Holy Sheet!

Well that was one hell of a birthday party! First thing we did this morning was file suit against the veterinarian. We don't care what it says on the records, that's not how a properly neutered perro behaves.

Apparently, while we were out on the town, a project our Audio/Visual Division had a small role in aired on American "tele-vision." As we recall the premise, a team of deranged scientists use computer technology to extract the figure of Jesus from the Shroud of Turin, which then comes to life, goes berserk, and takes revenge on all his enemies. (Good thing Pilate washed his hands, considering how far up his own ass they wind up!)

One day, on the set (we were catering lunch for the crew), we overheard a conversation between the producer and the network executives. Having finally seen the complete, computer-rendered figure of Christ, the executives gathered in secret in a majestic corner office, much like the College of Cardinals, and emerged with but a single question, which we quote here verbatim:  

"Why is Jesus's penis missing?"

Needless to say, we immediately trademarked that phrase and began designing a line of t-shirts, baseball caps and coffee mugs, which should be available next month. But in the interest of filling in the gaps in the public record, we bring you here a Burro Hall Exclusive -- the image a certain American tele-vision network was too craven to show you:

Yeah, that's Jesus's nubby li'l Ken-doll penis. Where's your Messiah now?

The moral of the story is that the Shroud of Turin is serious business, nothing to be fucked around with by amateurs. (Also, it's known in Mexico as the Sábana Santa - the "holy sheet." If we have to explain to you why a Mexican saying "holy sheet" is hilarious, you're not watching enough Cheech & Chong.) But if you're looking for a good starter relic - a smaller, more manageable blood-stained burial cloth of the Lord, we recommend beginning with the Sudarium of Oviedo.

As luck would have it, Friends of Burro Hall David Richards and Leonard Foglia have just published La Sangre del Sudario, the second book in their bestselling Sudario Trilogy (the premise of which is that a team of deranged scientists use computer technology to extract the figure of Jesus from the Sudarium, which then comes to life, goes berserk, and takes revenge on all his enemies, we think...it's not out in English yet). A good deal of the novel is set here in Querétaro, so local readers would basically be fools not to purchase this thing in bulk (available now at Gandhi) and hand them out to friends and family. Read the first two books, plus the upcoming finale, El Sudario Contra La Sabana Santa, in which Shroud Jesus and Sudario Jesus fight the Battle of Armageddon in Corregidora Stadium, and you'll be ready to graduate to the Shroud of Turin, and gaze upon the penis of Jesus.

This Dog Goes to 11

Today is the perrito's eleventh birthday. Schools and government offices will be closed here in Querétaro. Alternate side of the street parking rules are in effect in throughout Brooklyn.




Previous birthday coverage here, here and here.

Think of the Children!

Noticias de Querétaro is a good paper; it shouldn't have to work blue...

How to Succeed At Failure Without Really Trying

The Failed State of Arizona: a failure of such epic proportions that even the failures that make the state such a failure wind up failing.

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps is no longer.

The Arizona-based border watch group that burst onto the national scene in 2005 sent an e-mail to its members this week announcing the corporation has dissolved.

Aww. Pobre Arizona - so far from achievement, so close to Mexico. It seems the Failed Minuteman Civil Defense Corps failed when its failed leader, Carmen Mercer, sent out an APB for like-minded failures to join her in hunting Messicans.

On March 16, Mercer sent an e-mail urging members to come to the border "locked, loaded and ready" and urged people to bring "long arms." She proposed changing the group's rules to allow members to track illegal immigrants and drug smugglers instead of just reporting the activity to the Border Patrol.

A leader schooled in the ways of non-failure would probably expect such a plea to appeal to a certain failed segment of the populace - sociopathic failures, for instance. But because Mercer was born and raised in the Grand Canyon of Fail, she wasn't expecting such a feverish response.

Mercer said she received a more feverish response than she expected and decided the group couldn't shoulder the responsibility and liability of what could occur, she said.

"People are ready to come locked and loaded, and that's not what we are all about," Mercer said. "It only takes one bad apple to destroy everything we've done for the last eight years."

"Coming locked and loaded is not what we're about," said the failure who called for people to come locked and loaded! And that, dear readers, is how one succeeds at failure.

