Time's Arrow

It’s kind of hard to believe that a dog who pees on three of his own feet four or five times a day came with AKC pedigree papers (or maybe not, since this is basically proof of extensive inbreeding), but according to our files, the perro was born – tongue-first! - on this day twelve years ago.

March 30, 2011 - Age 12

A fancy-pants perro like this doesn’t have a father – he has a “sire” – a champion show dog descended from a pair of champion show dogs, who were themselves descended from champion show dogs, who were descended, we believe, from Secretariat. His sire's baby mama, however, was a loveable loser descended from three generations of also-rans, white trash down to her very name, which was (this is true) Harley Davidson.

April 5, 2010 - Age 11

We weren’t there for that magic moment, but can only assume that he fell asleep within minutes, snoring as loudly as he is right now – though at a higher, squeakier pitch. You know how when a baby snores it’s adorable, but your grandfather does it, you try to drown it out by cranking up the television? That’s sort of been the trajectory of the past dozen years. Plus, add to that a dozen daily outbursts of manic, uncontrollable licking, which wouldn’t even be cute in a baby, much less your granddad. Fat, lazy, feckless and (increasingly) flatulent. He's really taken to Mexico.

November 27, 2009 - Age 10

Dogs age at a much faster rate than people do. (The “one dog year = seven people years” thing isn’t really accurate, but it’s close enough for internet blogging purposes.) When we first took him home at age 18 months, he was the canine equivalent of a ten-year-old - younger than the average Justin Bieber fan. Today he's basically 84, the same age as Pope Benedict XVI. By comparison, we've barely aged at all.

August 11, 2008 - Age 9

Does time actually pass more quickly for him than for us? It's hard to tell. Sometimes we'll leave him alone in the office for three or four hours while we got to a meeting, and when we return, there he is, inches from the door, where he's sat unmoving for four hours. Then we realize, from his frantic excitement, that it must have felt like 28 hours to him.

September 15, 2007 (with brand new kitten) - Age 8

But if time's moving faster for him, it's not racing ahead of us; he's not living in 2083, where dogs fly around with portable jet-packs and have figured out how the fridge door works.

August 16, 2006 - Age 7

Which means that, for him, time's arrow is sailing backwards. As his age increases, his human-equivalent date of birth gets earlier. He was born in 1999, right before the Kosovo War and Columbine. But by the time we met him, his date of birth might as well have been 1990, when Saddam's tanks were rolling in Kuwait.

March 11, 2005 - Age 6

By the time he was three he'd lived through the Reagan nightmare and our own awkward high school years. Somewhere between the ages of five and six, when we were in our late 30s, he became older than us. When we relocated here to Burro Hall, it was as if he'd been born in 1957, before Mexican women had ever voted for president. He turned ten having lived through World War II, and today it's as if he were born in 1927 - the year Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop to Europe, where Carlota, Empress of Mexico, lay dying. Here in Mexico, the Cristero War was just beginning.

June 24, 2004 - Age 5

Unfortunately, for dogs - at least this one - age doesn't bring wisdom (see previous comment about repeatedly soaking his own feet in urine). It just brings a gradual physical breakdown. It's hard to tell when someone who sleeps 19 hours a day is becoming less active, but as he does less and less walking, his toenails are reaching Howard Hughes proportions, which in turn makes it sound like a chorus line whenever he crosses the tile floor.

September 10, 2003 - Age 4

When we do go for walks outside, he fights constantly for the right to go chasing after smells. But his eyesight is failing, and if we don't watch him carefully he's likely to smack into a tree or a lamp post. He also slams on the brakes abruptly and without warning, tensing up as if he's confused about where he is or what he's doing, or scared of something only he can see. We drag him, fighting, past whatever invisible thing it is that spooked him, and he trots along like nothing happened.

October 2, 2002 (recovering from a cut leg) - Age 3

At home, his main activity is watching his own muzzle turn to gray. He doesn't do much else, but the place he wants to do it is wherever we happen to be sitting at the moment - not next to where we're sitting, but rather that exact spot, though he's willing to compromise by simply sitting on our lap for hours on end, until our leg falls asleep under the weight of his ten snoring kilograms.

May 29, 2001 - Age 2

The sparkle has faded from his eyes, though (mostly because the whites have turned brown with age), and his stare can be as empty as, well, an 84-year-old's. His less-than-perfect control over certain bodily functions has gotten him banished from the bed at night, and relocated to a little sidecar of a doggie bed right next to it. Sometimes in the middle of the night, if he's really quiet, we'll reach down and touch him, just to be sure everything's okay. You never know.

October 14, 2000 - First day with the new family - Age 18 months

But a dozen times a day, all we need to do is hint at the prospect of food, or walk through the door after a few minutes' absence, or sit down somewhere, creating a vacant lap for him to crawl onto, and time's arrow comes shooting back towards us. His eyes light up, and he bounces up and down like a two-year-old - a puppy again, if only for a moment, until the effort exhausts him and he lies down to nap.

Gifts That Keep On Giving

Following up on the weekend's "Zygote Appreciation Day," the local paper reports on the Monsignor's sermon as if it were a presidential address. (Spoiler Alert! He thinks abortion is bad.) He reminds us all that an unwanted pregnancy is un regalo divino - a divine gift. It never ceases to amaze us how often God favors poor, undereducated teenagers with his gifts, though we wonder if perhaps they might prefer a gift certificate to Palacio de Hierro instead.

The article helpfully notes that, in Querétaro, there are on average 7,000 pregnancies a year that are classified as "high risk," with 500 of those being teenage girls. But those girls must be getting pretty decent care, otherwise we wouldn't been the Teen Mom capital of Mexico.

Of course, whenever we hear someone like the Monsignor refer to abortion as "taking the easy way out" (hay queretanas que toman la “salida fácil”), we think, well, there's a guy who's never been involved in one. Then we remember he's a Catholic priest, so it's not entirely out of the question - so maybe he's just callous.

Presumed Guilty Pleasure

First they came for Presumed Guilty, and I did not speak out, because I was not sitting in a Mexican prison for a crime I didn't commit. Then they came for El Santo's naked she-vampire movie, and I did speak out, because, darn it, I like naked she-vampire movies.

Showing of Mexico 'Santo' Wrestler Movie Canceled

The iconic Mexican wrestler "Santo" never took off his mask. But some of the villains in one of his movies took off a lot more than that. And it's causing a controversy about the sometimes cheesy but always heroic 1960s film star.

The Son of Santo is also a wrestler and he says release of the previously undistributed scenes could hurt his deceased father's image.

