Return of the Prince

HuHo roars to a 46th-place finish in the slalom, and so ends Mexico's Winter Olympic odyssey. And before you go looking it up and see that there were only 48 finishers, keep in mind that there were 102 starters, so technically he finished in the top half. Visibility was terrible on the mountain today, but spending his childhood in the smog of Mexico City gave HuHo a natural advantage his competitors lacked. So, ¡muchos saludos, Principe! Hasta 2014!

It took us a while to get around to posting, but we're still well ahead of the Mexican Olympic Committee.

Sunday Morning 7:30AM Update: Fourteen hours have passed, and news of the performance of the country's lone Olympian still has not reached the MOC. We suppose it is the weekend.

Sunday Evening 7:30PM Update: Still no.

Monday Morning 7:30AM Update: Believe this?

Monday Afternoon, 4:00PM Update: Finally!

200 Until 200

We were strolling down Corregidora earlier, when the Official Eyesore of the 2010 Bicentennial informed us that the Bicentennial is just 200 days away. We're sure there'll be fireworks.

Getting Hammered

It was around 2:00AM when the noise jolted us out of of bed. Engines revving, music blaring, a dozen voices shouting and laughing right outside our window. Maybe the Temperance Union has a point, we thought. As we pulled the pillow up over our ears and began composing an angry letter to the editor, we could hear the sound of an acetylene torch, mingled with the rhythmic thumping of a sledge hammer. Now the kids have gone too far!

Of course it wasn't a gang of drunken sidewalk-shitters, but rather the electric company performing some non-emergency maintenance. At 2:00AM. With sledgehammers. The city has spent the past year or so trying to submerge the town's various phone/power/television lines underground, and is now tearing down the poles that used to carry them. We believe they did this using dynamite, to judge by the broken concrete and steel stumps left behind. Stump-removal is apparently done in the dead of night, and requires two large trucks and a crew of nine: one guy to work the torch, one to swing the hammer, six to stand around shouting and laughing, and one to make sure the banda-blaring radio in the truck is just slightly off the station, so that it's static-y and distorted.

Dropping all these wires underground certainly reduces the visual clutter here in the Centro. The problem, however, is that they haven't quite figured out what to do about the last several meters - the wires that actually lead into people's houses. So on the one had, we no longer have a big ugly telephone pole outside our offices. On the other hand, our phone wires - the wires that connect burrohall.com to Carlos Slim and thus to the outside world - now run from the sidewalk and are simply tacked on to the outside wall of the building. One good, sharp tug from a drunken teenager and we'd be unable to call 066 to complain about the 2:00AM sledgehammering. Which might all be part of the city's grand plan...

Maybe We Should Put the 'No Trespassing' Signs in Spanish

Big trouble outside Burro Hall World Headquarters yesterday as an overexcited autograph seeker got a little too close the perimeter and found himself tasered by security. Given the crowd that quickly formed, we had to lay out some serious US dollars to ensure that nobody saw nuthin'. Still, we thought you'd enjoy this image captured by our rooftop security camera. In the upper left corner you can see proof of one of the great truisms of life in Mexico:


Whenever a crowd of 50 or more people gathers, it will always include a guitar-playing cowboy. Really, it never fails.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

Looks like the Mayan Prophecy is true - though the world will actually end on April 3, 2010, rather than in 2012.

If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Retirement Community

Because kissing The Man's ass requires a hands-on, personal touch, we've been out of town for something like 26-and-a-half of the last 28 weeks. We usually don't like to leave the people of Querétaro unsupervised for that long, and with good reason. We've returned to a city bitterly divided. On one side, young libertines who want to go out and have fun, to shake the small-town dust off their shoes and dance the night away, to taste the forbidden flavors of life beyond the city limits. On the other, a band of conservative crusaders looking to preserve a traditional way of life, seeking to consign the rabble-rousers to eternal damnation. Readers of a certain age may recognize this as the plot line of "Footloose."