The Story the New York Times Doesn't Want You To See

Two big things happened here a couple of days ago: The Autonomous University of Querétaro was named one of the ten best colleges in Mexico; and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, accompanied by the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence, came to Mexico to revise the bi-national counternarcotics strategy. Can you guess which story the New York Times decided to cover?

Yeah. It's like they live on another planet or something. Noticias de Querétaro (an outfit so lean and scrappy they don't even have a website) splashed the University story on page one, where it belongs. The Times didn't even deem it worthy of the "World Briefs" section ("Pollution Fine Sought Against Coca Cola" obviously being a much bigger story to the out-of-touch media elite).

And so today, Noticias actually called bullshit on the Times, taking it to task for favoring the "gringo security cabinet" over the hardworking overachievers at UAQ! Because, why cover good news when you can sell more papers with murder, mayhem and drugs (and an unprecedented entourage of cabinet-level security figures from your own country's government)? We say, it's about fucking time.

Maybe when Carlos "The World's Richest Mexican" Slim finally consummates his love affair with the Grey Lady, these people will get their priorities straight.

Lust For Life

We'd thought that if there were at least one thing positive about the Querétaro constitution being rewritten last year to make fertilized human eggs full-fledged citizens of the state, it was that there would be no more reason to have anti-abortion marches here.  And yet just an hour ago a crowd of white-clad zealots carrying a "Yo ♥ La Vida" banner and singing hymns through a four-way loudspeaker on wheels managed to tie up traffic outside our offices and disturb our afternoon meditation.   Is abortion not quite completely illegal enough for these people? 

We suppose that if you want to continue to lead the nation in teenage pregnancies, you've got to rally the troops from time to time. But can't this stuff be restricted to Sunday, when the streets are closed anyway?

War Is Bad For Puppies And Other Living Things

We never thought about it before, but we're suddenly very interested in the state of Mexico-India relations.

The Indian military has a new weapon against terrorism: the world's hottest chile.

After tests, the military has decided to use the thumb-size bhut jolokia, or ghost chile, to make tear-gas-like hand grenades to immobilize people, defense officials said Tuesday....

It has more than 1 million Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chile's spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce has 2,500 to 5,000 units, while jalapeño peppers measure 2,500 to 8,000.

Mexico has an ample habanero stockpile, though at 350,000 Scoville units it would at best impede the Indians (though with massive casualties on both sides) as they advance on the capital. Of course, as we all know, scientists have shown that the habanero can be weaponized to nearly 600,000 Scoville units - which, combined with numerical supremacy, could serve to keep India's ambitions in check.

Unless India, which has courted biotechnology investment for years, decides to escalate the bhut jolokia.  Where does this madness end?

Greetings From Sun City

Another day, another pickaninny.

Cinco de Mayo, 36.

72 Virgens

In a moment of cultural ambition the other day, we decided to take in the Querétaro Museum of Art's new exhibit "The Image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the Nation's History." We've been immersed in a fair amount of religious iconography lately, for professional reasons, so we were especially interested in the different interpretations of the patron saint of Mexico.

Which is why we burst out laughing the minute we entered the great hall (sorry, no photos allowed). We don't know why we didn't think of this, but, unlike Jesus, who was an actual man with a long and varied narrative to his life story - he preached, traveled, performed miracles, was crucified, etc - the Virgin of Guadalupe is literally a painting - so throughout the nation's history, the image looks exactly the same: brown-skinned chick with her hands clasped, greenish robe, reddish dress, borne aloft in a giant, floating fertility symbol by a little angel under her feet. Painting after identical painting, sprawling through three rooms. It was Warholesque. The background changed from time to time - she'd show up on a banner, or share the canvas with Porfirio Diaz - but that was about it.

Walk This Way

Yesterday continued the new "Get Off Your Fat Asses and Walk" program, in which an (apparently dwindling) number of streets in the city Centro are closed on Sunday, forcing people to move about without the aid of an internal combustion engine. As you can see, it was a crazy success (though the guy on the right isn't exactly getting with the program):

It's clear to us what's going on here. Mexicans understand what American health care reform will mean: previously-uninsured morbidly obese gringos will now have access to better care and live longer. Sensing that their goal of becoming the Fattest Nation on Earth just became a lot more difficult, the patriotic men and women (and children!) of Querétaro have plopped themselves down in front of the tv with a bottomless platter of enchiladas queretanas, and are refusing to move a muscle until President Palin repeals the bill.