Guadalajara film festival director Ivan Trujillo says the restored scenes from the movie "Santo and the Treasure of Dracula" show topless female vampires.

The footage was found by a descendant of the film's producer the festival planned to show the movie in its entirety.

Trujillo says the showing was called off due to the son's protests.

Mixed Signals

The Municipality of Querétaro is determined to do whatever it can to contain the teenage crime wave gripping this helpless city. To that end, they ruined the weekend of 44 young graffiti artists by arresting them for the crime of defacing this beautiful pre-Hispanic highway on-ramp.

If there's one thing the Municipality of Querétaro won't abide, it's graffiti, and a couple of years ago it increased the punishment for a first offense to three years in prison - which is about as long as this kid is going to get for chopping off four people's heads on behalf of the Beltran Leyva cartel. If it looks like you're about to get busted for graffiti here, you should probably try to kill the arresting officer, since the sentence is probably lighter.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, the Municipality of Querétaro is sponsoring, along with the Osel spray paint company... a graffiti competition!

First place is 20,000 pesos, with 55,000 pesos in total prize money being offered. Sadly, there's probably some Mexican version of the Son of Sam Law that prevents these 44 crazy, mixed-up kids from claiming any of it.

Mascotas Perdidas

This is the latest in our occasional series of karma-building exercises we hope will eventually lead to the return of the spare cat, who went out to buy gum about 8 months ago and hasn't come back. Most of these were posted in or around the Centro over the last month and a half.

Fairly nondescript mutt with green collar lost in Centro. 442-359-2169; 442-112-8521

8-month-old Shiba Inu named "Sushi." 148-2333

"Lula," shown actual size. Missing for three weeks in the Centro. 212-4665; 224-1070

Oh, look - pitbull on the loose! "Malaka," age 5 months. 044-4142-26-38-37

This one came in via Facebook. Went missing not too far from where the pitbull flier was posted. Probably just a coincidence...

[Previously, Previously, Previously.]

And On the 91st Day of Christmas...

...Correos de Mexico delivered to us what we think is the last Christmas card of 2010, which was postmarked from London on December 18.

What's amazing to us is not that it took more than twice as long as Christopher Columbus to cross the Atlantic, but that it took an entire week to travel from the La Cruz post office, where it arrived on March 18, to our offices - a distance (marked here in yellow) of probably 700 yards. Seriously, if not for a couple of tall-ish buildings in between, we could see the post office from our roof.

This is the reason why we never tip on Mailman's Day, and probably also the inevitable result of that decision.

American Gothic

Because the United States is the world's leading producer of school-shooting victims, state and local officials often find it advisable to hold multi-agency training drills involving make-believe terror scenarios, on the unimpeachably wise theory that actual armed-standoff/ hostage situations do not lend themselves well to on-the-job learning. And so it was that officials in Pottawattamie County, Iowa, scheduled such a drill for this afternoon, with the make-believe scenario being a group of "young white supremacists shooting dozens of people amid rising tensions involving racial minorities and illegal immigrants who moved into the area."

We will state here for the record that this scenario was inadvisable. Not because it could never happen, but because, well, stop us if you can see where this is going.

The fact that the fake shooters were white, heavily-armed domestic terrorists angry about illegal immigration, and the victims Hispanic, infuriated actual white, heavily-armed domestic terrorists angry about illegal immigration, who spent much of the last few days besieging Pottawattamie County's Emergency Management Agency, sheriff's office and School Superintendent's office with angry phone calls and emails, including at least one actual shooting threat. Upon which Pottawattamie County officials realized they never should have suggested that white, heavily-armed domestic terrorists angry about illegal immigration, were in any way threatening or dangerous, and canceled the exercise before their baseless insinuations get somebody killed - leaving Pottawattamie County security agents and emergency response teams unprepared to deal with the kind school-shooting that seems always to happen in places with names like "Pottawattamie County."

Anti-immigrant groups - the vast majority of whom do not have children in the Pottawattamie County school system - are of course celebrating, apparently no longer concerned that Muslim, La Raza, or eco-terrorist gunmen could someday open fire on those kids while the county's untrained personnel stand helplessly by. With any luck, there'll be some Mexican laborers working nearby.

Sábado Gigante

* Burro Hall Headquarters has no shortage of communications devices - a pair of US-based Vonage phones, a TelMex land line, a variety of US- and Mexican-based cellphones, four computers, a half-dozen email addresses and a blog with a comments section - and all of them are working just fine. And yet an entire week has gone by without anyone in the US State Dept. contacting us about the job vacancy. Dude, we're already in-country, we speak perfect English, know the Mexican National Anthem by heart, voted for you in the last election (or would have, if not for the long lines) and, most importantly, we know better than to put our unpopular personal opinions in writing! Hit us up in comments (unless you want to talk salary and benefits, in which case use the email).

* With the scope of the US government-sanctioned arms smuggling into Mexico becoming more embarrassing every day, this was the perfect week for the Homeland Security Secretary to declare border security "the best it's ever been" because Mexican violence isn't spilling over. Proving once again that everyone from Arizona is an idiot.

*Priorities: While Mexican officials are cracking down on counterfeit DVDs, an (allegedly) fake Mayan relic sells at auction in Paris for $4.1 million. The Year of Mexico in France, indeed.

* The Year of Mexico in France II: New Hermes scarves feature Otomí embroidery. Counterfeit versions to arrive at Otomí-run tianguis by early summer.

* Thirteen illegal immigrants tried to drive into the US disguised as United States Marines. Their van's license plate was crudely altered with paint, and all 13 men wore uniforms emblazoned with the same name: Perez. "This effort is an example of the lengths smugglers will go to avoid detection," a Border Patrol spokesperson said, which is, when you think about it, pretty reassuring.

* The Mexican border patrol agent from yesterday's post is now under investigation. Maybe the best way to reform Mexico would be for Bill Gates to buy and distribute 10 million video cameras. (Won't happen - but this is a good start.)

* Instead, Gates bought 15% of Mexico's largest Coca-Cola bottler. Now, every time we see an obese, diabetic child waddling home from school with a two-liter bottle of Coke under his chubby little arm, we'll smile knowing Bill Gates is 20 cents closer to toppling Carlos Slim as the World's Richest Man. These colors don't run!

* In other child-endangerment news, the American Academy of Pediatrics now says children should travel in rear-facing car seats until the age of 2. But the study only compared this with forward-face car seats, not with standing up in the lap of their unseatbelted mother in the front seat, so Mexican parents are free to disregard it.