Querétaro's Centro Historico has a lot of problems, but as far as we've noticed, "surfeit of good bars and restaurants" isn't one of them. Judging from the profusion of orange "ENOUGH! NO more bars!" signs covering our neighborhood, this is not a universally held opinion. In our absence, the Women's Christian Temperance Union has apparently opened a local chapter, and has been leading midnight marches through the streets of the Centro, city inspectors in tow, to make sure local businesses have all their papers in order. This is in response to an epidemic of "loud music you can hear from the street, drunks wandering in and out and keying cars...vomit and defecation on the sidewalks."

We're all in favor of an Anti-Defecation League, of course, and would proudly endorse a "No Shitting on the Sidewalks!" campaign. But "No More Bars!" strikes us as seriously misguided. Aside from a few overly raucous places on Cinco de Mayo (which is Spanish for "Bourbon Street") we have no idea what part of the Centro is so excessively bar-choked that "No More!" is a reasonable response. Beyond that, a "No More Bars!" policy essentially means "No More Liquor Licenses!" which essentially means "No More New Restaurants That Don't Totally Suck!" Over the past year, a handful of new, non-enchilada-serving establishments have opened in the Centro (some of which, in the interest of disclosure, have done business with our subsidiary, Burro Hall Packaged Foods and Confectionery Industries, S.A.). Very few of these places have liquor licenses, and the process of obtaining one is about as complicated as adopting a healthy caucasian baby. Papering all the neighboring windows with big orange "No More Bars!" signs probably won't make that any easier.

Santiago de Querétaro is a city of 730,000 people - bigger than Boston, Washington DC, Atlanta, Las Vegas or Denver. It's bigger than Miami and New Orleans combined. It's a college town. It aspires to be a high technology center. It's a major tourist destination. The fact that life in the center of such a town can get noisy and crowded should surprise exactly no one, and should certainly be taken into consideration before one decides to live there. That's why great cities are surrounded by great suburbs, where no one shits on the sidewalk and residents can sleep peacefully after enjoying the nightlife in the city center.

Shoot to Thrill!

The fact that we brought you news of Team Mexico's Olympic triumph 17 hours before word even reached the Mexican Olympic Committee is of course a great testament to our 2010 interns, but it's even more impressive considering Burro Hall World Headquarters is not equipped with a so-called "tele-vision" device. (We relied instead on Vancouver2010's fantastic site, which updates the standings - including quarter-splits - in real time).

If there's a downside to this approach, it's that we were completely unaware of this until we read it in the LA Times:

Von Hohenlohe crossed the line in 78th place out of 81 finishers, wearing an Aztec-theme bodysuit with painted-on bandoleers and guns.

"The main part was looking good," he said. "Having style. Don't look at the time, but have style and look good in the suit. I think I won for artistic impression. It's a pity we get no marks for that, like in figure skating."

Putting that in boldface doesn't even begin to convey the sheer awesomeness of it. Here's 1000 words-worth:



More here. We admit we're not really seeing the "Aztec" part, but maybe the MOC will put out a press release a few months from now.

#olympiccommitteefail

We took some of the powerful antibiotics you can buy over the counter here without a prescription, but still woke up this morning with a raging Olympic Fever. So we thought we'd skate on over the Mexican Olympic Committee's horribly, horribly designed website (warning: music plays automatically) for a little early morning Hubertus-on-slopes action.

And there he is, on the front page, under the headline "Hubertus von Hohenlohe in 86th place in Vancouver." We all know that he took 78th, but this is not, in fact, a misprint. HuHo [Note: we just coined that right now - must credit Burro Hall!], as the article correctly notes, was in 86th after his first run. He moved up eight places on the second run (more accurately, eight people DNF'ed the second run), but all the website of the Mexican Olympic Committee says is that the second run "will be at 2:30"...yesterday.

Let's put a clock on this now, because HuHo's finish has been posted on Burro Hall for more than 15 hours, but not on the Olympic Committee's site, despite the fact that von Hohenlohe is the only member of the Mexican Olympic team. Whoever is running the MOC's site literally has nothing else to do except keep an eye HuHo's progress! One guy. Two runs. Three minutes of sporting activity to keep track of. No wonder this country needs to recruit gringos to play on its team.

