Tacos Made of Sand

Our pursuit of filthy lucre continues today, so if you're looking for cringe-worthy entertainment you'll just have to watch this instructional video from our favorite San Miguel language school.  Trust us, we're leaving you in good hands.

Travel Day

The Man snapped his fingers, so we're scurrying back to El Norte to do his bidding.  We're not sure why the former mayor of Querétaro is leaving the country on our flight, but hopefully the satchels full of gold bars and $100 bills won't weight the plane down too much.

We're hoping your enjoyment of this post is enhanced by the fact that we're sitting next to Hizzoner in the departure lounge while we're posting this.

Output could be sparse for the rest of the week.  Go read a book or something.

"Are There No Prisons?"

A couple of Querétaro's child laborers junior entrepreneurs celebrating el Día de Dickens in the Centro.  Watch out for that car, kiddo!

The Ghost of Urchins Future

Día de Dickens continues here with a glimpse of our favorite street urchin, seen here during the Dickens Sesqui-bicentennial in the year 2062.

Mediocre Expectations

In honor of the Dickens Bicentennial, the students of Querétaro's Charles Dickens school dance the Cha-Cha Slide.  We have no idea at all what Dickens would have made of this.  



"We gonna git funky!" indeed.

Chuck D

Not many people realize that Charles Dickens was an early member of the Burro Hall editorial advisory board, serving two two-year terms in the mid-1860s, when this blog was just a one-page broadsheet. Today, we join the rest of the world - basically everyone but Dickens himself, who's been dead for 141 years - in saluting his 200th birthday. We last wrote about the great man over five years ago, when we were giddy to discover that the author of Oliver Twist has an elementary school named for him in Querétaro. In the years since, we've learned that it's actually a very good school, and in fact one of our smartest friends is a graduate of it. But it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago that we actually saw it for the first time sitting close to the eight-lane highway into the centro.

Maybe it's nice and cozy on the inside, but from out here it looks positively... oh, what's the word we're looking for?

Post-Game Wrap Up

The Super Bowl is actually quite popular in Mexico.  We assumed this was just because they were confused by the word "football" into thinking it was a soccer game, but in fact, at the bar we went to to watch it (Logan's Beer House - another new establishment touting a nuevo concepto, this new concept being the serving of beer and food in a bar-like setting, complete with televised sports), the crowd seemed to be evenly divided between genuine Pats fans and genuine Giants fans (though apparently the only non-Steelers football gear for sale in Mexico is Tom Brady's #12 shirt).

But while the game is a big deal, the actual broadcast isn't an event the way it is in the US.  By one friend's count, his cable package had the game playing on five different channels.  Where we were, it was ESPN en Español, led by the crack broadcast crew you see in the photo above.  Imagine your local public access cable station being sent to cover the Super Bowl with what appeared to be no advance warning, and you've got the feel of how this thing went off.   We'd bet with some degree of confidence that they weren't even in Indianapolis. 

Probably the biggest loss, though, is the commercials.  All those $2 million-a-minute ads don't get shown outside the US.  Here in Mexico, one of the Super Bowl's biggest sponsors is this cheapjack piece of shit weight-loss quackery called Bio Shaker.  Usually, when you see an ad like this, it's 3AM and you've fallen asleep with the TV on.



 Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana lends his image, if not his voice, to this ad for Modelo beer:



Meanwhile, Mexican erectile dysfunction ads leave way too little to the imagination for our tastes.



Anyway, if we could give some advice to our friends at Logan's ahead of next year's Super Bowl: you might consider having more than four bottles of Sam Adams in stock if the team from Boston is playing again. 

Sh*t My Dad Says

Sábado Gigante

*  Face it, Mexico's something of an attention-whore. So we were pretty surprised that none of the national punditocracy have crowed about NASA's recently-released high-resolution photo of the Earth, which puts Mexico basically at the center of the world.  In fact, of you draw a big X on the planet, the lines intersect over the city of Querétaro.  Of course, this merely confirms something we've known for a long time: the US government has a spy satellite locked in geosynchronous orbit directly over Burro Hall Enterprises World Headquarters.  Naked rooftop sunbathing will commence as soon as this unseasonable rain comes to an end. 