* The late Mrs. Hilton-Wilding-Todd-Fisher-Burton-Burton-Warner-Fortensky's Mexican legacy.

* We suppose our revulsion at Mexico's mistreatment of prisoners should extend to all of them, but for some reason it just doesn't.

* We're also not big on the slaughter of harp seals, but still found the anti-harp-seal-slaughter protest in Querétaro a little baffling.

* We know we shit on the Failed State of Arizona a lot, so, for the record: any place so spectacularly fucked up that a washed-up actor and alleged sex-slave-trafficker can persuade a failed sheriff to let him commandeer two tanks and a SWAT team to apprehend an unarmed fighting-cock farmer for an episode of his low-rated reality show is a place we're sincerely thankful to know exists. We just wish it were further away, that's all.

* And in more good FSoAZ news, the legislature finally passes a law against racial discrimination! For fetuses.

* Somehow we missed the publication of Illegal: Life and Death in Arizona's Immigration War Zone.

* When we see stories like this, about the hardships endured by the children of immigrant farmworkers, we think, "Those children need to be punished as severely as possible." Because that's the American Way.

* If we had $2012 and couldn't think of a stupider fucking way to spend it, we'd have attended the GOP Joes Summit Meeting - Arpaio, Miller and the Plumber - brought to you by the "Our Country Deserves Better PAC," a name that's hard to argue with. (For instance, in Our Country, the plural of "Joe" is not "Joe's"...)

* MexiLeaks: Mexico's super-secret aerial drone program apparently got a lot less-super secret when a couple of them were added to the Independence Day Military Parade last year, prompting a citizen to file a FOIA request.

* Haley Barbour will never get the GOP nomination now.

* Fun with statistics: The headline says there are 16% fewer Catholics in Mexico, but that's (a) compared to 1950, and (b) somehow a reduction from 98% of the population to 89% equals a drop of 16 percent, which is not how we remember math working. The percentage of atheists appears to have increased 666%, though, so watch out, Baby Jesus.

* "Juan Pablo, Segundo/ Te quiere poco del mundo!" A mere 0.0025% of the world's Catholics "Like" John Paul II's Facebook page. This is an even smaller percentage than the 0.0028% of New Mexico election ballots cast by illegal aliens in the past seven years.

* Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be done. Case in point: chipotle-flavored vodka.

* The Year of Mexico in France III: American sex-offender flees to Mexico, then Paris, then back to Mexico.

* How pro-life is Querétaro? Even our airplanes don't "abort" their takeoffs - they "reject" them.

* Spring Break visitors to Acapulco are down 93% from last year, meaning that has literally never been a better time to go.

* Slow week for Mexican Cheesecake. We've got Juliette Lewis, but notable mostly for the use of "bikini" as a verb.

* Is there any way that El Santo in The Treasure of Dracula could get any better? Duh! How 'bout adding naked she-vampires!

* Searching YouTube for "Electro Dance Queretaro" pulls up 56 different (yet similar) videos. We have no idea what it's about.

Angel Baby

Querétaro, which leads all Mexican states in both domestic abuse complaints and teenage pregnancies, where sex education has been replaced by an additional hour of singing the National Anthem, and where abortion is 100% illegal - so illegal, in fact, that the state constitution designates fertilized eggs as full citizens - also has an entire church dedicated to the preservation of not-yet-born teen-moms-to-be. And that church has declared today "The Day of Life," announced around town with posters featuring this not-at-all-creepy image from the Sonogram of Turin.

Church authorities generously scheduled this celebration on the day of the 100th Anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, thus allowing us to contemplate how far women's freedoms have advanced in certain areas, while remaining relatively stagnant or sliding backwards in others. We're sure a more thoughtful blog would have done this, but we just wanted to make fun of their stupid poster.

Clearly, He Didn't Watch "Machete" All The Way Through

Today's El Universal has a series of pictures on the front page of a border patrol agent menacing an illegal immigrant with a machete. The twist is that the agent is Mexican and the wetback is a Honduran woman swimming across the river on Mexico's southern border.

For the country with the world's largest percentage of its population living in other countries, Mexico can have some surprisingly... Arizonan attitudes towards immigrants. We don't just mean this incident above - hell, that's just garden-variety abuse-of-power, and quite mild by Mexican standards. But according to a recent survey, 66% of Mexicans agree that illegal aliens should be deported. Forty percent would not want to live with a foreigner. And before we take personal offense, "foreigner" almost certainly doesn't mean "gringo." The survey says that Americans and Spaniards are the most respected nationalities here - if you want Mexicans to love you, just colonize and enslave them, plunder their riches and then steal half their country in a war - while only 36% have favorable views of Guatemalans, and 40% are happy to allow law enforcement to racially profile Central Americans. (This last one make us genuinely curious, since [at the risk of offending everyone involved] we have no idea how that would work.)

Anyway, the north-of-the-Rio-Bravo anti-immigrant crowd will surely point to this as a sign of unforgivable hypocrisy on Mexico's part, and we're inclined to agree. But since the woman in the pictures above was almost certainly planning to dry off and catch a freight train to the Failed State of Arizona, it seems to us they should be applauding, since the machete-wielding INM agent is simply saving the Minutemen the trouble of doing the same thing a few weeks later.

Oh, the story on the left is about how the US Border Patrol allowed guns to be smuggled into Mexico, including the same type of "ICE Breaker" pistols used to gun down one of their Homeland Security brethren earlier this year, etc., etc., blah, blah, blah...

Change, We Can Believe In

We can't recall if we've written about this or merely bitched about it over drinks with anyone who would listen, but just what the fuck is it with Mexicans and change? Not change in the Obama-sloganeering sense, but in the "money back at the point of purchase" sense. We can't count how many times we've gone to the newsstand to purchase 17 pesos worth of delicious yellow journalism, only to have the woman look positively stricken when we hand her a 20. At this point, she's probably been selling papers for at least an hour, hour and a half. For those unclear on the exchange rate, we're looking to get back about 25 cents. Often this involves dispatching her child to a neighboring newsstand to do God only knows what in exchange for three pesos, during which time we find ourselves standing there wondering if all children run this slowly, or just this one.

So yesterday we were meeting some major advertisers for lunch, and on the way we stopped off at an ATM, which, to our horror, was dispensing only 500-peso ($40) notes, which is basically the same as not having money at all, unless you're purchasing something that costs 497 pesos or more - and even then. The clients told us they wanted Italian, "in honor of Sofia Loren's passing." We were about to explain that it was Liz Taylor who died, but frankly, we liked the idea of pizza. So we went to Italianni's - which, aside from actually having really good pizza, had the advantage of being a chain. A chain: multiple locations, an actual business plan, employees wearing matching uniforms, laminated menus with color photographs and, in Italianni's case, a half-dozen pizza-delivery motorcycles parked outside. In short, a place that should be able to break a large bill.