10:05AM Update: Just 17 hours after the completion of the men's giant slalom, the MOC has updated its site, in language strikingly similar to ours.

Hopefully Last Update:El Universal reports, at the bottom of the last page of its sports section, that HuHo finished 86th, 17 seconds behind the winner. Which means they either got their info from the MOC, or the sportswriter for the country's top newspaper didn't know there are two runs in ski events, or that he didn't even bother to watch it in the first place.

Hubertus von Hohenlohe, a Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You

Never mind the swine flu - is there a vaccine for Olympic Fever? Because Mexico has been in the grip of it all day, as Hubertus von Hohenlohe, the 51-year-old Austrian who owns a house in Baja and comprises the entirety of Team Mexico, finally laced up his skis today in the giant slalom, the first of his two attempts to tener el podio, as the Canadians would say if they spoke Spanish. Would he take the gold? Silver? Bronze?

It was thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisclose, but Señor Hubertus finished up in 78th place, +33.61 seconds off the winner. (Though it's worth pointing out that he did, in fact, finish. We're looking in your direction, Bode Miller.)

He'll get another bite at the golden apple Saturday morning in the slalom.

An Upton Sinclair Production

We don't know which is more impressive, that the state of Querétaro is doing something this cool, or that it was actually advertised in the papers more than a day in advance, but on Thursday night there'll be an outdoor screening of Sergei Eisenstein's Que Viva Mexico! in the Plaza de Armas, with live accompaniment from a band we've never heard of.

Que Viva Mexico! has long been our out list of Films We Eventually Plan to Get Around to Renting, so mucho saludos to the Bicentennial Commission for saving us 50 pesos and a roundtrip drive to Blockbuster.

We Be Chillin'!

Greetings from Querétaro, a town so civilized that even our barefoot pickaninny lawn-jockeys get to sit back and relax!


[You can't make it out in the picture, but the sign on his chest says, "They're selling me because I'm disobedient. 4500 pesos." Seriously. We're not making that up.]

Congratulations Class of '010!

We're very proud to announce that four of our seven interns have successfully completed our "Oportunidades 2010" study-abroad program in New York City, and will be receiving their Certificates of Merit this afternoon in a ceremony at the former site of Tavern on the Green, after which they will be escorted by members of the United States Customs and Border Patrol to Liberty Newark International Airport and returned to their country of origin.


We expect them to put their skills to work here very shortly, with an increase in both the quantity and quality of their posting indicative of the investment we have made in them. Congratulations, muchachos!

Statue of Limitations

Proving that Americans have no unique claim on anti-Obama stupidity, Indonesia has announced that it's removing a statue of the 10-year-old future president because "Mr. Obama ha[s] yet to make any particular contributions to the country." Presumably they're referring to the country of Indonesia - whose president (prime minister? king?), Whats-his-name, has made so many contributions to the US that, frankly, we can barely wrap our heads around them.

What struck us, though, was the eerie similarity between the bronze Obama icon [left] and a certain little Mexican boy:

"Typhoid" Édgar Hernández, better known as Patient Zero in the global swine flu epidemic. Unlike Obama, young Édgar has indeed made particular contributions to the country of Indonesia:

Swine Flu the Biggest Challenge For Indonesia Health Ministry in 2009

The H1N1 swine flu virus easily caused the most worries for the Health Ministry in 2009, following its spread across 25 of the country’s 33 provinces and the initial unfamiliarity with the disease’s symptoms, an official said on Tuesday.

“H1N1 influenza, or swine flu, was definitely the outbreak that caused the biggest scare in the country this year. People were unfamiliar with the virus and its ability to spread quickly from human to human, so we had a serious panic situation on our hands,” Rita Kusriatuti, the ministry’s director for management of animal-related communicable diseases, told the Jakarta Globe.

More than 1,000 people in the country were infected by the virus — which first emerged in Mexico and the United States in April — which reportedly claimed 10 lives.

Catblogging: The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Yeah, we know. We've been busy. So quit bitching and enjoy the gatos. Normal posting will resume shortly.

Mexicans on Ice!

In case you don't have a freeze button on your DVR, here's the Mexican Olympic team [center] marching in the Parade of Nations last night.


