I thought Muslin=scratchy sheets.

Oh, right, Muslims wear Muslin. OK, punch now.

So do she and Ronnie get their memories back in the afterwhatever? Or are they both still so demented they don't remember that once they Ran The World?

PS personally, as a fellow human, may she RIP. But may her and his policies Rest In Abandonment.

Dylan, this is outstanding. You certainly deserved a break, and a time of quiet searching and discovery, after your excellent TV show, including the world's best real-life rant of truth to power. Loved the book, and have been hoping you got back in the game somewhere. This funding, encouragement, drilling into this specific solution for reinventing a sustainable agriculture is a change, but is entirely in keeping with your passion to find real, attainable solutions. Best of luck!

Mea Culpa! Part 1 of our occasional posts on "Getting Health Insurance in Uruguay" was back in November, when we first did get it. I thought I had included a link, but oops!

Here it is http://www.uruguayexpat.info/2012/11/getting-heal... and I will also update the article with the link to the first one. Thanks!

Thanks, and sorry for the delay in reply, it's been a busy couple of weeks. No, I haven't gotten it yet, and no, I haven't actually operated from here, just monitored. My main rig is in my son's garage near San Francisco at present, waiting for my next run back to the States in a couple of months or so. 73!

Thanks for the read and reply. However I stand by my contention that the reputation of the plane among passengers, and thus its ability to generate ticket sales for the airlines, was a big part of its demise. And I'm not the only one drawing the Dreamliner/DC-10 parallel. In fact since I wrote this, several more blog pieces and articles by news organizations have been raising that exact same parallel. For example, BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-17/t....

As to the "same era as the 757/767" being untrue: Sorry, wrong. I don't write for the airliners.net obsessive airplane geek audience, so the launch dates are irrelevant factoids. The facts that matter are that the DC-10 series and its follow-on MD-11 have substantial overlap with the Boeing 767 of the time period when they were in heavy airline usage. That Bloomberg Businessweek article notes that the last DC-10 was delivered in 1989, which was well after the 767 series was in use. Sure, the DC-10 commercial launch was a decade and a year before the 767 (1971 vs 1982), but in the 1980s and 1990s both were in common use. Obviously, the 767 survived to this day as a major player for the airlines, in significant part for the reasons of efficiency you give and the later acceptance by airlines and passengers of a 2-engine overwater aircraft. But Douglas had plans for a twinjet variant of the DC-10 too. And the DC-10/MD-11 is larger than the 767; maybe not today, but likely for another several years, there would have been a place for it in passenger service.

The flying public did become aware of it from the various crashes, and did lose faith in it. I remember that well, I remember comments from corporate travel departments, I remember "chatter". The same image problem is happening with the 787. There are dozens if not more articles, analyses, commentaries all over the web, including some of archives from those pre-web days, on the reputational damage to the aircraft from its safety problems and high-profile events, including a high ratio of hull-loss incidents.

I liked the DC-10 as a passenger. I flew on many, from "back in the day" up through that late 2005 KLM flight I mentioned. First trip to Europe was in 1989 on a Lufthansa DC-10 using United miles. I had the fish :) Taken Eastern, Continental, American, and Delta DC-10s at various times. But it got a reputation, and the reputation hurt it probably as much as did its fuel efficiency. We Flyertalkers have been going gaga about the Dreamliner, posting about taking trips just to fly on it, tracking new 787 routes and speculating about others. The general public, however, is going to start thinking of it as the Deathliner (even though nobody has died, yet) or the Fireliner.

In general, when the public becomes aware of what kind of plane it is, it is rarely a good thing. DC-10. Q400 Dash-8. 787 Dreamliner. You really don't want the public to care about what you are flying, unless it already has a rock-solid reputation. Many airlines may find themselves all Jeff'd up by the degree of positive hype they spewed about the 787. They made sure people know it exists and know they have it in their fleets. Now, they will see backlash. And Boeing will see canceled or indefinitely delayed orders or swaps to 777 variants.