We run up a tab of about 200 pesos (Mexican pizza is cheap) and hand over a 500. So we're looking for about 25 US dollars in change here. "Have a seat, we'll bring you your change," we were told (in English, because this place is legit enough that even the register clerks are multi-lingual). Would you be surprised to learn that all our food arrived, and still no change? "It's coming," we were assured, as one of the delivery bikes screeched away. Dessert? Coffee? Still no change.

Eventually we learned that the delivery guy had been dispatched with our 500-peso bill to go... well, it's not clear to us where he was going, but someplace - the bank maybe? - that could give him change. The explanation - delivered politely and apologetically - was that "we only opened an hour ago."

Do Mexican managers close up shop at night, take all the cash on premises with them, deposit it in the bank every morning before opening, and then come to work hoping that all today's customers will have exact change? This is the only reason we can think of that a successful chain restaurant would not have 25 dollars in the register at 2:00 in the afternoon. Might we suggest perhaps keeping a small safe somewhere in the establishment? It seems safer to us than having the manager carry they days receipts home with him at night. We've met the manager - he came over twice to apologize - and think we could totally kick his ass.

Anyway, the 45 minutes (no, really) we spent waiting for our change allowed us to admire the restaurant's pre-fab decor, including this poster for La Donna di Notte, about which IMDB has little to say except that it's an Italian documentary from 1962, released in English as Women by Night. It seems from the poster to be a survey of swingin', super-glamorous, international jet-setting nightlife. The poster lists the seven hottest hotspots on Earth, circa 1962,  and while we don't think Acapulco would make the list today, we're kind of shocked to see Haiti making the list even back then. We know things were different under Papa Doc, but not that different.

So change isn't always good, we admit.  But sometimes it is. 

El Oso

Retired general Carlos Bibiano Villa Castillo was until recently the public safety director of Torreón, where his policy was literally "Kill'em All, Let God Sort 'em Out." He left his job not because anyone had a problem with that - everyone seemed more or less cool with the whole extra-judicial executions thing - but because he got a better offer: public safety director for the state of Quintana Roo, which he begins in a couple of weeks. We don't have a whole lot to say about this except to note that for some odd reason Gen. Villa arrived for his first day in Quintana Roo dressed as the 1986 Super Bowl. We don't know much about the security situation in QR, but if he can pull the various agencies together the way he pulls together the Pats and Bears in one magnificent sartorial package, we predict a lopsided victory for the forces of law and order.

On the other hand, a combination of arrogance, hubris and an abundance of swagger can lead otherwise sensible people to make total jackasses of themselves:



What Would Walter Peyton Do?

Querétaro: Slugging Our Way To The Top

Congratulations, Querétaro! You're the wife-beatingest state on the whole Republic of Mexico! According to the Centro Nacional de Vigilancia Epidemiológica - sort of Mexico's CDC - there have been 430 reported cases of domestic violence in the first two months of the year. That's apparently second only to Guanajuato's 620, but since Guanjuato has three times the population of Querétaro, We're Number One! (Sorry, baby, didn't mean to make you flinch...I was just throwing up my arms in victory, that's all.)

This story is another example of the difficulty in obtaining accurate data here, despite Mexicans' obsessive love of statistics. (Seriously. The same newspaper has articles on Querétaro's one million Catholics; eight bishops; 35,000 equinox tourists; and 45 traffic accidents, and in none of these articles is the statistic an incidental fact - rather, it's the whole point of the story.) If you want to read the actual Centro Nacional de Vigilancia Epidemiológica study or press release, you can go to their website and try to find it, but good luck. The last new release is dated Sept. 8, 2010. Meanwhile, because the article we're quoting appears in a Mexican newspaper, it's almost entirely devoid of helpful factual information - for instance, are the rankings weighted by population? Because if Querétaro (pop. 1.8 million) has more domestic abuse cases than Estado de México (pop. 15 million), that's worthy of a presidential-level blue-ribbon study group, at the very least. (Of course, the article doesn't give statistics for more than a handful of other states. Colima is ranked last, with four reported cases, which makes us wonder more about the efficacy of Colima's 066 hotline system than anything else.)

The article goes on to cite estimates by independent women's groups that there are three women killed in Querétaro every month - so, like 36 a year, or about 3.8 per 100,000. Which is actually kind of low, but almost three times higher than the rate being quoted by INEGI just a month an a half ago, which we quoted in a post celebrating how un-wifebeatingish Querétaro is.

So there we have it. Querétaro: either the worst place in Mexico to be a woman, or one of the best. Who's to say? Burro Hall may or may not regret the error it may have made. Or not.

Aging Bull

Update: About three weeks ago we brought you this photo we took of some dead bulls lying on the side of the highway.

In case you were wondering what a pair of dead bulls looks like after an additional three weeks in the Querétaro sun, it's basically this:

Like two giant meat balloons slowly leaking air.

Given the state's love of pointless make-work projects, we have no idea why they can't put together a 12-man Taurine Carcass Removal Squad and drag these things out to a landfill before they infect the entire city with anthrax.

Money Talks

Ah, the Failed State of Arizona, where everyone and everything is drenched in the stench of failure. With the lone exception of Maricopa's own Bristol Palin snagging the bronze in Dancing With The Stars, the state doesn't seem to be able to do anything right. They accuse the Federal government of failing to enforce Federal immigration laws while simultaneously proposing legislation that would allow the state to ignore any laws they don't feel like enforcing. They pass the nation's toughest anti-Mexican law, which costs the state much-needed Federal dollars while doing nothing to stop the "Hispanification" of its population. President Obama yields to the state's temper tantrum and sends National Guard troops to patrol the border, but when he announces that the deployment will end in June (as scheduled), the Governess pitches another fit, while Republicans in Congress - true to their Big Government, tax-and-spend beliefs - threaten to hold their breath until more taxpayer resources are directed at the FSoAZ. The Federal government already fought a war to get Arizona in the first place. It's easy to imagine there's some buyer's remorse up on Capitol Hill these days.

And through it all, opponents of the anti-Mexican law have called for a boycott of all things Arizonan - a boycott Burro Hall has scrupulously upheld, after making exceptions for Fender and, obviously, Taser. The boycott elicited mostly derision from the right, while the state legislature decided to double-down on the craziness and defiantly proposed a passel of laws designed to make SB1070 look like it was written by the National Council of La Raza. And the measures - five laws in all - failed! Why? Because the boycott succeeded. Or at least it did if you believe the dirty hippies at some left-wing outfit called the Arizona Chamber of Commerce.