We're not sure who the other two guys are. Coach and trainer? Couple of childhood friends?

There's No "I" In "Team"

But there is one in equipo, which is good, because the 2010 Mexican Olympic Team roster reads, in its entirety:

Hubertus von Hohenlohe, Alpine Skiing

The end. Frankly, that's an even bigger team than we would have expected, but as you might be able to tell from the name, he's something of a ringer - a son of Austrian nobility born in Mexico. Austrians tend to be pretty good at the whole Alpine skiing thing, so if, like Señor von Hohenlohe, you happen to be 51 years old, you've probably got a better shot at making the team of a country that has no serious ski slopes to speak of. (He's the oldest athlete at the Games this year.)

Here's his website, since you probably won't be seeing much of him on NBC.

Hey, What's One More?

We're not sure this is exactly what Mexico needs right now.


A new water park, on the other hand...

The Mexchurian Candidate?

The First Lady of Kenya the U.S., Michelle Hussein Obama, wants America to fail.

WASHINGTON — The White House, led by Michelle Obama, announced a sweeping initiative on Tuesday aimed at revamping the way American children eat and play — reshaping school lunches, playgrounds and even medical checkups — with the goal of eliminating childhood obesity within a generation.

Oh, hey, good idea. Why not just declare Mexico the Fattest Nation on Earth right now and get it over with? We could have some of our second-tier Olympians deliver the trophy while we're at it. For all the talk about Obama being a Manchurian Candidate, it's pretty clear that he's in fact taking orders from south of the Rio Grande.

Childhood obesity rates in the United States have tripled over the past three decades, and today nearly one in three children in America are overweight or obese. Health experts blame obesity for a variety of medical conditions, among them heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and asthma.

Savor that one for a while, people. Print it out. Pass it down to your children. Because some day you'll be telling your grandchildren about America's freedom and obesity heyday, and they won't believe a word you're saying.

Oh My God, They Killed Everyone!

The unofficial tally of 2010 Drug War dead passed 1,000 this week, Which is impressive when you consider the year still has 331 days to go. That's right - 1,000 dead in 34 days...another record year.


Note that in 2006, when we first moved our operations south of the border, these lazy slugs were still taking 181 days to kill 1,000 people. Sometimes, people just need a little leadership and a little discipline.

Oh My God, They Killed Kenny!

This post contains an image of the Mexican flag. Apparently, this is not supposed to be done without permission.

A last-minute decision by MTV in Mexico not to broadcast an episode of the US cartoon show South Park has caused controversy.

The episode portrays Mexico's president as a leader who wastes funds and irritates the international community.

MTV Mexico said they did not get a special permit needed to broadcast an image of Mexico's flag, seen briefly in the same scene as the president.

…A spokesman for MTV Mexico reassured the BBC that the reason the episode was not shown was that the permit required to show the flag did not arrive in time for the scheduled broadcast.

To say the Mexican government is batshit sensitive about its flag would be something of an understatement, but thas the clip below shows, this incident doesn't even come close to insulting the flag - or Mexico.

If you're too busy to spend 2:24 watching it (and yet you have enough time to be hanging out here?) the joke is that Mexico blew its share of the stolen space-cash on 23 hospitals and 6 water parks. Twenty-three hospitals wouldn't be a bad idea, really, but the country already has so many water parks that not even a super-intelligent race of space aliens would notice six more.

When You're Down and Troubled, and You Need a Helping Hand

Mexico has a friend in Jennifer Aniston.

JENNIFER ANISTON chose to celebrate her 41st birthday in Mexico to help boost the country's tourism industry.

.. Aniston has revealed she chose the destination to help encourage others to return to Mexico for holidays following the recent swine flu outbreak, which crippled the country last year.

She tells Access Hollywood she arranged the trip after a male friend suggested it to her: "He said to me, 'You come to Mexico all the time and Mexico is really hurting right now because of the swine flu and the drug trafficking and all of this sort of stuff but it’s not all of Mexico.' These people survive on us coming down and spending money and coming here to these beautiful places. It sort of made sense to sort of say ‘Hey, let’s help out Mexico.' Let’s shout out to these kids in Tijuana at El Faro. That’s sort of our birthday celebration this year.”