¡Oh, No!

Socialized medicine!

Here Comes the Sun

Today is the equinox, the day when Mexico's prehispanic ruins are besieged by foreign hippies seeking to absorb the kind of power, wisdom and strength that allowed the country's ancient inhabitants to be overrun by a few hundred unwashed Spanish sailors, and their great civilizations to become known as "prehispanic ruins." Querétaro doesn't really allow hippies within city limits, but if you're looking for somewhere nearby, we've got an embarrassingly small pyramid and an amazingly huge rock nearby, both of which are willing to take your tourist dollars today.

About a week ago, Excelsior ran this helpful chart explaining the dos and don'ts of worshipping the sun:

So that's DO dress like an ice cream vendor, bring water, carry sunblock, and DO NOT bring drugs, firearms, animals or gas tanks.  Presumably, the only reason this chart was necessary is because people tried to bring all those things and more to the Pyramid of the Sun at some point, which we think is really kinda awesome.

About a Boy

When we first moved to New York 20 years ago, our Uncle Martin (into whose empty apartment we were moving) called and told us to go down to the end of the block and find a specific panhandler - a hard-worn guy with a scraggly beard who looked like a cartoon version of a hobo. "That's Marty, my namesake homeless guy," he told us, and instructed us to give him five bucks whenever we saw him, which turned out to be nearly every day. A few years later we moved a mile away and Marty disappeared, but we never forgot the concept.

So, this is Jesús, our perro's namesake street urchin:

Local readers will recognize him as one of the dozens of kids who wander the heavily-trafficked streets of the Centro begging for change and selling stuff nobody needs. We've been buying gum from him for almost three years now - since he was four years old. He's here from the early afternoon until way past a six-year-old's bedtime, six or seven days a week. Whenever we ask him what he's been up to, his answer is always "working." He's recently been joined on his rounds by his three-year-old sister, which is a lot more depressing than it sounds.  (Readers with children barely out of infancy are invited to imagine them walking unattended through the streets of your city.  We'll wait a minute while you catch your breath.)

The Tubers From Toluca

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, we offer further proof that Mexico is to blame for absolutely everything in the world:

The cause of [1847 Irish Potato] Famine was a water mold (Phytophthora infestans) that originated in Mexico. This fungus-like mold results in a disease called “late blight” in which entire fields of mature potato plants are destroyed within days. The name “late blight” is because the mold strikes late in the growing season, close to harvest time. Infected tubers are subject to soft-rot bacteria which render them useless as food. What is worse, the discarded rotting tubers can easily re-infect the succeeding year’s crop.

One kind of late blight mold, A1, crossed the Atlantic in the 1840’s, reaching Europe in 1845 before rapidly spreading across the continent to reach Ireland. Although cultivated potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) originated in Peru, the late blight mold appears to have originated in the Toluca Valley of Mexico (adjacent to the western edge of Mexico City) where it is found in several related wild-growing Solanum tubers.

Jesus. Thanks, assholes! Guess this kinda takes the edge of that swine flu thing - what'd that kill, a few thousand? That's basically a long weekend in 1840s Skibbereen. Anyway, as a result, everyone (including our ancestors) left Ireland and crossed the Atlantic, where they became the most reviled immigrant group in America - paving the way for Mexicans to be despised there 150 years later, while fifth-generation gringos like us defend them by saying things like, "remember how they treated the Irish, and now we've had Irish-American presidents!". It's almost as if the Mexicans planned it...

The Lord Is My Safety Harness, I Shall Not Want

We were on our way back from an awards luncheon yesterday when we noticed one of our fellow human beings standing where there usually is not one of our fellow human beings standing: on top of Templo de la Cruz's extremely tasteful neon-tipped steeple.

In addition to the baseball cap, he's got a triple layer of protection: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and is therefore in full compliance with Mexican workplace safety laws.

