I write today from the Business Center of the Sheraton Internacional Hotel in Iguazú, Argentina. The resort is dropped smack in the middle of a rainforested national park. To the sights, then:
The keyboard in front of me is set up for Spanish speakers, and aside from its maddeningly misplaced punctuation keys, it diverges from the QWERTY configuration in its introduction of a twenty-seventh letter. The "ñ" key is located at the end of the second row, pushing the ENTER/RETURN key one notch further to the right than is customary on the Anglo models. I suspect that repeated blogging from here will make the fifth finger of my right hand double-jointed. Under Lamarck's [rejected] model of evolution my children would be born with this mutation, handicapping them on Anglo keyboards in an increasingly computrocentric world economy and ultimately requiring Phutatorius
et al. to lift roots and move to South America. And while I admire the beef intake down here — ¡the average Argentinian consumes 133 lbs. per year! — I am troubled by the dearth of Macintosh terminals in the various Business Centers I have visited to date.
So thank God for Darwin, then.
Did I say they have a collection of gigantic
waterfalls here?