* New York Magazine is working our side of the street now. (Here, too.)

* Some good, practical advice for not getting your head sliced off in Mexico. It's surprisingly easy!

* Of course, you may want to check out Diego Valle's fabulous interactive drug war map, just in case. 

* Slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry's family sues the ATF for $25 million, to the rapturous applause of right wingers.  So much for the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.

* Mexican smugglers try the old "Fake UN Diplomatic Pouch" trick to avoid customs inspections.  Hilarity ensues when 30 pounds of coke actually gets delivered to UN.

* PAN Presidential Candidate Ernesto Cordero's website is inaccessible today because of inter-party elections, so you can't play the internactive game in which he chases and captures Chapo Guzmán, but you can watch someone else play it here.

* Casa Dorantes Cervera wines from Querétaro. They're remarkably un-terrible.

* Everything you need to know about making tamales. 

* Quote of the Week, from the Failed State of Arizona:

“I do feel this opening a box of Pandora, and we don’t know where it’s going to lead,” said Mayor Juan Carlos Escamilla, who filed a legal challenge of Mrs. Cabrera’s English ability.

* Regular readers know what a mendacious idiot FSoAZ governess Jan Brewer is (along with large swathes of the citizenry), but in case you're just tuning in...

* 500 Year of Chicano History in Pictures is on Tuscon's book-burning list.  Publishers are offering it free to Tuscon students and 50% off for all FSoAZ residents.  We don't mind paying full-price.  White man's burden, etc. 

* Mitt Romney: The Juan Percent.

* Great photo of the border.

* Two more weeks til the Querétaro Perro-Qron, which we imagine is the Worst Spanish Pun for "Dog/Querétaro/Marathon" Ever.  But so if we were feeling especially sadistic, we could drag the perro through the streets for a couple of kilometers.  And in completely related news:  pet obesity reaches "epidemic" proportions.

* The state of Querétaro, population 1.8 million, has precisely 1,333 people in rehab.   Like many local news stories here, there is absolutely no context given for this, but we thought you'd like to know.

* A proposed state law would automatically award shared custody to divorced parents, regardless of how much of an evil harpy one parent is.  Still, we think it's a good idea.

* The Municipal Inspectors Abusing Indigenous Peddlers investigation keeps expanding.

* We don't read "The News" very often, but still want to give props to its awesome online print edition. It still amazes us that 900% of online newspapers don't do this (*cough*newyorktimes*cough!)

* If you're not listening to friend-o'-the-blog Kent Garrett's weekly Word Up radio program, currently broadcasting from San Cristobal de las Casas, you're fucking up, son.  Click the damn link.

* Mexicans are unimpressed with your so-called "Super" Bowl.

Travel Day

More cheap filler courtesy of the perro.

Table for One

Apologies again for the minimal posting.  None of the Mexican-American kids we spent the day with knew the historical significance of today, so we thought we'd repost this item from a few years ago.  Not that they'll read it of course, because they're busy with homework.  You, on the other hand...

Monday, February 02, 2009
A Simple Twist of Date

Enjoying the holiday? No? You must not live in Mexico! As always, to figure out what the holiday is, we pull out the city map - Cinco de Mayo St, no; September 16 St, no; November 20 Ave, no; 1857 Blvd, no...wait, February 5th Ave - close enough! So today is the day we celebrate the Constitution of 1917, written right here in Querétaro's Teatro de la Republica. But since, like the US, Mexico often moves its holidays around to form three-day weekends, today the entire country is taking a day of celebration and rest on February 2, the 161st anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and ceded about half the country's territory to the US. (This sort of thing is not uncommon: Passover often falls on April 20, for instance, forcing Jews to hold the Seder on Hitler's birthday.)