An Enthusiastic Plug For An Album We Have Not Actually Heard In Its Entirety

There are few holidays we hate more than St. Patrick's Day - the Reinforcin' o' the Stereotypes, as it known around here - but this year we're kinda psyched about the new project from the Chieftains and Ry Cooder: an album-length meditation on our favorite band of hopeless Irish romantics, the San Patricios, who deserted from the U.S. Army to fight for Mexico during the American invasion of 1846-48.  It seems a natural project for the Chieftains, and the presence of Ry Cooder means it's full of Mexican legends you've probably never heard of.

The disc just came out last week, so it's new enough that there aren't any videos except for this "making of" promo:



You can listen to excerpts (and order us a copy as a gift) here. (Track #9, El Caballo, is sung in the queretano huasteca style.) If you're in NYC tonight, you can catch them live - but, y'know, good luck with getting tickets.

World's Best Press Inquiry

We've long had a theory that the Zocalo in Mexico City would hold the world record for Most World Records Set In a Single Location - everything from the World's Largest Group Kiss to the World's Largest Fleur de Lis Made of Recycled Cans.  So this morning we fired up our electronical mail-sending system and went straight to...well, not the top, exactly, but to the Assistant for Public Relations and Marketing for the Guinness Book of World Records (yeah, you read that right: the Guinness Book of World Records!)  And the answer is...

Thank you for your inquiry to the Guinness World Records press office.

While Mexico is one of our leading countries for record breaking, we do not currently recognize this category and don’t have any further information on this.  

Best,
Sara Wilcox
PR and Marketing Assistant
Guinness World Records

Let's just take the glass-half full view here: even though this is not a category they recognize (and to put that in perspective for a minute, "Largest Fleur de Lis Made of Recycled Cans" is a recognized category), The Assistant for Public Relations and Marketing for the whole Guinness Book of World Records Organization knew exactly what we were talking about when we inquired if Mexico might be #1.

We don't know about you, but for us, that's confirmation enough.  Congratulations, Zocalo!

In the Houses of the Holy

X Warriors International Freestyle Motocross. Live, this Saturday, at the Plaza de Toros.   It's like having sex.   In church.  With a dog.

More desecration here.

This is Your War, On Drugs

Nice piece in the hometown paper today showing how well a lot of the Drug War money has been spent here:

Mexico’s National Defense Secretariat has spent more than $10 million to purchase hundreds of the detectors, similar to the “magic wands” in use in Iraq and Afghanistan, for its antidrug fight. Although critics have called them nothing more than divining rods, Mexican defense officials praise the devices as a critical part of their efforts to combat drug traffickers...

...the black plastic wands, known as the GT 200 and manufactured by the British company Global Technical Ltd., are widely used nationwide at checkpoints to search for contraband inside vehicles as well as to canvass neighborhoods in drug hotspots for drug and weapons stash houses.

This leads to the single greatest quote about technology we've ever read:

“We’ve had success with it,” Capt. Jesús Héctor Larios Salazar, an officer with the Mexican Army’s antidrug unit in Culiacán, said recently. “It works with molecules. It functions with the energy of the body.”

Well, shit, if it works with molecules...drugs - even drug traffickers! - are made of molecules! This thing must be unstoppable.

In Culiacán, a city in Sinaloa State where Mexican drug traffickers have a strong presence, the military showed off the GT 200 in December. Canvassing a residential neighborhood, soldiers walked up and down the street with a GT 200 waiting for the antenna to point toward a suspicious residence. There were no discoveries.

But the soldier trained to operate the detector walked by one of the army’s armored vehicles and the antenna swung quickly toward the high-caliber machine gun sticking out the top. He took several steps back and walked by again. The antenna pointed again toward the gun.

“See?” he said.

Yeah....See?

Of course, while our gringo readers are sitting there laughing at the silly Mexicans getting ripped off like this, you need to keep in mind one thing:  you're paying for it.

See?

Great Moments In Custom Embroidery

Having donned their new, whimsical uniforms, the bartenders at Harry's take the plunge...

...into the Great Lake of Fail.

Preposition Problems

The headline on this (subscription only) Wall St Journal article pretty much sums up American reporting on Mexico in a nutshell:

America buys all the drugs. America supplies most of the guns. The vast majority of the drug related killings happen within a few miles of the US border.  But now we learn that Mexico's violence is stretching to the US.  Gosh, somebody ought to do something before it gets there.