So suck on that, Angelina Jolie and Haiti.

Of course, without swine flu and drug trafficking it would be really hard to fill up a blog, so here's a big muchas gracias to Jen and the stalkerazzi for serving up a little birthday pay de queso from Cabo San Lucas. She really is helping us through this difficult time.

The Ex-Files

We suppose it was just a matter of time, but Mexico now has its first church dedicated solely to the performance of exorcisms, a chapel adjacent to the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de Soriano in Colón, Querétaro - Querétaro apparently being a hotbed of demonic activity. (The fact that Colón is the only municipality in the country named for Christopher Columbus might help explain this.) Though at least a dozen churches are visible from the roof of Burro Hall World Headquarters, we plan to make the 50-mile drive to this particular house of worship with some regularity.

Lest you think this is some sort of fringe cult kind of thing, the church, which opened today, was consecrated by the archbishop of Querétaro himself, Mario Gasperín.

We were having a good ol' chuckle of the silliness of this, until we noticed just how low the bar is for earning a visit from Max von Sydow:

Signs of possession could be, for example, speaking in a foreign language that the person does not know, or being familiar with events that happened in far away places or in other times.

Um...your correspondent routinely speaks a foreign language which he barely knows, and is currently employed making historical documentaries about past events in places he's never been. On second thought, maybe we won't be heading out to Colón after all.

Pumping Irony

You've probably noticed we've been having a union related slowdown here at Burro Hall Enterprises over the last last couple of weeks: specifically, we don't belong to a union, and therefore have been working way too hard for The Man. We expect this to stop soon (and, if all goes according to plan, to look like an accident...) Meanwhile, in the interest of filling space, enjoy this home video of our Executive Editor flexing for the gold at Mr Querétaro a few years back

Avocados: Kinda Bad For You

If there's one great advantage life in Mexico has over life in the US, it's that avocados are priced about as close to $0 a kilo as possible, whereas in the US they're like four bucks apiece.

If there's one great disadvantage to life in Mexico, its that it's the kind of place where people who earn a lot of money - say, for example, guys who grow fruits that go for four buck a pop up in Gringolandia - tend also to earn visits from drug cartel muscle.

URUAPAN, Mexico (Reuters) - This sunkissed corner of western Mexico is the source of an annual bounty of guacamole dip for U.S. Super Bowl fans, but extortion and kidnapping by drug gangs has cast a grim shadow over its avocado farmers.

Michoacan's avocado farmers can easily earn more than $150,000 a year, a huge sum in Mexico.

All the large growers and packers around the city of Uruapan have been threatened, people in the industry say, as well-armed cartels search for new sources of revenue amid pressure from a government crackdown.

...With demands for regular payments, the cartels suck cash out of an industry that has brought hundreds of millions of dollars to Michoacan over the last decade. Kidnap ransoms are often equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Many growers now stay clear of their prized land, managing their farms remotely, for fear of being approached or abducted. Some go to farms during the day with bodyguards but live with their families in towns a safe distance away.

"Many of them give money, others don't," one manager said, also declining to be quoted by name. "If you don't give it, well, you are putting yourself in danger."

In early November, avocado producer Martin Gallardo, 62, was snatched by three armed kidnappers. Although his family agreed to pay a ransom, he was found dead two weeks later.

Way to put a damper on the Super Bowl, La Familia! We'll probably just make our famous salsa instead.

Body Count

For those keeping score...

Mexican journalists fatally shot in 2010: 3.

Club America soccer players shot (non-fatally) in 2010: 2.

Still 11 months to go, of course.

And the Failed State of Arizona Lived Happily Ever After

Happy Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Day from everyone at Burro Hall!

One Small But Significant Way In Which Mexicans Are Vastly Superior to Americans

Mexicans almost always pronounce the second month of the year correctly – because they understand that there are two Rs. Febrero. Feb-rrrrare-oh! They never say Feb-air-oh.

Too many Americans, on the other hand, seem to believe we have a month called Febyooary.


End of rant. Thanks for listening.