And they're gone! No more user ids. RSS syndication is available, and I'll turn on the email subscriptions soon. Thanks for reading!

Replying separately on the prescriptions issue:

You have read right. I get my blood pressure meds and Lisa Marie gets some of her meds just by walking into the local farmacia and asking for them. Many drugstores do have a discount of about 20% a "receta", a prescription from a doctor (a medico).

If your mutualista runs its own pharmacy, as does ours, you get prescriptions for a very low price there, however you have to have a receta from a medico in the practice. I should make an appointment at Española this coming week before I run out of my meds, so that I can get them for about U&S6 instead of the roughly USS16-23 I've been paying at the local pharmacies. Varies by brand and by store. Often there are more than one brand at any given store. It is not exactly "branded vs generic" but rather "competing laboratories".

I have not seen a doctor here so don't know. Lisa or I may have a link here somewhere from another blog where the blogger had a bad fall and she had to see a doctor without insurance. The whole thing was pretty cheap. I'll see if I can find that.

Hi again Alicia, thanks for the nice comments!

As far as I know, you could never do what is commonly called "direct deposit" in the USA into any Uruguayan bank. "Direct Deposit", of the sort that a US employer, Social Security, Pensions, PayPal, Elance, Google Wallet, and others do, is an Automated Clearing House (ACH) Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) wholly within the US Banking System via facilities put in place by the Federal Reserve.

What did happen is that certain of the private banks, like BBVA or IDB, had banks under their same parent companies in the United States, which of course do have regular USA routing numbers and checking account numbers to allow "Direct Deposit" of SSDI or Pension or whatever. Then those banks would do an automatic transfer within the bank holding company from the USA bank to the Uruguayan bank owned by the same company. I don't know if the transfer was really just an international bank wire but automatically initiated, or if it was some other form of subsidiary-to-subsidiary transfer. The end result was what many other expat forums wrongly call "Direct Deposit to a Uruguayan Bank."

Now, none of those banks will touch American Citizens, not even the USA-owned ones like Citibank, nor the foreign-owned but substantial retail banking presence like Spain's Santander Bank (Sovereign Bank all over New England, about to be rebranded with their global Santander Bank brand just like Santander here in Uruguay.) Discount Bank of Uruguay, a subsidiary of IDB Corporation of New York (Israel Discount Bank) was willing to do it for me in a few years when they heard the amount of what my 2015 age-62 early Social Sec would be (apparently misunderstanding the citizenship issue or thinking I was a non-USA-citizen with USA-legal-resident Social-Security-qualifying earnings.) But once the American Citizen issue pops up, you are out.

BROU does not do that kind of "quasi direct deposit". The strategy for using BROU is to keep a USA "bank" account - at a bank, a credit union, or some other non-banking bank-like account provider (like my Fidelity Investments MySmartCash Account, now called Cash Management Account). As long as that institution can issue an international bank wire, you are in business.... for a fee, of course. But you need to manage it, though you may be able to create standing instructions with your "bank" to send that wire every month. My credit union, BECU of WA State, has very low-priced wires at $15/wire, no upcharge for international. However they do go through intermediary banks (on inbound international they use evil Bankster Wells Fargo) which I am sure takes its cut, and probably on the outbound too.

BROU does offer dollar-denominated accounts, so you would probably want a dollar-account with them (U$S 300 min to open, U$S 500 min to avoid charges) for receipt of those funds. You can then transfer freely between the accounts, or use them separately for ATM withdrawals and debit Maestro (a variant of Debit Mastercard) purchases.

Hi Alicia and thank you for following us. Delighted you are here!

For your stay visit next march, I wouldn't worry much even if what you have is a Debit MasterCard. At any Banred machine, it will work just fine.

The Banred machines give a manual choice of specific networks after you put in your card and enter your PIN. I just choose "MasterCard International", and never have a problem. Regardless of whether your card and the cajero share another network, a Debit MasterCard is of course on the MasterCard network. So it just works.