All Quiet on the Central Front

Kind of eerily quiet in el Centro today. We assumed everyone was staying home out of a superstitious fear of the Ides of March, but in fact it's Benito Juarez's birthday. What's that you say? Benito Juarez's birthday is March 21st? Well, let's hear it for you, Attentive Reader! Yes it is, but because of some crazily inflexible Mexican law requiring holidays to be observed on the previous Monday (even if that Monday comes six days before the actual holiday), we're stuck trying to be patriotic on a day when most bars, restaurants and museums are closed anyway.

Here's a little waving of the red-white-and-green for ya.

(Uh, no offense, Mexico, but...)

Hieroglyphics: The Universal Language

This is the keypad of a typical Mexican payphone - the kind that has made Telmex chairman Carol Slim the richest man in the entire world. As with many mundane things in Mexico, we find them utterly incomprehensible.

We think the first button on the left allows you to play Texas Hold 'em, although it might be Blackjack. The second and fifth buttons appear to do the same thing, except the second one does it a little more emphatically, hence the arrow.

Button three... we have no idea what button three does, though judging from the position of the finger relative to the numbered keys, we think it allows you to push button three.

Button four translates your call into Greek. We suppose that's helpful if you're calling Greece, though we've never met anyone here who has.

It's Earlier Than You Think

Mexico doesn't follow the US in its new "let's move Daylight Savings Time up a couple of weeks" policy, so the three-man band - one playing the trumpet, one banging a drum, the third knocking on doors soliciting payment for this "service" - was coming up the street at 8:45 this morning, not 9:45. The truck with the four-way PA system blaring an advertisement for the X-Warriors Motocross Championship!!!! was parked in front of the house at 9:00AM, not 10:00AM. Please synchronize your watches.

Today is the second "Get Off Your Fat Asses And Walk" Sunday, in which some random assortment of streets in the Centro will be closed. Local merchants reported a 50% drop in sales last Sunday, so we'll probably be back to the usual traffic chaos by the time we turn the clocks ahead again.

Hope You Like Our New Direction

We're having some workmen in over the weekend. Please pardon our appearance.

-- Burro Hall Board of Directors

Saturday Update: Well, at least we managed not to delete the entire site from the interwebs. We decided to switch to Blogger's upgraded layout primarily because it allows you to post bigger pictures, which means we can get away with less writing. Please let us know about any glitches which may not be visible to us from behind the velvet rope of Administrator's privileges.

Our IT department is away for the long weekend (Benito Juaréz's birthday? Seriously?), so we've been mucking around in the HTML ourselves, which is going about as well as if we'd decided to crack open our iPod and make a few changes. If anyone knows how to: change the date stamp, post-footer and sidebar-headers to lowercase; change the color of the sidebar links to black (without changing the color of the links in the blog posts); and anchor the left side of the blog so that it doesn't float when you adjust the size of your window...we're happy to replace the entire IT dept before they get back from Acapulco.

Mexican Standoff

Masters of Their Domain

This article on the most expensive domain names ever - mostly basic words like porn.com, business.com, etc. - reminded us that a domain name we would assume to be worth a small fortune, college-bar.com, actually belongs to an establishment just down the street from our offices. How the hell did that happen?

(And if you're thinking of squatting on burrohall.com, forget it, we ain't payin').

Imagine No Possessions

We'd been meaning to write about this for a few days now, but had managed to misplace the clipping. It seems like every few years - or, more recently, every few months - the Diocese of Querétaro holds a press conference to announce that Satanic possessions are on the rise. The most recent was about a week ago (sorry, no link). As amazed as we are by the information and by the fact that such announcements are made at all, we're especially amazed at the straightforward, deadpan tone of the coverage.

"In the cases of demonic possession that are becoming increasingly common in the Diocese, the priests who perform the exorcisms are at risk of losing their lives at the hands of the forces of evil," begins the article in Noticias, before going on to quote at length the Diocese's chief exorcist, Monsignor Salvador Espinosa Medina, as he explains how turning away from Jesus can give the Devil just the opening he needs.

"The demon cannot possess the soul," the Monsignor explains, "but he can possess the body."

At no point does the assembled press corps appear to raise their hands and ask, "Excuse me, padre, but what in the holy living fuck are you talking about?"