[T]he Chamber, like many other business organizations, was neutral on SB 1070 last year, believing that the bill mostly dealt with law enforcement issues and did not directly affect the workplace.

But as we watched the unintended consequences unfold, we saw that Arizona businesses were taking a direct hit to their bottom line in the midst of a deep recession. Conventions were canceled, companies lost contracts, boycotts were carried out and the state’s image took a hit. There was an economic price to pay for Arizona going it alone.

I talk to business leaders every day. They are genuinely worried about what another spate of bad publicity could mean for their business and their employees.

Over 20 chambers of commerce from across the state have signed a letter urging the Legislature to turn back legislation that would redefine the concept of citizenship.

Sixty CEOs and corporate executives signed a letter[*] calling on the Legislature not to pass additional state-level immigration legislation and instead direct its energy to pressing Congress for meaningful immigration reform.

*[We note that Fender and Taser are not among the signatories - a testament to the awesome ability of Burro Hall to move markets.]

Martin Luther King, Jr, really loved a good, effective boycott, which is probably why Arizona was one of the last states to approve (despite the threat of boycott) making his birthday a holiday.

In honor of the Failed State of Arizona's slight left turn towards sanity, we considered upgrading its status to the Failing State of Arizona. But then we saw that the Baja Arizona movement has managed to get its website up and running, which raises questions about Governess Brewer's ability to control the separatist elements within her own borders. So, for now "Failed State of Arizona" it is.

Is Our Children Learnin'?

We flunked high school Spanish, too, but no one threw us a parade.


Student Protests Spanish Requirement - KRIV 26 - MyFoxHouston.com

Feelin' Groovy

We visited Cuernavaca for an expatriate blog summit meeting several years ago - we don't remember exactly when, but before it became the government's favorite place to assassinate drug barons - and stayed at a hotel whose tv played an endless loop of a 1965 movie called Cuernavaca In Springtime, a so-bad-it's-good sex farce that really deserves a greater presence on YouTube than it currently enjoys. The first few minutes of this clip are priceless, since this band of hepcats seems to have wandered in from a Frankie & Annette film set in Malibu, not in Morelos, the home state of Emiliano Zapata. Every now and then Mexico defies the stereotypes.

Spring Comes to Burro Hall

Where the gato has been waiting for it all winter...

Primavera

Spring is finally here, and while it's admittedly not such a big deal when it's been a consistent 75 degrees all winter, we spent enough decades living in the frigid northeast to consider the equinox one of the happiest days of the year. So here's the Diocese of Querétaro to shit on it for us:

The spokesman for the Diocese of Querétaro, Saúl Ragoitia, expressed regret that people continue to engage in the rituals for spring, which only serve to restrict their freedom of self-determination.

In a press conference, he rejected the idea that people should put their faith in "energy, talismans, amulets, the zodiac and witchcraft," such as the spring equinox rituals that occur in various locations.

Oh, hey, thanks for stopping by, Rev. -- haven't seen you since you were condemning trick-or-treaters to the fires of hell a few months ago! Of course, we've been slamming the equinox thing for years, based on our personal impatience with hippie-dippy horseshit and the fact that, while the idea that the ancients "recharged their energy" this way is nonsense, the damage it does to the nation's archeological heritage is quite real. But since we reflexively support everything the Jesus Mafia opposes, we'll take this opportunity to direct local readers to Querétaro's only pyramid and also this really big rock, which is inexplicably popular with the equinox crowd despite being nothing but a really big rock). The good vibes reach their peak at 5:21PM.

Sábado Gigante

* Two more people spontaneously combusted here this week, bring the year's total to four. In fact, dozens of people spontaneously combust each year. It's just not really widely reported. In other dead-queretanos news, five (5) have died in the US so far this year, putting this state with a population equal to West Virginia's on pace to receive about 30 pine-box shipments from Gringolandia this year. (Not counting the 33 who mysteriously disappeared a year ago.) Strangely, the local government has yet to issue a travel advisory.

* At least 80 Mexicans decide that an earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown zone is worse place to live than Mexico.

* We're all for killing the bad guys and stuff, but we can't help thinking that the Torreon Public Security Director's new policy of extra-judicial killings without trial is a step backwards. Like, 300 years backwards.

* Meanwhile, the head of the Mexican Lawyer's Association dropped into town yesterday to urge Querétaro lawyers not to defended accused drug traffickers, which makes us think someone's unclear on the reason lawyers exist.

* On the other hand, the defense lawyer from Presumed Guilty got his law degree at Querétaro's Universidad Anáhuac.

* If you missed the Discovery Channel's "Hiena de Querétaro," here it is in one two three parts.

* A Ferrari that once drove the length of Mexico without getting carjacked sells at auction for $4.29 million.

* Our Comment of the Week comes not from our comment section, but from Twitter, where we were declared the Mexican interweb's most "grappigste" blog, which we believe means "grape pigsty."

* The Catholic Church's official publication blames the US for the drug violence in Mexico. The sound you're hearing is the heads of people who can't decide which they love more - guns or the Baby Jesus - exploding.

* Hopefully, the Academy won't treat Saving Private Perez with the same contempt it treated Machete.



* No Regrets, Coyote: Steven Seagal hunts human traffickers in the Failed State of Arizona, finds one in his own home.

* FSoAZ Governess Jan Brewer goes all-in on courting the white supremacist vote. On the plus side, it might result in more of the state's ammo being kept in-house.

* We're sure the majority leader of the FSoAZ state senate had an excellent reason for smacking his girlfriend around, but thanks to the state's legislative immunity laws he doesn't have to tell us what it was.

* The Texas Agriculture Dept. - apparently no longer being run by Jim Hightower - unveiled its new border vigilante website this week. The state legislature, meanwhile, is pondering a bill to make discrimination illegal. Well, against creationists, anyway.

* We were shocked to learn there are at least three Jews in Mexico, not counting the Reyes Magos.

* And apparently they're not shy about passing around the Manischewitz.

* Imagine waking up and remembering you're Mexican.

* PBS indoctrinates children to not loathe illegal aliens. Republicans coincidentally propose bill to cut off Federal funding.

* Mexico's nanny-state bureaucrats try to limit the amount of junk food sold in elementary schools, but free-market capitalists courageously defend the dream of making Mexico the Fattest, Most Diabetic Nation on Earth.

