Our favorite local paper celebrated its 500th day of existence today, as we discovered when we saw this modest little notice on the front page. "Half a thousand" is how they put it, giving us little taste of what we can expect 500 days from now. (The non-self-celebratory half of the page is given over to the governor's prediction that the soccer team will win tomorrow's Big Game. Every major city has its slow news days, we suppose. We just seem to have four or five a week.)
Inside, the paper counts down some of the biggest stories it's covered in the last 500 days. We were pleased to see the put them installation of Archbishop Faustino Armendáriz all the way up at #3, with nary single word about it being the most embarrassing botched story of their short history of newspaper-making. New days are here, Querétaro!
Before he died, Joaquin Luna put on his best suit, white shirt
and black skinny tie, the same outfit he wore every Sunday without fail
to the Pan de Vida church in his home town of Mission, Texas. As his brother put it: "He dressed himself to go to God."
Then
he shot himself in the shower room, leaving behind a note that
explained why he ended such a promising life. He spoke of his
desperation at what he felt to be the wall blocking out his future and
preventing him from attaining his dreams.
A wall reserved for undocumented immigrants in America.
Aged
18, and in his last year at Juarez-Lincoln High School in La Joya, Luna
appeared to have it all going for him. He spoke fluent English, had
grades that were regularly 100% and never below 85%, and was skilled at
operating computer graphics.
"He was one of the smartest kids at
school. His passion was for math and engineering, and he had developed
his own blueprint for designing houses by computer programme," his elder
brother, Carlos Mendoza, says.
The one thing that Luna did not
have was the paperwork to grant him legal status in the US. He was born
in Ciudad Miguel Alemán in Mexico, right on the border with Texas.
When
he was six months old his family, including his parents and five
siblings, crossed the border without visas and travelled just about 40
miles to Mission, on the US side of the frontier.
As he grew
older, Luna grew more and more anxious about his lack of a social
security number that he would need were he ever to find a job. He used
to talk about it often to his brothers and sisters, fretting that even
if he gained a good college education, he would never be able to find
work or support a family of his own.
He also followed politics closely, reading in the newspapers about the harsh immigration laws passed in other southern states such as Alabama
and Arizona. "He got angry," Mendoza says. "He said the people passing
these laws had no heart: how could they leave so many kids without
parents and destroy so many lives?"
When the Dream Act – a law
that would have granted undocumented immigrants in higher education such
as himself permanent residency status – failed to pass the US senate last year, Luna took it heavily.
"He
got depressed real bad," Mendoza recalls. "Every one of us, we all get
depressed. Some of us can handle it, some of us can't. Joaquin
couldn't."
Shortly after 9pm on Friday, Mendoza received a call on
his cellphone from his younger brother. Luna was at their mother's
house and sounded strange on the phone.
"He told me to have a good
life, and when I asked him why he was saying that to me, he said:
'Because I'm not going to be here.'" In his last words to his brother,
Luna said that he felt he couldn't accomplish his dreams because there
was a big wall in front of him.
Fearing the worst, Mendoza began running to his mother's house, but arrived only in time to hear the retort of the gun.
The
note Luna left is in the keeping of police investigating his death.
Detectives have told family members that in it, he tells them that his
main motive for suicide was his lack of legal status and the failure of
the Dream Act.
Mendoza believes that his brother took his own life
for a purpose. "Everybody has a mission in life and I think this was
his – to communicate to people what's going on in America."
The family is planning a small funeral for Joaquin Luna on Wednesday.
At
the weekend a letter arrived for him from the University of Texas-Pan
American. It offered him a place for next year in its undergraduate
course in engineering.
We're big fan's of InQro.com's Flickr page, where they upload hundreds of local news photos and video every week. But for some strange reason they usually do this without captioning them. So instead of being a news source, it's really more of a "write your own news story" parlor game. This weekend, posted without comment or explanation, was this handout photo from the Municipal Police. Six packets of Kraft Philadelphia Light cream cheese.
Assuming that the packets of cream cheese are not themselves suspected of having committed a crime, we can surmise that they were in fact recovered by police. So:
A) Someone stole six packets of Kraft Philadelphia Light cream cheese. We know times are tough, and sympathize with anyone stealing food to feed their family, but since there are no bagels to be had in this town, these were either stolen to make cheesecake or (God forbid) sushi. If you're stealing to feed your kids, you can do better than this.