So we'll jump on the bandwagon here and just lay out the latest statistics. The Diocese of Querétaro has, as of this writing eight (8) exorcists, who have performed roughly 30 exorcisms so far this year (the year being just 70 days old, we point out in slack-jawed amazement). Throughout the country, five exorcisms a day are performed - so, back of the envelope here: Querétaro, with less than one percent of the Mexican population, accounts for almost 10% of the Satanic possessions.

Oh, and sometimes the demon strangles the victim to death. That's how the article ends. Just like that. So we will, too.

Can't Say They Didn't Warn You

We think we'll look elsewhere for our laparoscopic surgery needs.


Blvd. de las Americas 58, Col. Reforma Agraria, Querétaro

(Seriously, it isn't even one of those words that means something benign in Spanish.)

Risky Beezness

Via Copyranter, here's a Sanka Coffee ad from the 1940s in which a fat, lazy, dishonest Mexican learns about the miracle of caffeine-free Sanka from a beautiful, intelligent white woman.

Ironically, until not very long ago, Sanka Nescafé [nevermind] was just about the only coffee you could get served in Mexico. They must have been too fat and lazy to look for another brand or something.

International Women's Day, Continued

Miss Querétaro has been keeping a pretty low profile since she was crowned nine months ago. So low, in fact, that we'd forgotten our pledge to bring you bikini pictures as soon as they were available, so here you go. (She ain't much, but she's ours.) If that's not enough for ya, Diario de Querétaro has a riveting interview with Her Highness. She's strongly in favor of family, friendship and love (no one asked her about puppies), and she likes tall, handsome God-fearing men (two out of three ain't bad). Interestingly, she does claim to have a pair of favorite night spots (Dorsia and Kaan), which pretty much blows her chances of appearing at the Temperance Union's next fundraiser.


In other pageant news, this gathering of reputable-looking gentlemen may look like a mob funeral, but they're actually the organizers, funders and, one assumes, judges of Miss Bikini Querétaro 2010, a contest so legit that as far as we've been able to find, there is no Miss Bikini Querétaro 2009. Anyway, it's being held on March 25, and if we can get credentialed in time we'll definitely be sending a correspondent. Entry is free and there's no age limit, so come on down, ladies! First prize is 200 dollars cash, which is, like, totally classy and only a little less than your average Spring Break wet t-shirt contest winner gets.

Watch this space for announcements about the upcoming Miss Nude Burro Hall 2010.

The Third Quest

A lime Slurpee, and a microwave burrito for my horse.

For the Record

Mexico continues its quest to hold the world record for Most World Records in Categories You Didn't Know Even Existed. This weekend, the Yucatán took home the certificate for the World's Largest Cochinita Pibil (3.9 metric tons, in case you're hoping to break it on your own someday). Cochinita Pibil happens to be a Yucatán regional dish, so it would be pretty surprising if they didn't hold the world record - though the fact that none of the articles mentions the previous world record leads us to believe there wasn't one. Later this afternoon, we're heading into the kitchen to create our own regional dish - Frog Legs a la Burro Hall, we'll call it - and will inform the Guinness officials that we've produced nearly half a kilo. We'll post photos of the record ceremony when it happens.

Last week, Yucatán also snagged the mark for World's Largest Meteoric Event Causing the Extinction of All Dinosaurs, which was bestowed retroactively.

So Far From God, So Close To Non-Sucky Places

Querétaro's going all out for this Bicentennial thing - it is, after all one of the cradles of the Mexican Independence movement. Just yesterday, the city began plastering the Centro with red vinyl banners proudly festooned with our brand new motto: Querétaro - It's Close to Everything.

Try to contain your enthusiasm.

We can't recall ever hearing a more half-assed slogan, with the possible exception of the state of Oklahoma's "Oklahoma is OK." Why not "Querétaro: Pass Through Us On Your Way to Guanajuato;" "Querétaro: Dozens of Connecting Flights Each Week;" "Querétaro: You Don't Have to Stay Long"? Seriously, does anyone actually work for the Tourism Department here?

Face it, this is what happens when you have very few good bars and just a handful of restaurants that don't suck.

