tech4help – Ed Warner

Argentines on the River

Obviously along in years and sitting in forbidden territory with wine and book, I was a prime target for the coronavirus police. Two patrol cars pulled up by the Masa and More Restaurant, peered through the glass window, entered and said “No sitting here.” That was me, though I was six yards from the nearest person. What’s more, they commanded the staff to bunch up all the chairs so that no one else will be tempted to sit. I remonstrated but to no avail Off they went probably to spell out the rules for other struggling small businesses along the scenic Ft. Lauderdale river.

Coronavirus Hits Drug Cartels

There is one benefit – a silver lining – to the coronavirus epidemic. The super rich, wildly violent Mexican dug cartels are also struck. Production is way down, supply chains are broken and prices for drugs have risen 400 per cent. The cartels’ multi-billion dollar business in the U.S. is in jeopardy.

Beauty of the Plague

For ten days in 1820 the English poet John Keats was forced to remain at sea in the bay of Naples. It couldn’t have been a nicer place to be quarantined from the typhus – the epidemic of the time – that was ravaging Italy. “One of the most sublime locations in the world,” writes Frances Mayes in the New York Times in an appreciation of the poet whose work was a culmination of the romantic era that found beauty in almost everything.

The Face That Stops

Passersby on busy, bustling Las Olas Blvd in Ft, Lauderdale, Florida, are suddenly stopped by a poignant, strikingly beautiful face in a window. It seems to say look at me and forget your cares. That is its point, says artist Jamali. “It’s the essence of woman.”

Prison with a View

Amid the soaring luxury high rises in sunny Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, stands a great hulk of a building that seems out of place. It definitely is. It’s the county jail with room for 1500 prisoners with very narrow windows to keep them from falling or jumping out. The exterior is concrete flat with nothing to catch the eye. In the pardonably outraged words of Sun Sentinel reporter Steve Bouquet, it’s “a soulless monstrosity incongruously plopped down there, of all places, with sleek yachts cruising by.”

A Tear for an Artist

Isabel Cabanillas de la Torre, an artist in the Mexican border city Juarez, was fascinated with eyes. She liked to paint them. In one self-portrait, a tear dropped from an eye.

The Book Drug Cartels Hate

Jeanine Cummins could not have asked for greater accolades for her new novel, “American Dirt,” about a mother fleeing with her child in Mexico after a drug cartel has killed her journalist husband and fifteen others in a not untypical massacre. “Marvelous,” “masterful,” “dazzling,””riveting,” “a Grapes of Wrath for our times,” referring to John Steinbeck’s famed novel of American migrants heading west in the Great Depression.