B) The local police force in a city of over 800,000 people responded to a call involving six packets of Kraft Philadelphia Light cream cheese, launched an investigation, and successfully recovered the stolen goods. No wonder there's no narco activity in this town.
C) Said police force was so proud of this effort, that they photographed the six packets of Kraft Philadelphia Light cream cheese, stamped their logo on it, and handed them out to the media, which
'Twas a night of homoerotic theater last Tuesday as the lucha libre came to Arena Querétaro. We certainly aren't the first to make the completely banal observation that there's something kinda, well, you know (not that there's anything wrong with it!) about a bunch of oiled up, shirtless guys in tights grappling with each other all night. (Really, the same is true of all contact sports. Tom Brady may be banging the Victoria's Secret cover girl, but his day job is spooning with guys in tight pants with his hands between their legs demanding balls. Not that there's anything wrong with it!)
Still, there was something almost operatic about the show we saw that night. One of the earlier bouts was a three-on-three involving five luchadors who were pretty obviously dudes, and one woman, La Chica Yeye, who is somewhat less obviously a dude, but after 20 years of living in New York was can pretty much assure you she's a dude. The match was unremarkable except for the remarkable way in which no one involved seemed to take any notice of the that that she was (a) at the very least, a woman, or (b) a transvestite. Again, no that there's anything wrong with it in real life... it just seemed like it would be part of the show. If you go to a movie and one of the lead characters is a tranny, it's usually relevant to the storyline. So let's give the CMLL points for being super-progressive.
Then came one of the featured bouts of the evening, a tag team matchup of Cancerbero and Raziel versus El Rey Escorpion and Máximo. Three pretty straighforwardly straight wrestlers, and Máximo, a short, plump, pink-mohawked, mini-toga clad queen (not that there's anything wrong with it).
Unlike the take-the-tranny-for-granted fight, if Max were any more camp he'd be singing Judy Garland tunes. Though his opponents are usually the superior wrestlers, it only takes one suggestive butt-grind from Max to make them dive out of the ring. He and the Scorpion had a foolproof strategy in which Scorp would wrestle the other guys down and hold them, while Max slithered up and kissed them on the lips. The victims would write in agony as if acid had been thrown in their faces.
Whether this is a cheap laugh at the expense of the gay guy or a very clever commentary on macho attitudes towards homosexuality is hard for us to figure out. What's clear is that Máximo is the crowd favorite by an enormous margin. They may be laughing at his antics, but they're on his side.
But then Max, because he's so uncontrollably gay, decided to put the liplock on his parter, El Rey Escorpion.
And rather than merely writhe on the mat in agony, Scorp joined forces with the other team, and the three of them went all Matthew Shepard on Max's big gay ass.
And machismo lived happily ever after.
An added layer to the whole charade is that Máximo, who comes from a family with several generations of luchadors isn't actually gay. (This is Mrs. Máximo; the interns tell us they would hit that like the fist of an angry god.) So we have a straight guy playing a gay guy who provokes the ire of straight guys by acting all cartoonish-gay-guy on them and gets the crap kicked out of him despite being the crowd favorite.
You didn't think the lucha libre could be so complex and thought-provoking, did you?
Like all bloggers, we'll be spending the night in our childhood bedroom while our Mom makes us something to eat downstairs. Here' the latest addition to the household decor, hanging right near our bed where we'd be sure not to miss it.
We think it's a damn strange way to tell your son he's adopted, but we have to admire the cleverness of it. If our real parents are reading this, please get in touch via the email address at right.
It took us a few minutes to figure out how a guy from Texas "Suffer[ed] Three Gunshot Wounds During Queretaro Argument" on Tuesday, until we saw that - duh! - it happened in Texas, "outside of a home in the 400 block of Queretaro" street in San Antonio.
The scene of the crime.
As soon as the research staff get back from Thanksgiving we'll try to run some numbers on the crime rate in Querétaro, Mexico versus the crime rate on places in the US named after Querétaro. But scoring just on Tuesday night, it's:
The two are in town shooting a movie, so it's not likely to turn into one of those annoying Jack-Nicholson-and-the-Lakers deals, but we'll be keeping an eye on it.
