So That's How Those Plants Get So Green / Starbucks Up, Starbucks Down / Metropolis in Argentina?

This man appears to be American; the Starbucks, however, is in Argentina (Notice the "Please use exact change/We have no coins" sign?)

Just when a boy starts to get tired of the campo striking, Cristina screaming, no one listening, and smoke wafting in from the north--the apocolypse as farce--the director of the Jardín Botánico, Carlos Cosentino, manages to get himself fired when it comes to light that some of his employees have been leasing out the botanical garden for photo shoots (400 pesos), renting park benches (two for the low price of 100 pesos) and, according to two former gardeners, selling burial plots inside the park. At least they're using natural fertilizer. I still can't get used to the "Proud Users of Roundup Ready Seeds" signs on the road to Córdoba.

Talking of corpses (not to mention ham-handed transitions), Starbucks started to look a bit sick around the gills on Tuesday, when the hawker of burnt-coffee-by-the-vat (sorry Starbucks lovers, sorry Cintra) announced that it was closing 600 stores in the U.S. Ever retro-fashion-forward Buenos Aires (Mullets? Check. Repetitive labor strife? Check.), however, recently was colonized by its first Starbucks, when the Seattle death star, via a Mexican licensee, opened a store in Alto Palermo. To fit with local mores, it will offer a "frappuccino" of dulce de leche and a "mate latte" of mate cocido with milk, not to mention glacially slow table service.

Talking of corpses (as we do around here), three lost reels of "Metropolis", the 1927 futurist dystopian masterpiece made by the now-dead genius Fritz Lang, were found in the archives of the Buenos Aires Museo de Cine. Originally brought over by the brilliantly named film distributor Adolfo Z. Wilson, the German film apparently spent much of the last eight decades hiding out with its fellow German immigrants, under an assumed name, in a small village outside Bariloche.