I don’t follow American football much these days. Eight years after I left the U.S. those funny helmets, walking meaty chemistry experiments, not to mention a stupid plot line, all make me want to laugh. I find it hard to care anymore.

Now it’s in the news that some guy I’ve never heard of named Michael Vick has been dogfighting in his spare time. He is being indicted and faces a prison term.

The question I want to ask is: are you for fucking real?

You’re going to put a human being in jail, destroy his career, destroy his LIFE because he caused injury and death to DOGS?

If I cut a tree down you gonna throw me in prison too?

Let’s get something straight here, folks. Animals ARE NOT PEOPLE. They are ANIMALS. Senators in the god-for-fucking-sake U.S. Senate are on the floor denouncing this “barbaric practice”. Well guess what people, LIFE is a barbaric practice. Nothing lives unless something else dies, and that includes you and me. We kill animals and plants because they are interesting and tasty and edible and maybe sometimes just for the fun of it.

Guys: get your heads out of your fucking asses, bitch slap your pushy girlfriend/wife/mother/all of the above and tell them this:

Michael Vick did nothing wrong. Leave the man alone. Hell, let’s televise some of this here dog-fighting. It can’t be any more savage, brutal or boring than watching him play football.

Today’s word for the day is “zancudo.”

Zancudo is the Spanish word for the stripey tiger mosquito, the one that carries dengue. The news today here in Cali is that the dengue previously confined to the fringes of the metropolitian area is now making serious inroads into the city itself. The health department has trucks spraying in the streets against zancudos and is conducting house-to-house inspections.

Will it make any difference? Some, probably. It’s another reminder, though, that Cali sits lower in the mountains than Medellín and Bogotá, which are spared at least this particular plague.

Here’s a travel trip for adventurers in Panama and Colombia. According to a British traveller I met on the street here in Cali the other day, firehouses in these two countries will happily give you a free bed and a hot meal if you’re an overland walker or biker.

Backpackers up and down the Gringo Trail in South America have invariably heard of, if not read, Rusty Young’s Marching Powder. It’s the story of his friendship with a British inmate in Bolivia’s San Pedro Prison, where inmates buy their cells, and some of the best cocaine in the country is produced.

I recently came across a yellow, crumbling paperback copy of Charles Nicholl’s The Fruit Palace. It makes Rusty’s Big Adventure seem tame by comparison. With the spirit of gonzo in his blood and copious amounts of cocaine up his nose, Mr. Nicholl goes to Colombia to write The Great Cocaine Story.

The time is the early 80s, and cocaine has wrapped its champagne tendrils around the brain stems of New York and London’s finest, and Nicholl’s publisher wants the scoop. The lengths he goes to and the risks he takes are astonishing — talking his way into a meat-packing plant in Bogota he suspects is a front for cocaine trafficking, bussing into the Chocó and then boating downriver to Buanaventura on the Pacific Ocean (a very dangerous thing to do, even now), and ultimately getting involved in smuggling a briefcase of 100% pure cocaine out of Santa Marta.

The Fruit Palace appears to be out print. No matter. It received many printings during the 80s and 90s and, though never quite a bestseller, there’s plenty of used copies floating around out there. It is essential reading for anyone interested in South America.