(We're guessing the dude in front is a former IDF guy hired by Sony to assassinate the bull if it tries to jump the barrier too close to Mr. Damon.)
Sorry we were off the grid yesterday. We're sure the American cable networks have been covering this nonstop, but in case your tv has been on the fritz, Querétaro did in fact smash - not "set," but smashed - the record for World's Largest Taco Ever, Bitches. We confess, at first we thought there was a bit of fine-print trickery going on, because all the signs in the area spoke of the "World's Largest Taco de Carnitas," as if the record could be parceled out between various categories of taco filling. But no: at 73 meters in length and containing 2,500 pounds of chopped pig meat, there has never been a More Large Taco In The World, Ever. (More photos here.) This was certified by representatives of the Guinness Book, who apparently are no longer affiliated with the beer company, and so probably did nothing to improve the city's dismal supply of Irish stout while they were there.
Previously, the Largest Taco In the World, Ever, Bitches, was the - in retrospect, embarrassing - "effort" of the people of Mexicali, who in 2003, mixed together equal parts carne asada and tears of shame and fashioned the resulting mixture into a "giant taco" a mere 10 meters long. By "10 meters," we of course mean "63 meters shorter than Querétaro's effort," (which, by the way, was put together by 300 students... children, basically). Thanks for playing, Mexicali. Next!
Plaza de Armas coverage (which, because the story didn't involve the PRI or the Venegas family, the paper chose not to put on its website), includes this enigmatic line:
[The president of the Patronto de la Cocina Queretana] added that this is the fourth time that this taco has been made, surpassing year after year the previous year's size and making the state of Querétaro the leader in making this dish.
Which would seem to say that for four years in a row, Querétaro has been quietly shattering the World Record for Largest Taco Ever, Bitches, but only this year decided to make a fuss about it. There's a word for that, people, and that word is "Champion."
Heading to El Norte today for several days of giving thanks that we've only got to spend a couple hours in Benito Juárez Airport, the least-confidence-inspiring of the world's major airports.
The World's Largest Tapestry of Toothpicked-Together Tortillas takes shape in the Jardin Zenea, waiting to become the World's Largest Taco, muthafuckas!
5PM Update: Well, we figured there was no harm in escaping the midday heat by returning to the office and spending a few hours catching up on the to-do list. Around 5:00, we saddled up the perro and headed back to the Jardin. We can't tell you if a World's Largest Taco record was set, but if they fell short, they certainly broke the record for Very, Very Large Taco Assembled, Eaten and Every Trace of the Taco-Making Effort Removed In As Little Time As Possible. Honestly, if we hadn't taken the above photo ourselves, we wouldn't believe the whole event even happened.
* If Mexican politics has a single, unbreakable taboo, it's re-election. It's pretty much the whole reason the Mexican Revolution began (101 years ago today). Every office has a one-term limit, a policy we happen to believe is disastrous, since politicians spend half their term learning their job, and the rest of it ignoring their constituents because, hey, whaddaya gonna do, vote me out of office? So last week, when the PRD nominated Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to repeat his losing performance from 2006, we thought, "but isn't this the same guy who rejected his razor-thin margin of defeat and has spent the last five years declaring himself the 'legitimate president' of Mexico?" Shouldn't he, by his own logic, be forced to step down next year?
* Leaving no stone unturned in the investigation, the feds detained a guy for making a joke on Twitter. Stunningly, he turned out to have had nothing to do with the crash.
* We mentioned the New Mexico Secretary of State's ongoing investigation into non-existent "vote fraud" a while back. Her follow-up report has just been released, revealing that perhaps as many as 19 fraudulent votes have been cast by the 1.1 million registered voters in the state - or roughly 0.0296875 percent.
* Percentage of current New Mexico Secretaries of State who ran over a guy on the highway this week: 100%.
* Take college football and Republican politicians, put them in the Failed State of Arizona, and what do you get? Failure!
* The FSoAZ's failure to develop a regional cuisine of it's on is genuinely kind of sad, out its push to have the chimichanga declared the official state food is just pathetic. We vote for baloney and mayo on Wonder bread.
* Readers in Mazatlán should check out the Mazatlán Book and Coffee Shop. The Pacific Coast branch of our fat gay Nazi condo promotion literary cabal meets there regularly.
