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Judging from the responses and traffic from those who follow this website via our email list, Facebook postings or frequent checking of the front page, this issue has a more popular than usual nature section. Most of the reason for that is John Douglas's Lazy Man's Farm story. For many of our readers in Panama, in this economy it becomes important to get a good crop out of the garden and growing conditions here are not the same as they knew in the temperate zones where they used to plant their vegetables.

Also in the nature section, for the first time in a long time I cover an event at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where I caught part of a conference on reforestation using native tree species, a talk on Mayan land management practices. For more than one year I have found myself in the Interior on most Tuesday afternoons, which gets in the way of covering the weekly science lectures. That's something I expect to change shortly.

Also covering an event at the Smithsonian this time, Katie Zien went to Jorge Ventocillas's talk on art and research with Kuna children.

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The Panama Jazz Festival is over, but Carnival will be here shortly and this is the season when musicians have an easier time finding work. Shorty and Slim, above, will be playing at least one Carnival gig, even if we don't yet know such simple things as where Panama City's celebrations will be held or whether a leak of Penonome's sewage system into the Zarati River will stop that town's Water Carnival.

We do know, however, that the Antillean Fair will be held as usual on Carnival Saturday and Sunday on the Afro-Antillean Museum grounds, and that because West Indian culture has become such an integral part of life in Panama the event is going to attract all sorts of Panamanians and foreigners of all colors and ethnic backgrounds. It always does.

An older generation's expression of the integration of West Indian culture into Panamanian culture was the music of the combos nacionales of the 1960s and 1970s, many of whose musicians are still to be heard in Panama today, and others of whom carry on the culture in the Afro-Panamanian diaspora. (The Mighty Sparrow, is, of course, from Trinidad rather than Panama, even if he is an important part of our West Indian culture for having lost a calypso competition to Lord Cobra here.) An example of Panama's combos nacionales of yesteryear is Los Silvertones:


And then there's a younger Afro-Antillean generation that's deeply affected by reggae and hip hop. A few of them even make music that the older generations can stand:


Ah, but to many Panamanians, the cumbia and tamborito genres coming out of the central provinces is and always will be "the real thing," or as it is put here, "la música típica." Carnival's a good time for that, too. Samy and Sandra Sandoval are never out of work this time of the year unless they want to be:

Finally, to close out this musically oriented front page let me direct you to an entirely music-oriented video edition of our Cool Internet sites, remind you that we add content to this website nearly every day and let you know that, for all the wealth of jazz coverage we have in our culture section, there's one more important Panama Jazz Festival story to come, the one with not too many photos and a bit more writing, about the educational mission that's the backbone of these annual events. Look for it and other additions in the list of recently added stories near the top of this page.