Update: A commenter points out that the motto is actually "Querétaro - It's Close to Everyone. We don't see how that's any better at all.

Can't Catch Me 'cuz the Rabbit Done Died

The city of Querétaro has started to realize that this national quest to become even fatter than the gringos is probably a bad idea. (A recent Health Ministry study warned that the current generation of children may wind up with a life expectancy several years shorter than their parents.) So the new plan is to close a lot of the streets in the Centro on Sundays, so that people will have to get off their fat asses and walk. we're not sure what this is supposed to accomplish - everybody already walks in the Centro, it's just that some people have to drive to actually get here, and now those people won't come because they'll have fewer places to park - but we very much like the other part of the plan, which is: in order to accommodate the fact that several of the closed streets are in fact kind of important, the city is making up for it by reversing the way traffic flows on certain one-way streets that remain open. Oh, we can just imagine the look of surprise on the drivers' faces! Comedy gold.

We took advantage of the new pedestrianism to walk down to Plaza Constitution for the annual Women's Fair, which is basically just a bunch of stalls selling stuff that may or may not be related in some way to women. Our favorite? This one, selling various rabbit-fur products, which we love purely for the sign behind the guy showing adorable little bunny-wabbits in steel cages waiting to be bludgeoned to death and skinned into earmuffs. Who says there's no truth in advertising anymore?


Awwwwwwwww.....

Liminal

Not sure why we feel this way, but we bet this place over on Hidalgo has really DELICIOUS CREPES! And that we should buy a lot of them. And maybe you should, too.

The 60% Solution

During the Haitian earthquake, we happened to be reading, for professional reasons, Gary Willis's Negro President: Thomas Jefferson and the Slave Power, which contains a long section about the Haitian slave revolt. Let's just say that Mr. "All Men Are Created Equal" wasn't a huge fan of the visiting team. "Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man," he wrote - referring not to the plight of the slaves but of the unfortunate slaveowners who were dispossessed of them. It's like saying the worst thing about the Holocaust was all the prison guards who lost their jobs when the war was over.

Anyway, the book wasn't about Haiti, but about the US constitutional provision requiring that each slave be counted as three-fifths of a person. Being Northern liberals, we'd always misunderstood this, and found it an outrage: black slaves are only 60% human? But the real purpose for this was to determine congressional representation. Every five slaves, who of course could not vote, counted as three people, and the more people a state had, the more congressional representatives it got. Eventually, there were something like 12 Southern congressmen who existed solely because there were so many non-voting slaves in the South. The outrages wasn't that they were only counted as 60% human - the outrage was that they counted at all.

(Hang, on, we're going somewhere with this.)

We thought of this when we saw that immigration reform is moving back on the agenda, while at the same time the 2010 Census is moving into gear. Since undocumented Mexicans generally work (and often live) like slaves in the first place, why not give them the same deal the slaves had? What if, for the purposes of congressional representation, undocumented Mexicans were to count as 60% of a person? With an estimated 12 million living in the US, that would be worth [12,000,000 x .60 ÷ 647,000] more than 11 whole Congressmen.

Overnight, you'd see their plight improve. Rather than trying to drive the illegals away, states would have an incentive to welcome them - even compete for them. States that complain that immigrants are draining away their resources could wind up with a "Mexican" Congressman sitting on the Appropriations Committee funneling earmarks back home. The immigrants already count as 0% anyway, so they'd gain clout and, unlike slaves who were brought there in chains, they actually want to be in the US. It's kind of win-win.

Now, who do we get to sponsor this bill?

In Which Irony Dies a Painful Death and We Notify Its Next of Kin

Apropos of our earlier post about the Catholic Church being the Centro's rudest, least-considerate and most-disruptive neighbor, we would have to say that, if we were forced to pick just one house of worship to have its license revoked, we'd pick Templo de Merced - though that's largely due to it being just half a block away from our offices; they certainly don't have a monopoly on predawn fireworks and clanging bells at all hours. (They do rely a more heavily on the loudspeaker than most.)

Which is not to say that Merced is not civic-minded, of course. Why, right here on its outside bulletin board is a sign demanding that the city take action against bars!


It makes sense, really. The poor guy who lights off the fireworks has to get up at like 4:00AM. How's he gonna sleep with all those drunken rowdies shitting on the sidewalk?