* News you can use: To download "protected" Flickr images like the ones above, go to your browser menu under "Tools," to "Page Info," click "Media," scroll down until the picture appears in the window, and Save.
To the list of geniuses more respected overseas than in their home countries, we can add the name Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, boss of the Sinaloa Cartel. Not two weeks after Forbes Magazine named him the 55th Most Powerful Person on Earth - the whole fucking world, 7 billion people... 6,999,999,945 for whom are less powerful than El Chapo - Mexico's own Quién Magazine leaves him off their annual list of "50 People Who Move Mexico." Maybe Carlos Slim gets tired of making small talk with him at these award ceremonies, so he pressured them to keep him off.
A few months ago we wrote about the Failed State of Arizona coming hat-in-hand to beg Mexico to save them because they were all constantly being stung by enormous, venomous scorpions. To do this is the wake of passing a statewide "No Mexicans Allowed" law struck as that the apotheosis of shamelessness.
But that was before we saw the way the drug's American importer is profiteering off the whole thing.
Rare Disease Therapeutics, a Tennessee-based company, has the U.S. rights to Anascorp through an agreement with Instituto Bioclon, the Mexican firm that makes the drug.
...Metro Phoenix hospitals are billing as much as $12,467 per vial of the antivenom, The Arizona Republic reported. Because the typical dose is three to five vials, bills for patients and their insurance companies can exceed $62,000.
Each link in the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain from the Mexican factory to Arizona patients raises the price.
A Mexican biotechnology company produces more than 250,000 vials for Mexican residents, who are charged about $100 per vial.
Does America have the best healthcare system in the world, or what? The morale of the story is obvious: if you absolutely must be bitten by an Arizona scorpion, try to do it as close to the border as possible, so that you can crawl into Mexico and avoid the 12,000-percent markup.
We were out on the town last night, guzzling Cristal and high-fiving ourselves over the way we'd stuck it to The Man (see previous post), when we returned home to find that gas pipe-laying operations had moved off the street in front of the house and into the pedestrian andador that runs along side it. No one had mentioned this to us. Also, they had ditched the jackhammer and returned to the method of the Aztecs: sledgehammers and pick-axes. Here's the view from our roof this morning at 3:50 AM:
We've written before about the city's elaborately handcrafted sidewalks. The way these are un-crafted is that one guy repeatedly bashes one of the paving stones with a sledgehammer, cracking away the seal that connects it to the others. Artisan #2 then pick-axes the thing into a pile of gravel, while a third, possibly apprentice sidewalk-craftsman, uses an eight-foot metal spike to breakup the underlying sand and sediment which a fourth worker, generally the boss's nephew, shovels away, leaving a narrow, open trench under the argyle-patterned stonework. This is as loud and slow-moving as it sounds, though it can be made even more torturously annoying by throwing a banda-music-playing mobile phone into the mix, like the one the dildo with the sledgehamer was carrying.
In the above photo, the man on the left is standing directly outside our ground-floor bedroom window, probably seven feet from our pillow. Also, the square he's working on is as far as they got this morning. So either the gas line ends there, or they'll be starting on the next square sometime around midnight tonight. Remember, this is being done at night so as to not disrupt traffic. In five years in this house, we have never seen a car driving down the pedestrian andador, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. In fact, we're thinking of parking ours up against the bedroom window tonight.
Of course, since they told us they would be there on Sunday, not on Tuesday, we neglected to move our car, forcing them to route the gas lines around our parked vehicle. This was the view from the Chairman's office around 4:15 this morning.
Yes, we could have moved the car, but this was funnier, even if it prolonged the jackhammering.
A few weeks ago the "gay marriage" issue started bubbling up again in the halls of the local Querétaro government. We didn't pay much attention because Querétaro will elect a talking horse as governor before it legalizes gay marriage. (A national survey [pdf] last year ranked the QRO at the top of the list of homo-hatin' states, with 46 percent of respondents saying they wouldn't allow a gay person to live in their house, and 42 percent saying that gays, generally speaking, should have no rights.) So a few congresscritters from PAN, the Baby Jesus's political party, formed some sort of committee for reasons that we're not completely clear on, and solicited comment from the public as to whether marriage should be reserved for unions of men and women, or if filthy gay sex perverts should also be able to marry each others' children and dogs (okay, we're making that part up - we don't know exactly how the question was worded). Again, this thing was only barely on our radar, and we aren't citizens anyway, but somehow 51,639 people found time to write in a response. It's true what they say about the Devil finding work for idle hands.