* Yes, War for Oil! The UN approves the use of force against Libya on the 73rd Anniversary of the nationalization of the Mexican oil industry, when Mexico drove out the Americans and the Brits and replaced them with smokin'-hot chicas like these Pemex employees parading in Veracruz yesterday:

* Via the MexFiles, Aldous Huxley's Mexican travelogue.

* From Awesome Gang Names Dept., meet The Knights Templar.

* The Mexican Congress literally eats shit.

* Jim Cramer, man of the people, reminds us that Spring Break in Mexico can be pretty nice if you're a gazillionaire.

* Mexico's only atomic clock is located here in Querétaro. Accurate to within plus or minus 90 minutes per week. (In the unlikely event anyone in Mexico actually gives a shit what time it is, you can find out here.)

* The President of Mexico and the US Ambassador have got a great Old-School beef going: talkin' smack about guns, drugs and each other's crews, and even bangin' a rival's daughter just because, hey, fuck you. A word of advice: This shit's bad for business. If you boys don't take care of this, Suge Knight's gonna take care of this, dig?

Update: US Ambassador shot dead behind the wheel of his Cadillac Escalade outside Caesar's Palace.

* Tonight, Calderón will be burned in effigy on the streets of Valencia. But it's all good.

* The real-life President Calderón was in San Miguel this week for the opening of the Rosewood Hotel. To repeat, the president of the Republic of Mexico traveled 200 miles to cut the ribbon on a new hotel. We're booking him now for our 2011 office holiday party.

What Passes For a Belated St. Patrick's Day Post Around Here

Despite our impeccably PC reverence for all thing indigenous, we generally don't think it's a big deal when we hear that another of Mexico's 360-plus indigenous languages is headed for the scrap heap. Maybe it's because we hate languages. Or because, if the trend continues, eventually Spanish itself will disappear, thus saving us the trouble of mastering the subjunctive. But mostly it's because we believe that a lot of indigenous people are genuinely handicapped by an inability to speak Spanish, so while it's nice to cling to parts of one's heritage, speaking the language of the majority can only be beneficial. (Our family's last native Gaelic speaker passed away in 1977; we'd probably miss her more if we'd ever been able to understand a word she was saying.)

This is why we can chuckle guilt-free at the imminent demise of Ayapaneco, a language so obscure it doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. That means we have to make some stuff up here, but we're probably not widely off the mark in assuming Ayapaneco's decline began with a gift of smallpox-infected blankets back in the mid-16th Century, and continued steadily as Catholic missionaries forced the people to speak the same language as Jesus Christ: Spanish.

But in the mid-20th Century (we're done with the making-it-up part now) there were still about 8,000 Ayapaneco-speaking families in and around the town of Jalpa de Méndez, Tabasco. Jalpa de Méndez is apparently a real shithole, because as soon as the Villahermosa-Comalcalco Highway was constructed nearby, a steady stream of Ayapaneco-speakers left town as quickly as possible - until, now, half a century later, the world's known community of Ayapaneco-speakers numbers in the low single-digits.

Two, to be precise. Named Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velázquez, 69.

And they refuse to speak to each other.

No one knows exactly why the world's last two speakers of Ayapaneco have fallen out with each other - perhaps they're trying to tell us, but we can't understand them because we don't speak Ayapaneco. But this raises all sorts of questions that make us wish we paid attention in class while we were earning a philosophy degree 20 year ago: If the only people who can speak a language refuse to do so, does the language still, in fact exist? And if the answer is yes, then why would it be considered 'extinct' after they both die? If either of these guys talks out loud to himself, does that count? And how bad would it suck if the only other person who spoke your language was a prick or a bore?

A few years ago, a couple of Stanford University linguists compiled an Ayapaneco-Spanish Dictionary (mostly by getting Segovia and Velázquez to point at things and call out their names, sort of the way Anne Sullivan taught Helen Keller.) Does the dictionary mean the language will never die? And why don't the guys who wrote it count as Ayapaneco-speakers? Surely their Ayapaneco is as good as our Spanish.

One thing we know for sure - our Gaelic-speaking great-nana would have admired the way those damn Ayapaneco hold a grudge.

Merger Mania

You'll come for the pizza...but you'll stay for the automatic transmission.

The Day the Eagle Cried

It's an article of faith among the "Aliens are Evil" crowd that the first thing illegal aliens will do when they arrive in the US (after signing up for welfare and giving birth to triplets, of course) is to start voting illegally in our elections. There's never been a lot of evidence for this - hell, most US citizens don't even bother voting - but since when has evidence ever figured in the immigration debate?

Since now, that's when! The Secretary of State of New Mexico - America's most-Latino state (duh, it's got "Mexico" right in the name) - just completed an exhaustive investigation of the state's voter rolls, and discovered to her horror that Illegal Aliens Voted in New Mexico Elections!

The implications are huge. The secretary of state said the votes cast by foreign nationals are not only illegal, but they may have changed the outcomes of some of our close elections,” Duran said.

Specifically, a total of thirty-seven (37) illegal-alien votes have been cast in nine statewide elections going back to 2003. To get a sense of the hugeness of the implications here, we sent a pair of research interns over to the Secretary of State's office in Santa Fe to go through some of the data. In those nine elections, a total of 1,288,278 votes were cast. But when you factor out those 37 illegal alien votes, only 1,288,241 - a mere 99.9971293 percent - were legitimate.  99.9971293% may be acceptable in Mexico, but in America 0.002872 can mean the difference between freedom and... the opposite of freedom.

Why so quiet, "Governor" Richardson?

Nothing to See Here, Folks. Literally.

Someone mentioned in comments a few days ago that pirated DVDs of Presumed Guilty were doing a roaring trade in Mexico City. We were going to write up a post after our Sunday visit to the mercado confirming that the same is true here, but we got distracted by beer and, well, you know... But just about all the pirate DVD stalls have made up signs announcing that they've got the film, most of them are playing it in a continuous loop on their TVs, and one guy even made an entire wall display of Presumed Guilty box covers, like he'd studied showroom design at RISD or something. We're not oblivious to the irony of an illegal black market trade in a crusading-for-justice movie, but with the film's legal status uncertain, it strikes us as a positive thing that hundreds of thousands of Mexicans are getting to see it by any means necessary.

So, not surprisingly, the mercado here was struck by a bold pre-dawn raid (well, the Querétaro equivalent of pre-dawn, anyway - like, 10:30am) by a couple-dozen heavily-armed officers from the AFI (Mexico's FBI) who swooped in and, having solved all other crimes in the city, confiscated 10,000 pirated DVDs - several thousand of which were surely copies of Presumed Guilty.