That it's also Groundhog Day is appropriate, since a huge chunk of the populace wakes up every morning still seething about this.

A couple of years ago, a friend of ours came for a visit and asked if we could take him to see the table where the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. [The treaty was signed in - duh! - Guadalupe Hidalgo, but after it was ratified by the US and Mexican Congresses, the president affixed his signature in Querétaro, where the government had moved after Mexico City fell to US troops.] We chuckled knowingly, made a mental note to find to what the hell the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was, and vowed not to invite any more university history professors to visit without doing our homework first. Then within 24 hours we came down with typhoid fever and ruined everybody's vacation. We never thought of the treaty or the table again until it just suddenly popped into our heads about a year ago.

Since then, we've been on a minor quest to find the thing, stymied at every turn by what we took to be official stonewalling. We were even going to write a humorous story about the way the city was hiding this shameful piece of office furniture. Of course, what was really happening was - because we're idiots - we'd been inquiring about the "treatment of Hidalgo." A typical interaction would go like this:

"Do you know where I can find the table where Hidalgo received his treatment?"

"Um...treatment by whom?"

"The United States, of course."

"I don't know what you mean. The United States had nothing to do with Hidalgo."

"Ha! Denial, my friend...no es solamente un rio en Egipto!"

"¿Qué?"

This went on for some time until we started reading a book called Querétaro in the War with the US (1846-1848) (it's a thin book, Querétaro's contribution being primarily moral support and cannon fodder), learned the correct word for "treaty," and realized that the weird object on the front cover was in fact the table we'd been searching for. Bringing the book to the tourist office here, we asked where we might find this object. It's actually displayed very prominently in the Regional Museum in the center of town, the man told us, before lowering his eyes, shaking his head, and telling us the "incredibly sad story" of the US invasion and the loss of over half a million square miles of territory. "But," he said, smiling, "we're starting to take it back!" It was not entirely clear that he was kidding.

Anyway, the branch of the museum that houses the table is (we think rather suspiciously) closed for renovations, so you'll have to settle for a picture of the picture on the front of the book for now.

The Jefferson Institute, Querétaro Branch Office

There's probably an excellent explanation for this.

We'll be off molding young minds all day. Treat yourself to some of the links on the right - they're there for a reason, you know.

People Are Talking - Apparently Very Loudly

El Universal had a piece last week about the "nightmare" of noise generated by Mexico City's street musicians - when tend not to be lone buskers with an acoustic guitar but, rather, electrically amplified five-piece ensembles complete with a rhythm section. (Video here.)  Apparently, some people are now concerned that noise levels of 102 decibels or higher may have deleterious effects not just on people's mental health, but their physical health as well.  We kind of chuckled a bit because, you know, no shit, Sherlock, but then we felt bad because we realized that, if our theory about Mexican's lacking a functioning inner ear apparatus is true, then the people in the article had suffered some sort of birth defect, and there's nothing funny about that.

But then yesterday we saw that a government commission in Querétaro is suggesting that "noisy... disrespectful neighbors" could be fined in civil proceedings.  What the hell is going on here?  First the Burro Hall Child Protection Act of 2012, and now a kangaroo court through which to punish people making noise at obscene hours?  Is this town making fun of us?  Or are they finally realizing we have a point?  What's next - pan de muertos all year round? Streamlined visa renewals?  Don't mock us, Querétaro...

Awkwardly-Named Local Business of the Month

"The Taliban" scrap yard, San Miguel.

"We pick up from your home!" Which is a nice touch.

Hey, Everyone! It's a Cute Doggie!

We'll be in El Norte the rest of the week working for The Man. Mostly, we're doing it for the children, but also because he agreed to our extortionate day rate, which we're pretty sure he misheard and will become a serious issue once we start invoicing. Anyway, it turns out working for a living is somewhat time consuming, so this site will be even heavier on meaningless filler over the next few days than it usually is. But now with 200% more perro!