Anyway, the results were finally tabulated last week, and it was a squeaker: 51,627 votes opposing gay marriage, 12 in favor.
That is not a typo: 51,627 to 12. Maybe we were right about the wording of the question. "Screw the gays" garnered 99.979% of the vote in a process that we have no doubt was completely transparent, unrigged and legitimate. By way of comparison, Saddam Hussein only took 99.6% of 1995 Iraqi presidential vote, for which he was the only candidate. "Screw the gays" fell one-thousandth of a percentage point short of Kim Jong Il's 99.98% victory in 2009. And we don't recall anyone complaining about the fairness of those elections.
Our staff researcher is out at a drunk-driving class all day, but even without the benefit of research, we can say with extreme confidence that the chancellor of Germany did not refer to the European debt crisis as a "holocaust."
* We're always willing to give the Failed State of Arizona credit when it does something right, though the last time this happened was when they formed the Grand Canyon. But Tuesday night they did about the rightest thing they've done since then, by making SB 1070 author and general right-wing lunatic Russell Pearce the first sitting state senate president in the history of the United States of America (God bless her) to lose his seat in a recall election. (Though, thanks to the state's excessive inbreeding, his successor is also named Pierce.) Pearce says he is looking forward to pursuing some solo immigrant-bashing projects he's been putting off for a while.
* Human Rights Watch released a report this week (website / report [pdf]) indicating that Mexico may be surpassing the US as the most torture-lovin' country in North America:
Five years after President Felipe Calderón deployed the military to confront Mexico’s violent drug cartels, Human Rights Watch.. documents grave abuses ... including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture. The report also examines the failure of both military and civilian prosecutors to investigate these serious crimes, and the detrimental effect of such impunity on public security efforts.
* But who will stand up and voice their support for the torturers, the rights abusers, the extrajudicial murderers? Why, the Catholic Church, of course.
* "10-year-old Mexican girl gives birth to baby boy after 31-week pregnancy." Between our zygotes-are-people laws and the government's embrace of waterboarding in the name of law and order, Mexico really is a right-wing paradise. Except for all the "it's full of Mexicans" part, of course.
* Pope Benedict XVI, previously seen making bullshit health-excuses for not visiting Mexico, is now saying maybe he'll visit Veracruz, once the most Yellow-fever-infested cities in the Western hemisphere. That's ballsy.
* Patrick Corcoran explains why, when the words "Forbes Magazine" and "Chapo Guzman" appear in the same sentence, nothing that follows should be taken seriously.
* In Querétaro, the single-mother capital of Mexico, single women can now adopt babies. Because we don't have enough single mothers.
* "A surprise inspection in a prison in Mexico has revealed the presence of 19 prostitutes, 100 plasma televisions, two sacks of marijuana, and 100 cockerels for cock fighting." Appalling, but on the other hand, it's probably reduced jailbreaks considerably.
* We're not sure what the state's sex-worker's union's gripe is with the Human Rights Commission, but we still think that staging mock funerals outside the HRC's office is a terrible idea.
* It's bad enough we got passed over the the job of US Ambassador, but when the guy who took our job is in town, it seems the least he could do is stop by our offices and pay his respects. But no. Fucking, no.
* A very nice man from Statista, Inc, has written us a few times now to let us know that "Our website www.statista.com offers a unique collection of statistics on the United States, Mexico and other countries around the world.... I would be very happy if you would consider adding a link to our website on your blog." So... there.
* Burro Hall Commenter of the Week: This Anonymous person found a five-year old post in which we joked that Mexicans, lacking a word for soccer, simply stole the word we use for American football.
I was a new reader until I came across this old post. Now I am an ex-reader. You
worked for 60 Minutes. This should indicate that your are adequately
literate, reasonably intelligent and have some awareness of the world
outside of the USA. "futbol after the American game"? What about the
rest of the English speaking world that calls soccer "football" Could
that be the reason "futbol"is used in Mexico. Between journalist and talking head you appear to be just another lowest common denominator talking head.