Update: The pressure from the Burro Hall community must have made the baby Jesus cry - as of Friday afternoon the sign has been taken down. This is a good first step, but the Templo remains on probation until it proves it can be a good neighbor

Burnin' for Hu

The Olympics have been over for three days, but here in Querétaro, the Hubertus "HuHo" von Hohenlohe 2010 Olympic Torch still burns as bright as ever. Our prediction: it'll be September before anyone even thinks of extinguishing this thing.

And Friends, They May Thinks It's a Movement!

Our post last week on the Temperance Union's "No More Bars!" campaign led one of our regular commenters to accuse us of "inconsistency" - since we have in the past used this space as a forum for the occasional noise complaint - and to describe the intern who wrote the post as a "true ignoramus." (And then, this being Querétaro, he came over for dinner and we had a delightful time...because the "gringo community" really is.)

But bad manners shouldn't obscure a good point! We can admit when we're wrong. We'd been trying to draw a distinction between lodging a complaint and salting the earth, but maybe that's the wrong approach. Maybe the time has come to take action against the most disruptive, inconsiderate establishment in the Centro Historico - an organization that has been known to serve red wine at all hours without a license, so our crusade should dovetail rather nicely with the "No More Bars!" thing. We're talking, obviously, about the Catholic Church.

Whenever the concussive explosion of fireworks shakes us from our beds in the wee hours of the morning, it's the church, not drunken barflies, that's the source of the noise. If there are a dozen people marching past our window singing songs before sunrise, chances are, they're drunk on the Holy Spirit. None of the local antros chime their bells at 5:00AM, but the churches seem to compete for the honor of waking everyone up the earliest. The hundreds of pilgrims who descend on the Centro a half-dozen times every year, camping in the plazas, cooking in the streets, pissing God only knows where, can hold their own, stench-wise, with even the most determined sidewalk-shitting bar patrons. This guy? He doesn't work for a bar.

And this is just their everyday sociopathic behavior. Don't get us started on the major holidays or the dancing-Indians festivals. Noisy, obnoxious crowds? Check. Parking problems? Amen. And as you can see here on this map of the Centro, there are more churches than taco stands in this town. Isn't it about time someone said "Enough! No More Churches"?

We think it is. And if you have a color printer, you can, too:




[Concerned citizens who prefer not to take on the Church directly - probably a wise choice; this is the Diocese spokesman - may prefer to use this less-confrontational "no more fireworks" sign instead. Theoretically, it could apply to anyone - anyone who's enough of a dick to light off fireworks at 5:00AM, we mean.]

We look forward to working with all our peace-loving neighbors to rid the Centro of this holy menace once and for all.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

One of the great constants of Mexican life is the perp walk. If you are ever arrested for any crime, no matter how insignificant, you can count on being paraded in front of the cameras along with all your alleged loot and any alleged weapons you may allegedly have been carrying, and the whole thing will appear in the newspapers with the exception of the word "alleged." This is a free service provided by the Mexican government in lieu of due process.

Anyway, we thoroughly enjoyed this picture of Querétaro's Irene Barrón López, whose spectacularly dysfunctional relationship with her boyfriend led the two of them to exchange gunfire in the middle of the street. Things may have changed a bit since we were cadets at Quantico, but "do not hand the perp a rifle, even for the purposes of public shaming" used to be the kind of thing they covered on day one.

Like a Bull In a Glass Ceiling Shop

In bullfighting, "taking the alternativa" is sort of the equivalent of going pro - or at least graduating from junior varsity to varsity. Dozens of men do it every year, but so far in the corrida's history only eight women have. Yesterday, Michoacan's own Hilda Tenorio became #9, and the first to do it in the largest bullring in the world, Plaza México. She even picked up an ear for her trophy cabinet. And the ladies don't face off against little girl-size bulls, so don't get snarky.

Here's the highlight reel:

No Rest for the Mole Men

Via the MexFiles, guess who's on their way to Chile.

Also, an update on the updates, in case you thought we'd stopped reporting on the fate of Mexicans in the wake of Haiti's earthquake: we haven't. There's simply been no news. The number of missing has morphed into a vague "150 or so, but so far only two bodies have been recovered.