The Burro Hall Child Protection Act of 2012

Hero: It's the same word in English and Spanish

A big shout-out to an eagle-eyed (yet Anonymous - what is it with you people?) commenter for bringing to our attention The Most Important Legislative Initiative Of Our Age:

Querétaro state legislator José Luis Aguilera Rico [right] has introduced a bill to make it a punishable offense for drivers to transport a child under the age of five without a child car seat.

Aguilera said that traffic accidents are the principal cause of death in four-year-olds; the second cause of death in two-year-olds; and fourth in one-year-olds, in large part because of the lack of preventative safety measure [such as car seats].

The legislator form the Movimiento Ciudadano party said that with a change to Article 74 of the state transit law, it would be possible to punish drivers who don't secure small children in a car seat.

We of course intend to put the full weight of this blog, as well as the ample material in our archives, behind the bill - which, for the sake of simplicity we're renaming the Burro Hall Child Protection Act of 2012.  You can send Sr. Aguilera a note of support here. We'll be assigning an intern to cover this story full-time, of course.

Blessed Are The Profit-Makers

Just two months to go before Pope Force One touches down in León, and all of Mexico is consumed by Papal Fever! Ha - just kidding. No one really seems to give a shit. But since no one's figured out a polite way to ask His Popeliness to stay home, the nation's really just trying to make the best of it. And really, seeing a pope in person isn't the worst way to spend an afternoon - hell, even we did it once.

Of course, to see the pope in person you need a ticket - a crowd-control measure so commonsensical, we're astonished Mexico thought of it.  But because the pope's whole schtick is the spiritual, not the material world, no one was gonna make a buck off this.  Within a week of the announcement of the visit, the Archibishop of Guanajuato was adamant: "Tickets for the papal mass are free." A week later, the governor weighed in: "Tickets will not be sold for the papal visit."

But then, wouldn't ya know it, a couple days later the head of the Episcopal Conference of Mexico is in the paper complaining of the lack of money for the papal tour. Apparently, these things are really expensive, and the guy with the golden-threaded vestments doesn't pick up the tab.

Which brings us to the latest headline: "Mayor of León plans to charge to see Benedict XVI."  So forget about that whole "ticker are free" thing.

Of course, this is Mexico, where everything is for sale, whether the seller has any right to sell it or not, so we can look forward to a vigorous trade in scalped pope tickets.  Oh, come on, you say.  The papal visit will be absolutely crawling with security.  No one will be able to scalp tickets out on the street.  For this, we would refer you to last week's home game for the Querétaro White Cocks.  You don't need to understand Spanish to get what's going on.



The only thing we would add is that, unlike in Guanjuato, Querétaro's police are generally considered among the least corrupt in the country. So the pope's visit has become an occasion for public officials of all stripes to make a quick buck. No wonder Querétaro was fighting so hard to host this thing. Monday Update: The Papal Nuncio in Mexico - obviously a regular reader of this blog - offers the following comment on the mayor's plan to charge admission to see the pope: "The fuck you are!" (We're paraphrasing, but he's not happy.)

How Do You Say "Fourth Amendment" in Mexican?

So, here's a thing that happened here.  Bunch of stoner-looking guys were walking down the street, clearly guilty of being slightly unkempt, and so a cop stops them, carries out a "routine inspection" and, wouldn't ya know it - weed!  And, because this was their lucky day, it happened right where all the local news photographers hang around waiting to stenographize politicians's utterances. Bummer, dudes!

 
Let's put aside for now their mistake in breaking Burro Hall's Golden Rule #1 For Living in Mexico: "Never ever be in possession of any drugs, ever - whatta you, fuckin' stupid? You see Midnight Express? Yeah, we know it's Turkey - don't be a smart-ass." Instead, we're curious about the "routine inspection" part. We've tried a couple of times to read the State Civil Code [pdf], but it turns out to be just as impenetrable as an American legal code, only in Spanish. So here's our question for locals, Mexicans or people who are simply smarter than us (that would be all of you who live east of the Sea of Cortes): cops can just stop you and go through your shit? Seriously - one of the hardest things for a foreigner here is figuring out what his rights are. Does the fact that a dude smells like patchouli constitute probable cause? Or can cops just make this stuff up?