* Like everything in Mexico, the press conference announcing the 2011 Querétaro Agricultural Fair required the presence of not one, but two, Corona Beer models.
* Anonymous's not-very-anonymous spokesman, after threatening to kill the Totally Awesome Zetas, decides that Texas is too close to Mexico, and moves north. We'll be sending him a copy of "Matando Güeros," by the Tijuana death-metal band, Brujeria.
* Querétaro Philharmonic Orchestra does Pink Floyd. Hardcore fans will recognize several of the words:
It takes a lot to stun the Burro Hall Editorial Board into silence, but today could be the day. We though it was kind of eerie that Mexico would be playing against Serbia on Armistice Day - 11/11, the end of a war that started with the killing by a Serb of Archduke Ferdinand, whose Uncle, Maximilian, had been killed by Mexicans here in Querétaro, where the match is being played. (Never mind that Ferdinand was shot on our birthday.)
But the fact that 11/11/11 - Nigel Tufnel Day - has brought, for the second time in three years, the death-by-aviation-accident of the Mexican Interior Minister, just might cause us to knock of early and go drinking.
Nigel Tufnel:
Way Creepy Update:
The last tweet on Blake's twitter account was on November 4, when he paid tribute to Mourino.
"Today we remember Juan Camilo Mourino three years after his passing, a human being who worked toward the creation of a better Mexico," Blake said.
We were just paid a visit by a very polite man from the gas company, who wanted to let us know that we shouldn't park in front of our offices on Sunday night, because there would be an enormous pneumatic jackhammer tearing up the street between the hours of 10pm and 6am on Monday.
Not that it was going to do any good, but we tried to suggest that since Sunday was, well, Sunday, and traffic was relatively light, maybe they need not wait until 10pm to begin performing one of the noisiest activities known to man. "Well, yes, but what about the Masses?" he asked, pointing to the church up the street and the church down the street. "It would disturb them, plus they have congregants coming and going all day, so yes, very much traffic."
In other words, out of respect for the people who will wake us up at 6am with bells and fireworks, the gas company will wait until 10pm to keep us awake with the jackhammers. We're beginning to understand why terrorists would want to blow these guys up.
On Tuesday, our favorite local paper, which is basically the PRI house organ in Querétaro, landed a front-page exclusive! interview with one of the PRI hacks considering a run for mayor. And because, in the world of Plaza de Armas, there is nothing more important than the world of Plaza de Armas, the front page was mostly taken up by a photo of the candidate sitting in the Plaza de Armas offices, with a copy of Plaza de Armas on the table, framed copies of Plaza de Armas on the walls, speaking with Plaza de Armas publisher Sergio Arturo Venegas, Plaza de Armas editor Sergio Venegas Jr, and Plaza de Armas reporter Fernando, yes, Venegas. Inside was a two-page interview illustrated with an even larger photo of the candidate and Venegas Sr., and a half-dozen smaller pictures of the candidate with various combinations of Venegases, touring the Plaza de Armas offices and smiling appreciatively at their amazing "people sitting at desks working at computers" system for putting together the paper, which is called Plaza de Armas.
We were all set to rip off a quick post making fun of this, but got distracted doing something or other. Then the next day, another mayoral candidate, showed up on the front page, at the same table, with a different edition of Plaza de Armas on the table. Only one of the Venegases is in the picture, but the others appear in the two-page pullout section, chatting amiably with the candidate as he admires the Plaza de Armas offices.
On Thursday, Plaza de Armas threw us for a loop, presenting candidate #3 not at the conference table, but instead admiring the Plaza de Armas offices in the company of Plaza de Armas publisher Sergio Arturo Venegas, Plaza de Armas
editor Sergio Venegas Jr, and Plaza de Armas reporter Fernando, yes,
Venegas. For the multiple conference table shots, we needed to turn to the two-page interview inside.
And then today...well, you get the picture(s).
We need to step up our game, or Burro Hall risks becoming the second-most self absorbed and narcissistic publication in the town.
Today is the 236th birthday of the United States Marine Corp. When we think of Mexico and Marines, we think of one thing.
- Lee Harvey Oswald?