The raid was lighting-quick - the agents were gone in less than 20 minutes, which is pretty fast for boxing up 10,000 pieces of evidence - and unimpeded by any contact with the DVD sellers, all of whom fled the minute the agents pulled up. Perhaps that's an admission of guilt (we're not totally naive, you know), but perhaps they were also aware of the case of Jacinta Francisco, an indigenous queretana grandmother who, during a similar pirate-DVD raid a few years ago, was accused of kidnapping a half dozen AFI agents and spent three years in jail after a trial so farcical that the sentence got reversed even without having been filmed for a hit movie. That left the agents free to confiscate everything in sight and simply cart it away without documentation (again, we're not complete rubes, but maybe some of the materials were not copyrighted?), and without actually arresting or fining anyone.

So, to review: Movie about Mexican judicial corruption is hottest-selling bootleg DVD in the country. Mexican Justice Department develops sudden interest in cracking down on bootleg DVDs. DVD sellers, aware of previous gross miscarriage of justice by AFI during pirate-DVD raid, offer no resistance. Agents cart away bootleg DVDs, with no pretense of arresting or prosecuting any criminals. Thousands of copies of movie about Mexican judicial corruption now scheduled to be destroyed by Mexican Justice Department, all in the name of justice.

Nothing to see here. Move along, everybody.

Less Talk, More Cock

Because intertube blog-thingies don't have to be factchecked, we can just pass on these statistics from the Mexican Association of Fighting Cock Raisers without ruining everything by checking it out.

Photo: InQro.com

The Cocksmen staged a protest here a couple days ago over a small town's refusal to allow a cockfighting tournament to take place there. In reminding us that it's all about jobs, the association maintains that, in Querétaro alone (the 29th-smallest state in Mexico), there are 13,000 cockfights every year, involving 400,000(!) birds, which come from 2,000 farms, which employ 20,000(!!) people, and which generate (nationwide, not just in Querétaro) 1.5 billion pesos - about $120 million - in revenue for the government, mostly though permit fees.

We've managed to live here for four years without ever seeing a cockfight, and only seldom see them advertised - but, again, we don't want to ruin it by questioning the assertion that there are 35 sanctioned cockfights a day, every day, here in li'l ol' QRO, each involving 32 or more birds - or to quibble with the notion that the queretano fighting-cock industry employs as many people as Perdue Farms. Instead, we'll just applaud the honesty of the Association's president, Efraín Rábago Echégoyen, who says that if these governmental obstacles and delays are allowed to continue, they'll just have to hold "clandestine" cockfights instead. In other words, "if you don't let us do this legally, we'll have no choice but to do it illegally." As lobbyists go, this guy's cock is bigger than most.

See you at Fight Club!

Everybody Panic!

We were having one of our gin-fueled editorial meetings last night, reviewing the news of the day, particularly the increasingly apocalyptic situation in Japan, when someone remarked - not in a racist, Top Gear kind of way, but rather with the wisdom that comes from four years living in Mexico - that if an earthquake-tsunami-nuclear meltdown trifecta has to happen somewhere, isn't it more confidence-inspiring to know it's happening in Japan and not, say, Mexico? I mean, can you imagine?

Actually, we can.

This is the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant, located a tsunami-proof 50 feet from the Gulf of Mexico in Alto Lucero, Veracruz, with an ocean view uninterrupted by any sea wall that we can see.  Laguna Verde is Mexico's only nuke plant, providing about 3% of the country's electricity since it went online 20 years ago.  (This being Mexico, you'll be pleased to know that Laguna Verde once held the world record for Most Consecutive Days of Uninterrupted Operation During a First Generation Cycle - 250 days.)

Yes, yes, we can hear you saying, but what about earthquakes? Not to worry, amigos, the state of Veracruz hasn't had an earthquake in more than two weeks - and it was just a puny 5.7! So the odds that we'll get to see how Mexican bureaucrats and public utility employees would react to a Daiichi-type disaster are... well, we'll get the Statistics Department crunching those numbers and update you later. Sleep well.

(Meanwhile, the Energy Dept. here is reexamining their plans to build more nuke plants in light of recent developments in the Land of the Rising Sun, so chalk one up for Mexican prudence.)

The Road Best Not Taken

Sure, there's plenty of room on the sidewalk to anchor this enormous street sign/stop light combination, but it's just as easy to put the thick metal post right out in the street, on a curve, in the middle of a crosswalk, and then paint the post the same color as the pavement and the night sky.

Corner of Universidad and Circumvalacion, Querétaro Centro

What could possibly go wrong?

Flag Waving

As all Mexican school kids and a handful of particular attentive American ones know, the United States and Mexico butted heads repeatedly over a period of about a decade and a half in the 1830s and '40s. The result was that the US walked away with about 525,000 square miles of Mexican territory, comprising what is today Texas, New Mexico, The Failed State of Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, while Mexico got a flag from the Alamo and another reason to feel victimized.

So with relations between the two countries growing more agitated by the day, and Mexico mired in a murderous quagmire of a drug war, you'll be happy to know that in the interest of improving bilateral relations, Texas wants Mexico to give the flag back.

Houston Rep. John Zerwas knows he's only the latest in a long line of Texas politicians hoping to bring home a famous flag that flew at the Battle of the Alamo.

For nearly 80 years, Texans have unsuccessfully negotiated with the Mexican government to reclaim the New Orleans Greys flag, the only remaining banner known to have flown at the legendary fight 175 years ago.

So what's different in 2011?

Not a whole lot, actually.

"But what we know for sure is that if we don't ask, it won't happen," said Zerwas, a Republican.

He filed a bill last week that would encourage Gov. Rick Perry to work with Mexican officials to - at the very least - bring the flag to Texas on a temporary basis.

It's probably not even worth pointing out that Mexico, y'know, won the Battle of the Alamo. But regardless, Zerwas knows he needs to work fast. When Texas secedes later this year, it's likely to take Mexico a while to establish diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors, and by then, who knows where those crafty Messicans will have hidden his flag.

Mujeres Asesinas

If we were looking for a tagline for this site, "The Hyena of Querétaro" would definitely be on the short list. So we were disappointed to learn that this phrase had already been taken by a local woman, Claudia Mijangos Arzac, 22 years ago. Actually, it was bestowed on her by the press after she decided one night, for no reason that she ever managed to explain, to butcher her three young children to death with a kitchen knife. In other words, she'd probably be willing to let us use it if we asked.