[Clarification:  Despite the poor phrasing, we're asking about Mexicans' rights.  We assume foreigners' rights are whatever the police say they are at any given moment (hence, Golden Rule #1 above), but if we were going to act under the assumption that most cops don't actually know the law very well (this has been our experience whenever we've had a run-in), what's the actual law as regards unwarranted searches and seizures on the street?]

Mexicans: Doing the Jobs Mexicans Don't Want To Do

Everybody has his own way to relax, we suppose.

Sometimes it will be a body. Sometimes the decaying parts of a mutilated corpse, the fetus that nobody wanted, a lost pet, the remains of a collapsed home, an old sofa, pieces of an automobile, junk. Whatever Julio finds in his path under water, it's okay: just being there, in the serenity of the deep, is the only way he finds calm. Tranquillity. Paz.

Julio César Cú's job, basically, is to dive into Mexico City's sewerage pools and unclog shit from the pipes. And he loves his job! So quit friggin' whining about yours.

Dirty Tricks

As the GOP ties to wrangle away a share of the Hispanic vote in Florida this week, the Dems have apparently taken out Spanish-language attack ads reminding everyone what an asshole Nixon was:



(This joke brought to you by the Bush/Cheney 2000 Memorial Foundation.)

Turf & Surf

A couple of months ago a place calling itself the New York Steak House opened up a couple blocks from out offices.  Like just about every place in town that features a chef who actually attending cooking school, NYSH billed itself as a nuevo concepto in dining - and, like just about every place that does this, the "new concept" turned out to be "serving cooked meat and vegetables to people sitting at tables in exchange for money," which - and we don't mean to get all worldly on you - we've seen once or twice before.  They did try one newish thing, though, which was to have absolutely no customers ever, any time we thought about taking a client there.  So we never tried it and, without the awesome power of a positive review in Burro Hall, it's closed its doors.

But just a few doors away is the brand new Loto Sushi & Tea!  As you can see, it has the word "Sushi" right there in its name.  And it's advertising features a geisha chick chowing down on a couple of thick, juicy salmon nigiri.  And because it's Mexico and this is a frequent complaint of ours, you've probably already guessed that Loto Sushi & Tea's nuevo concepto in sushi is to not have any sushi or fish on its menu.

Be pedantic if you wish and argue that maki is sushi, and we'll counter that apple, cilantro, and breaded fried beef maki in no way falls under the conventional understanding of sushi.  (And fried shrimp is not fish.)  It pisses us off, because that hunk of raw salmon was the best-looking thing we've seen here in months. 

First Execution of the New Year

A decomposed corpse was just discovered in a shallow grave in Peñamiller, Querétaro.  Investigators say it was a man between the ages of 17 and 20.  The cause of death is at this moment unknown, and whoever the killers were, they didn't leave a note on the body.  The papers say he was a member of a gang called the "Prehispanicos," which we've never heard of.  We'll bring you more on this story as it develops, but first we're moving the women, children and domesticated animals to safety.

Searching for signs of foul play

Update: Our little joke was cute, if perhaps forced, but today's Diario de Querétaro wins the award for best unintentional satire:

" SWINE FLU KILLS 1"

El Grifter

Great catch from Señor Aguachile, regarding an angle from the Peña Nieto rally in Querétaro that apparently went unnoticed by the star-struck local press:

... close to 20 supporters of the candidate denounced that they had been robbed. ..... before entering the auditorium Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez, security personnel prevented them from entering with bulky backpacks or bags in which the victims kept wallets, clothes, keys and cell phones. But after the event, they approached the guards to have their belongings returned, but were told that there were no objects left to return.

The "PRI is Back!!" jokes write themselves.