Well, okay, two things: Lee Harvey Oswald, yes, and also the "Marine Corps Hymn," (lyricist unknown; music stolen, ironically, from a French opera) which begins "From the Halls of Montezuma / To the shores of Tripoli.." The line is a reference to the Mexican-American War's (or, as they call it here, the US Invasion's) Battle of Chapultepec, in which Gen. Scott's forces - which included some Marines - prevailed, despite outnumbering the Mexicans by a mere 4-to-1, even counting Mexico's child-soldiers. 160 years later, the Marines are still gloating.
Which is fine. Here's our question though - and it's a sincere question, which we're sure our readers better-versed in history than we are can answer: what, literally, are the "halls of Montezuma"? The Marines say it refers to Chapultepec Castle ("After two days of battle, the Marines gained control of the castle, better known as the 'Halls of Montezuma.'") Other, less authoritative sources say it refers to the Palacio Nacional or the Zocalo ("Quitman’s men... took the Mexican National Plaza, where before had stood the Halls of
Montezuma").
But we've given the Google machine a good workout, searching in English and Spanish for any reference to these places or any other location being "better known as the 'Halls of Montezuma'" in any context other than in the Marine Corps Hymn, and have come up empty. So we toss it out to the Teaming Millions: Montezuma (Moctezuma II) died over 200 years before work was started on the Chapultepec Castle. Why would it be "better known as" the Halls of Montezuma? Or is this just some made-up shit?
We've probably seen fewer than ten people riding bikes here in the past half-decade. But as part of the government's "Let's Spend All Our Money!" initiative, the city's first-ever bike lane has been installed along Av. Universidad.
As you can see, they're still getting the hang of it.
How awesome are the Totally Awesome Zetas? This awesome:
Another blogger has been decapitated, purportedly in retaliation for postings about drug cartels, prompting users of social network sites to unite in their stance against the gangs.
The gruesome slaying on Wednesday is believed to be the fourth since early September in which a drug cartel killed people in Nuevo Laredo for what they said online.
"I'm Rascatripas and this happened to me for failing to understand that I should not report things on social media websites. I am a ..... (text covered by body) just like La Nena from Laredo... With this last report I bid farewell to Nuevo Laredo en Vivo.. Always remem... Never For... Your moderator, RASCATRIPAS," said a placard left with the man's body at a busy intersection in Nuevo Laredo.
Awesome! Not only to the put him through the hell of torture and decapitation, but they inflict the added indignity of signing his name to a badly-written note. This sort of thing probably explains why the much-overhyped Anonymous Smackdown turned out to be literally nothing.
The narcoblogosphere reacted with understandable outrage and grief, though some people got a little carried away:
Ovemex, who blogs on Borderland Beat, added [in an email to MSNBC], "THESE DEATHS WILL NOT BE IN VAIN...They cannot kill us all!!"
Dude! Shhhhhhhh! Yes they fucking can! Do you not even read you own blog? Hey, Totally Awesome Zetas - don't pay any attention to this guy! He's crazy! In fact, we don't even know him!
Oh, look! The kitty and the puppy are playing together! Awwwww....
This afternoon, the Margarita Maza de Juárez School for the Intensive and Repetitive Study of the Mexican National Anthem, located across the street from our offices, took time out from its regular curriculum to spend an hour or two boning up on their Christmas carols (Christmas, not to be overly pedantic about it, being 46 fucking days away). They used the patented MMJSIRSMNA Method of cranking the music through a tinny, distorted loudspeaker, while a teacher with a two-note range and a nonexistent grasp of English drones along to the music. The video below, according to our staff enthnomusicologist, is a very loose version of the David Bowie classic, "Little Drummer Boy." [Note: the surge in volume at about :50 seconds is them, not us.]
One of the 300 churches within a five block radius of our offices is holding a daily rosary-praying session for 46 consecutive nights leading up to the Virgen of Guadalupe's feast day on December 12. Why 46, we have no idea. But the purpose is to pray for peace in Mexico.