Unfortunately, the Discovery Channel's Latin American division beat us to it, and tonight "La Hiena de Querétaro: The Claudia Mijangos Story" airs as part of the "Instinto Asesino" series.

The Hyena is still caged up, but owing to the weirdness of local laws that make it almost impossible to condemn someone's property, her house/scene of the crime at c. Hacienda Vegil 408, in Colonia Jardines de la Hacienda, has sat abandoned and unsecured since 1989. Wandering through the 'haunted' ruins and posting the video on YouTube seems to be a popular pastime with the kids these days.

Please Make Up Your Mind

Poor Columbus, New Mexico. Back in 1916, frustrated by, among other things, his inability to secure a steady flow of firearms from the US, Pancho Villa crossed the border and raided the town - which, unfortunately for him, was home to a 300-man US Cavalry garrison. Eighteen Americans and 80 of Villa's men died in the fighting, making it the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil prior to Sept. 11, 2001.

So on the 95th anniversary of the raid, the town's mayor, police chief and nine others sought to make things right by finally arranging for an enormous cache of firearms - AK-47-type "ICE Breaker" pistols and American Tactical 9mm pistols, 1,580 rounds of 7.62 ammunition and 30 high-capacity magazines - to be smuggled into Mexico...and what thanks do they get? Oh, nothing much - just an 84-count federal indictment.  And the Mexicans are of course outraged at the disclosure.

Running guns from Columbus into Mexico: damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves

The Mexico City bullfighting season comes to a close this afternoon with an event unprecedented in the plaza's 65-year history: all three toreros - excuse us, toreras - have lady parts. The bulls, on the other hand, will still be all man, with two sharp horns and an average weight of 1,075 pounds.

Torera Lupita Lopez was interviewed this week about the pressures of being a female bullfighter, and said that the worst part was just getting to work.

"Maybe the most difficult thing for me is going out by myself, with my bags, in the airports, in the buses, having to go out at night, taking a taxi - these things that carry some risk for a man, but which are much more dangerous for a woman simply because she is a woman."

The fact that "killing a wild half-ton bull with a sword" didn't make her list of inconveniences tells you all you need to know about the size of Lupita Lopez's balls. Or, perhaps, about the hazards of driving at night in Mexico.

Sábado Gigante

* This is probably all over the front of the American papers, but just in case - there are 1,500 Mexicans living in Japan, according to the Mexican Embassy there, and 60 living in the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear meltdown zone. Presumably all five dozen of them have survived and now have Godzilla-like powers. (Machete's not looking so goddamn fictional now, is it, Arizona?) Anyway, that number is about to rise 50%, as the first wave of three dozen Mexican rescuers heads to the Land of the Rising Sun. No word yet from the Mole Men, but they're probably just tunneling through the center of the Earth rather than waiting for a flight to Narita.

* "Presumed Guilty" is back in the theaters, though this seems to change every other day. This essay (which came via the MexFiles) is an excellent discussion of why the filmmakers shouldn't have been pulling it off YouTube. We have nothing to add except for the fact that the judge who ordered it pulled from the theaters is named Blanca Lobo Domínguez, which means "White Wolf Sunday." As much as we oppose her ruling, we find it really hard not to love that name.

* Presumed guilty - A photo gallery of Mexican perp walks.

* The hometown paper had two articles last week about what selfish, self-centered people Mexican immigrants are.

* Blair River, 575-pound spokesman for Heart Attack Grill in Arizona dead at 29. Is literally everyone in Arizona a fucking idiot?

* Why, yes, everyone is! The latest super-productive FSoAZ initiative is to forge alliances with other states to nullify the rule of the Federal government. We think an excellent way to show their sincerity would be to refund the one-sixth of the money they get from Washington, since they rake in $1.19 for every $1 they pay in federal taxes. This would mean the state's death panels would be run on a volunteer basis, but tough times call for shared sacrifice.

* But thank God for that anti-immigrant crackdown! Otherwise, the New York Times might be running headlines like "Hispanics Are Surging in Arizona."

* This interview with Daniel Hernandez (author of Down and Delirious in Mexico City) reminds us that Querétaro could use, if not an English-language bookstore, maybe at least one shelf reserved for foreign books.

* Given our own deficiencies, we're reluctant to make fun of other people's English skills - but when the people in question run a bi-lingual school, we'll make an exception.

* There's not the slightest bit of evidence that Chapo Guzmán is worth a billion dollars, but the other ten Mexicans on the Forbes list are pretty solid.

* Another argument in favor of video piracy.

* It ain't as sexy as narco-porn, but it turns out that considerably more Mexicans die from boring stuff like diabetes and car crashes than from being decapitated on YouTube. Who knew?

* The Michoacán state legislature sent a rather odd letter to all other Mexican state legislatures reminding them that not all families from Michoacán are members of La Familia Michoacana, so please don't harass them.

* Memo to our friends in Wisconsin: This is how you run a teachers' strike:



* As you can see, riling up Oaxacans isn't the hardest thing in the world. But this US-sponsored mapping program does seem particularly ill-conceived.

* Given the way these fuckers drive, is anyone else astonished to learn that there have only been five Mexican drivers in the history of Formula 1 Racing?

* This 100-year-old photo of Querétaro would be going for a lot more than $9.99 if people knew you could see Burro Hall World Headquarters in it.

* If you need to learn Hñähño, but don't have time to attend classes, you can now study online.

* Likewise, if you want to read a 1605 edition of Don Quixote, but don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend, you can just click here.

* Favorite headline of the week: "Cartels Threaten Leisure." Surrender, or we'll work on our tans some more.

* Least favorite: "U.S. Agents Under the Gun in Mexico." Sam Zell really gutted that copy editing department, didn't he?

* On the other hand, we assumed the Texas-bought gun used to murder Agent Zapata, the AK Draco 7.62x39 caliber, would come to be nicknamed "The ICE Breaker" without our help, but apparently not. Anyway, you can order one online (from the FSoAZ, natch,) for just $319.95, so act now before Obama repeals the Second Amendment.

* The Pamplonada Pirotécnica in Tultepec, Mex., leaves a mere 293 people injured this year. All of them refused to leave the party to go to the hospital. Because that's how they roll in Tultepec.

* Congratulations to Cancun, the Smelliest Tourist Destination in the World. Si se puede!

* Somehow, when the world was otherwise distracted, Yanni managed to record an album of Mexican-ish music, and this album was then made available to the public. [By clicking on the video below you agree to absolve Burro Hall Enterprises, S.A., of any and all claims resulting from self-inflicted injuries or deaths.]