word Beenhakker means in dutch? Leg chopper, really!”

That I’m no football analyst, but that the Soca Warriors looked like a tight, purposeful unit today. (Sorry, Andreas).

That the Guardian’s liveblog of the Trinidad & Tobago v. Sweden match was one of the more distasteful pieces of journalism I’ve come across in recent times.

That — as Skye and I remarked simultaneously during CNC TV’s coverage of the post-match celebrations at various bars across the country — Trinis should consider looking for some other, more elegant way of expressing jubilation besides wining on each other.

That Nikipedia may never manage to wrest his vintage Strike Squad ‘89 t-shirt from the clutches of his younger brother Andrew, who looked just a little too comfortable in it today.

That we may never know why Jonathan has suddenly gone off T.S. Eliot and julie mangoes — but that we’ll sure as hell keep trying to find out.

That our English buddy Alistair, whom we let hang with us today to watch the match (and who even donned a Latapy shirt for the occasion) will probably be safer hanging with us again to watch Thursday’s match than with a more hardcore posse.

That with the West Indies playing India in St. Lucia, Federer playing Nadal in Paris, three World Cup matches being played in various parts of Germany and a load of unfinished work the size of the pile of top soil sitting at the side of C*POP’s as yet unfinished house, tomorrow is going to be a hell of a juggling act.

There was anti-smelter talk too, of course, notably from Omari Ashby, but the warrior spirit was very much in evidence at last night’s “WarrenMan Birthday-Welcome World Cup Warriors-Happy Friday Jam Session” at the Little Carib Theatre. We arrived there in time for what appeared to be the second set, which consisted of a spoken-word presentation, a really excellent neo-kaiso perfomance by a pair of young women whose names I regret I can’t remember and Omari, followed by the inimitable Canals, bedecked in red (Roger), white (WarrenMan) and black (Stanton). The cut+clear crew were all wearing 3line Soca Warriors t-shirts as well — with Robert “Robbie Styles” Persad going the extra mile by adding red football socks and a cap to his kit. The fabulous Z-Star, who heads back to London today, joined the fellas on stage for three smoking hot numbers involving drumsticks and the occasional cymbal clattering to the floor. The show ended about midnight but the lime continued outside in the street in front of the Little Carib, probably into the wee hours of this morning. . . .

Off now to purchase stocks to keep us going during the Soca Warriors v. Sweden match, which we’ll be watching up at Skye’s. Go Warriors! Vibes it up!

Just in case there’s somebody out there who’s not watching the World Cup, I posted the second episode of the Global Voices Show in the wee hours of this morning.

Off not to prepare for today’s event….

Update: Forgot to mention that this episode of the GV Show is available in two flavours, MP3 and enhanced AAC (with images and clickable links viewable in iTunes and late edition iPods).

Because it’s home, in a powerful and unequivocal way that Britain, for all its joys and advantages and attractions and excitement, can never be. Even after more than half a decade here, adopting the idioms and the culture and the fashion and the freedoms of a big, first-world country, it’s still a foreign land to me. The people are the wrong colour, their accents are strange, their view of the world comprehensible to me now, but still alien. The land is flat and tame. There are mountains (somewhere), cliffs (I’m told) and gorgeous plains (criss-crossed with neatly-maintained walking paths). But they’re not all lumped together, a big crash course in geography like the land of my birth. . . .

If you read one thing today, make it London-based Trinidadian blogger Seldo’s heartfelt meditation on the idea of returning to Trinidad. It’s long (1700+ wds), but it reads beautifully, and Seldo asks all the right questions of himself and of his homeland and writes fully and responsibly from the point of view of a white, privileged, gay Caribbean man who is determined to at least contemplate the idea of taking the destiny of his country into his own hands. Thomas Wolfe said you can’t go home again, but according to Seldo, you can.

With three days and twentysomething hours to go before T&T makes its debut at the World Cup, Trinidad and Tobago World Cup Blog author Stacy-Marie Ishmael riffs off the musings of commentators ranging from a Muslim blogger to Kofi Annan, in her eloquent and free-flowing treatise on football.

And don’t miss Caribbean Beat magazine’s special celebrating both the Trinidad and Tobago qualification and the Caribbean’s chequered history at the tournament. James Ferguson’s newly released book, World Class: An lllustrated History of Caribbean Football, is worth a read as well.

Not surprisingly, the Caribbean islands are barely visible on this map — somebody needs to build a Caribbean-specific version. And I need to head out east very soon….

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

St. Vincent and the Grenadines seem determined to avoid a Natalee Holloway-type circus. . . .

Global Voices update: Among the exciting developments at Global Voices over the past few months are the posts offering translations of the action in the non-English speaking blogosphere. Two recent entries that should be of interest to CFR readers are David Sasaki’s “Journalism 3.0 in Cuba: A Utopian Wish?”, which discusses an online debate among journalists and academics about internet access and online journalism in Cuba; and Alice Backer’s “Senegal: Conversations on Drowned Migrants”, which compiles the reactions from the Francophone African blogosphere to the story of the boat found adrift off the coast of Barbados bearing the corpses of 11 Senegalese nationals.

Gifted, or bordering on senility?:  My dentist has been on vaction, so I had to wait until last Friday to have some work done on one of my pre-molars. As minor as the work required was, for the past couple of weeks the tooth has been quite sensitive to cold and to any kind of pressure, which meant that consuming anything but room-temperature beverages and softish foods has been like, well, pulling teeth. On returning home from the dentist on Friday, and experiencing the first cold drink I’ve been able to put near my mouth in the last two weeks without feeling like somebody had attached live electric wires to my right pre-molar, I was suffused with a feeling of utter joy — anybody looking at me would have sworn this was my first brush with the transformative effect of ice cubes.

I experience a similar sensation when I have had something repaired: I get all excited at the fact that the thing is working again, that the tap has ceased dripping, the appliance no longer makes that droning noise, the car engine has stopped emitting the scent of burning rubber. I’ve begun to wonder, however: am I lucky to be able to experience this sense of newness in the face of small changes? Or does it simply mean I have a short memory, or perhaps even ADD or the early stages of Alzheimer’s? Will a used car salesman one day be able to convince me that the jalopy he’s selling me is that year’s model?

Well said: Sure, we’ve all heard versions of this idea before, but sweet trini puts it very nicely today:

Hear, hear.