Sometimes the New York Times’ London correspondent Sarah Lyall really makes me homesick. Here’s an excerpt from her latest report on the much-maligned town of Slough:

The town is close to London, and has a $5 billion economy, one of Europe’s largest industrial parks and companies like Black & Decker, Amazon and Computer Associates. Because it is such a magnet for business, “people see it as a symbol for modern life” — one conveniently located next to three major highways, said Rob Anderson, a borough council member.

“We don’t do wisteria around the door and quaint little cottages,” he said. “If you want to go on holiday, go to Windsor. If you want to make money, come to Slough.”

The local government recently announced plans to spend $800 million to transform Slough’s tired downtown in the next decade. That could not come soon enough for 69-year-old Jim Hall, sipping a pint of lager in the March drizzle outside the Moon and Spoon pub, at a busy intersection in the center of town.

“It’s an ugly place, isn’t it?” he said, speaking above the din of the traffic and gesturing down the street, with its preponderance of concrete buildings. In the distance loomed the Brunel bus station and parking garage, Slough’s most prominent landmark.

Mr. Hall said that people in Slough are no more unhappy than people elsewhere in Britain. “I think people like to moan sometimes for the sake of it,” he said. “I don’t know why they bother, sometimes — nobody listens.”

Emma Cornelius, 36, who works for an American communications company in Slough, said that geographic satisfaction was all relative.

“If you had a choice of Slough or anywhere else in the area, Slough would be the last town you’d come to,” she said. “But compared to Watford, it’s fabulous.”

Or, as 16-year-old Diane Cotterell said: “It’s not the worst place in Britain; there are worse places, like Liverpool.”

Darren Hipkin, 30, a co-worker of Ms. Cornelius, said that while Slough’s downtown was slightly downtrodden, the atmosphere hardly joyous, its residents suffered merely from the things that other Britons did — “the economy, the taxes, this and that, you seem to be earning less and spending more.”

Actually, given the realities of the world, he said, he sometimes found himself perplexed, even annoyed, by the relentless enthusiasm of his American colleagues. “They get on the phone and say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ ” he said, putting on a peppy voice. “You think, ‘Hang on, it’s Monday morning — I just got up.’ ”

Related:
A Town Trying Not to Live Up to Its Name (NYT)
Little Britain (EiNY)

During our week in Costa Rica we saw capuchin monkeys every day and howler monkeys a couple of times, but we only saw this fellow, a spider monkey, once.

This picture was taken during a guided tour of Curu, a nature reserve about an hour’s drive from Montezuma on the Nicoya Peninsula. Spider monkeys are almost extinct in this part of Costa Rica, and Curu runs a program to reintroduce rescued and abandoned monkeys back into the wild. (I managed to get so close to this guy because he used to be someone’s pet. I hope to have a video up shortly.)

Curu is a great place to visit. The reserve is dedicated to rescuing and protecting threatened species such as Scarlet McCaws and crocodiles. And it’s packed with a variety of animals, including capuchin and howler mokeys, agoutis, ocelots, white-tailed deer and margays. It’s also full of birds, from hawks to hummingbirds, and a wide range of butterflies, including the spectacular morpho.

According to our guide, Curu was established by a European immigrant, Frederico Schutt, who bought the seventy hectares of land in the 1930′s for $5. His very elderly wife, Julietta, still lives in a house on the property with no electricity or running water. During our visit we passed one of her sons driving a herd of cattle through the woods on horseback. Quite another world from New York. What I wouldn’t give for an editor to send me back to write a feature about the place.

Related:
Howlers (EiNY)
Montezuma Holiday (EiNY)
The View From My Hammock (EiNY)
Costa Rica Wildlife (EiNY)

Even the New York Post was smitten:

OBAMA’S RACIAL CANDOR

March 19, 2008 — Sen. Barack Obama went before the nation yesterday and delivered a refreshingly candid analysis of the impact of race in American life.

Whether the address resolves the questions many have about his relationship with his racially extreme former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, is another matter.

Only time will tell.

But the speech was well-crafted and nuanced, recognizing the legacy of racism and discrimination in the nation while letting no one off the hook.

Obama condemned Rev. Wright’s toxic rhetoric – that God should not “bless America, but rather “damn America,” that 9/11 was a case of “America’s chickens coming home to roost” and that America has “supported state terrorism against Palestinians” – but attempted to place the slurs in a broader generational context.

“For the men and women of Rev. Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years . . . At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings,” he said.

But he didn’t excuse black anger: “All too often . . . it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change.”

Obama said that he sees the flaw in Wright’s worldview, which preaches self-help on the one hand while screaming about racism on the other: “What my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

“The profound mistake of Rev. Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know – what we have seen – is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation,” Obama said.

This is an important truth – of particular relevance to racial grievance-mongers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton – and it speaks to Obama’s own remarkable rise to political prominence.

This he also spoke to yesterday: “I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible.”

That is to say, if America is as bad as Rev. Wright would have it, the Barack Obama phenomenon would not remotely have been possible.

The senator did well to say so.

(MSNBC video via Clive Davis.)

As promised.

Related:
Montezuma Holiday (EiNY)
The View From My Hammock (EiNY)
Costa Rica Wildlife (EiNY)

Macboy’s Lowercase L blog has been cooking up a storm over the past year with mentions in newspapers, magazines, websites and submissions from around the world. I think this could be one of his best yet—the tombstone of the first person to die during development of nuclear weapons for the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oh, the indignity of it all. Killed by an experiment gone awry. Misidentified for perpetuity by a sloppy tombstone engraver.

Related:
Lowercase L (Blogger)
Harry K. Daghlian Jr (Wiki)