The Costa Rican 2,000-Colones Note Has a Hammerhead Shark and a Dolphin On It

photo by Naomi
Costa Rica
2008 September

Día de la Independencia

Happy Costa Rican Independence Day.

Books

Today at 7th Street Books in central San Jose, I traded a copy of The Steppe and a copy of The Shadow of the Wind, an uninteresting Spanish novel, for some books that I have been planning to read: Greene’s Our Man in Havana, a Conrad volume that includes The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and a novel that I discovered in the bookstore and that I am kind of excited over: Briefing For a Descent Into Hell by Doris Lessing. Lessing, a British writer, is familiar to me for some reason, but the cover copy sold me: “Doris Lessing’s brilliant exploration of a mind beyond madness. . . We are inside the mind of Professor Charles Watkins. He is doomed to spin endlessly on a raft in the currents of the Atlantic. He makes a landfall on a tropical shore. He discovers a ruined stone city, participates, moon-dazed, in bloody rituals in the paradisal forest, is caught in the swirling, savage war of the Rat-dogs, is borne on the back of the lordly White Bird across the sea of the dead. Charles Watkins is having a mental breakdown. Or is he?” And the cover art features undulating bare-breasted women.

The Last Ten Years

On 1998 August 5, I began recording where I spend each night. Of the 3,655 nights from 1998 August 5 to 2008 August 5, the top twenty locales account for 3,475 nights:

1. Mongolia ... 1,184
2. U.S.A., California ... 675
3. U.S.A., North Dakota ... 467
4. U.S.A., Minnesota ... 325
5. Russia ... 182
6. U.S.A., Louisiana ... 112
7. U.S.A., Colorado ... 104
8. U.S.A., Arizona ... 75
9. Canada ... 53
10. Costa Rica ... 43
11. Mexico ... 38
12. U.S.A., Wisconsin ... 36
13. U.S.A., Washington ... 31
14. France ... 29
15. U.K., Bermuda ... 28
16. Australia ... 22
17. Panama ... 20
18. Israel ... 19
19. Pacific Ocean ... 17
20. Guatemala ... 15

Treasure of Khan

"The action, and there's plenty of it, ranges from Siberia's Lake Baikal and the wilds of Mongolia to the Hawaiian islands. The treasure is that of Genghis and Kublai Khan, the great Mongolian conqueror and his grandson. The villain is a modern-day Mongol with dreams of restoring national power and pride."
-Publishers Weekly

A couple years ago in Costa Rica, an archaeologist friend told me about the adventure novels of Clive Cussler, which kind of incorporate maritime archaeology somewhat. He was reading one of them--I think it had to do with the Aztec--and he offered it to me when he was finished. I opted for Under the Volcano.

Last weekend at the ranch, we watched the mighty crap-bomb that is Sahara, based ("loosely," allegedly) on one of Cussler's novels. The pirate Chinese DVD crashed before the end of the movie, and we cheered.

Today, while researching a dead poet guy, I got into one of those spiraling click-chains that somehow led to Cussler. So, I discovered that his new novel has a Mongolian flavor. And is being released next month.

"When Dirk Pitt is nearly killed rescuing an oil survey team from a freak wave on Russia's Lake Baikal, it appears a simple act of nature. When the survey team is abducted and Pitt's research vessel nearly sunk, however, it's obvious there's something more sinister involved. All trails lead to Mongolia, and a mysterious mogul who is conducting covert deals for supplying oil to the Chinese while wreaking havoc on global oil markets utilizing a secret technology. The Mongolian harbors a dream of restoring the conquests of his ancestors, and holds a dark secret about Genghis Khan that just might give him the wealth and power to make that dream come true."
-Amazon.com