The screen also gives options for Visa Uruguay, Visa International, MasterCard Uruguay, and some others. It's unusual, for me coming from the USA, to have to tell the machine what network to use, I am used to the machine just auto-magically knowing. As a software guy, I would expect that bank would have specified what we call use cases for all types of accepted cards, in decreasing order of the Bank's profitability (lowest interchange fees), but hey, what do I know. In a small coastal town in Thailand I can just pop in my Visa Debit from a tiny Boston, Mass area bank (Salem Five) and out pops my money in Thai Baht. But here in Uruguay there's a tiny more seducing of the machine needed!

Now in the RedBROU machines, the network run by BROU their banks and some standalone locations, I have rarely had a problem with using a Visa Debit. That Fidelity Visa Debit works fine. Well when the card isn't expired and the replacement isn't 4500 miles north of here in Gainesville, Florida, that is! We used to bank with a regional Colorado non-bankster bank, First Bank of Colorado, before we wound down our life there. Our Visa Debit cards worked just great here, in both networks. I also used without problem a PrePaid Visa Debit - the Kroger Supermarkets 1-2-3 Rewards Visa Debit offered through them by US Bank. Used that during the Feb-June period this year when I was back and forth; spend on the Visa and also used it to access cash, got a lot of free and discounted groceries at City Market and King Soopers! I called them, of course, about the travel notifications. But their card also worked great in BROU.

Well, as great as any card works in a BROU machine. BROU still randomly throws the big fat ZERO error if you are requesting more money than that ATM feels like giving out, regardless of network, regardless of card brand, regardless of your issuing bank's daily withdrawal limit, regardless of how much money you have in that account available. One of the reasons I prefer the Banred machines is that they are upfront about limits: Maximum withdrawal - $5000 Uruguayan Pesos or U$S 300 dollars. And yes, the machines work in either Spanish or English. Some also offer Portuguese due to our proximity to Brasil and being in the same trading/political integration bloc, the Mercosur (or Mercosul in Portuguese).

Yes, every ATM in Uruguay I have ever seen also gives out US dollars. Typically only in hundred-dollar bills, and thus only in increments of U$S 100. Due to the dollar being the other, unofficial but widely used currency here (all automobiles, major appliances, some minor appliances, all real estate for sale, and many rentals are priced in USD), people do use dollars for here for some things. Don't even think about using dollars at a small store or restaurant, but you could at the supermarket/hypermarkets. I did so at both Tienda Inglesa and Supermercado Disco this past month. One of those situations where I didn't want a second approx-4-dollar ATM fee but wanted more money value out than the 5000 pesos, so took out 300USD instead (not quite 6000 pesos currently - we have live exchange rates on the site sidebar.) Then went and did the shopping, got change back in pesos uruguayos.

So don't worry, but be aware of my reports on how the ATMs work and which ones to choose. Be sure to give a travel notice to your banking institution (bank, credit union, brokerage, prepaid card issuer) that you will be here. Don't forget to tell them your layover connecting airports too! I make sure they know I will be in Brasil or El Salvador, Peru or Panama depending on who I am flying. Don't want problems getting a quick lunch or doing some shopping, and want to be prepared for an unscheduled overnight delay at my cost. I rarely fly American, since they hate me, LOL. See my Fuzzywanderer.com blog for that - http://fuzzywanderer.com/2011/11/23/why-do-you-ha.... Thus I usually connect through one of the excellent, efficient hubs of Taca, Copa, LAN, or TAM and want to be prepared

Just be prepared that if you use your any-US-atm-card at a BROU ATM, the ATM will go out of service for 2 minutes afterwards, whether it gave you the money or goose eggs. Be ready with my anti-stinkeye phrase! (OK, the new ATM on the calle 11 side of the Atlántida BROU, but not the one on the front side of the same building, does not do this. But it's the only one I've found. Must be their "we should do a beta test of an ATM that actually works" ATM. But it still gives me gooseggs instead of money 75% of the time on MasterCard)