They started this tradition last year, and in the intervening 11 months there have been about 34,000 homicides in Mexico, so the efficacy of this approach is clearly debatable. But far be it from us to criticize other people for wasting 46 consecutive evenings (we'll probably spend 40 of them drinking beer in the Plaza with a dog on our lap). Instead, we just want to highlight the work of one of our neighbors, a man we've noted from time to time, a man with a vision ("Anyone can shout into a megaphone, but if I took two megaphones, mounted them on a pole and hooked them up to a battery powered tape-player..."), a man with a dream ("...I'll get more tail than the parish priest!"). Starting about a month before the October 28 start of the rosary marathon, Ding-dong here was walking the streets day...
...and night...
...urging people to come pray for rosary-peace. If we had to say something positive about his racket-making contraption, it's that it's very well made. You can hear that fucker from about three blocks away. Unfortunately, he walks verrrrry sloooowly up and down every street in the Centro, which means we hear his annoying pre-recorded voice voice saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over again for about 45 minutes every evening. And note the use of the present tense. Even though we're 12 days into the rosaryathon, he's still out there begging people to show up, his message of peace noisily echoing off every wall in our office.
We may be wrong, but we tend to think that the kind of people who are disposed to spend 46 nights in church praying the rosary are the kind of people who already know about the 46-nights-of-praying-the-rosary thing. Can't God find something else for this guy to do?
We probably ought to be embarrassed by this, but this picture in the paper is the first time we'd seen the term "Permanent Campaign Against Drug Trafficking" used officially. Jesus, that's a bleak assessment, isn't it? A quick check on the Google machine reveals this phrase can actually be traced back to the 70s. We can't say that makes us feel any better about it.
Update: Our friend Margaret, a professional translator, informs us that permanent also means "on-going" - or, to put it another way, we're idiots.
A US doctor is trying to pioneer a laser treatment that changes patients' eye colour. Dr Gregg Homer claims 20 seconds of laser light can remove pigment in brown eyes so they gradually turn blue.
This was sent to us by a Mexican friend outraged at the Malinchistic implications of this. We're going to steer clear of that, except to say that, having been born with blond hair and blue eyes, we're not sure exactly what the appeal is. (Though we realize that, in this context, we sound like a woman complaining about the burden of being really stacked.) Readers interested in the aspirational Aryanization of Latino culture should check out Laura Martinez's Mi Blog Es Tu Blog.
No, what caught our sparkling blue eye was this:
He said he filed his first patent for the laser treatment in 2001. But it was not until 2004 that he began carrying out experiments on animals at a hospital facility...
Tests on humans initially involved cadavers, and then moved on to live patients in Mexico in August 2010.
Well, hell. We had our doubts about the safety of this, but if it's been tested on animals, cadavers and Mexicans, it's probably okay for use on humans.
How do you do heavy road work in a residential area without snarling traffic during the day? Why, by waiting until midnight to start jackhammering, of course!
Every year, El Universal runs what feels like a year-long celebration of the anniversary of its founding, complete with the sort of relentless self-congratulation that's just so rare in Mexican journalism. This year, in honor of it's 95th Anniversary, they've been running some of their more notable front pages, in maddeningly small reproductions. (Really, amigos - there's a market for this sort of thing. Think about it. Maybe call us...)
But so we couldn't help but love the big headline on April 5, 1968: "BLACK FURY UNLEASHED," which we suppose is one way you could play the "Martin Luther King Jr. shot in face by white supremacist" story.
In their caption, El Universal notes that this and the death of Mexican opera singer Fanny Anitúa made for a pretty big news day.
Several months ago we wrote about the city's creeping police-statism, including an utterly pointless Police Mobile Command Unit with a pair of telescope-mounted surveillance cameras that was parked in the Jardin Zenia on Sunday evenings, regardless of the fact that there were already half a dozen security cameras mounted on the surrounding rooftops. Well, at some point of the last few weeks (like the mythical frog in boiling water, we didn't notice it happening) the Mobile Command Unit became a permanent feature, parked day and night, seven days a week, in the Jardin.
In fairness, we suppose the only thing more ridiculous that putting this thing in the Jardin was putting it in the Jardin just a few hours a week.
Querétaro's a safe place, and we know it's sort of a chicken-and-egg argument whether the excessive security makes it safe, or if it's safe in spite of the wastefully excessive security. And since it's not our money, we can't really complain. Also, we look good in hats, and that requires our heads be attached to our bodies, so why risk it? But police states don't just pop up overnight. They creep up on you. A year ago there was no Mobile Command Unit. Now, with no escalating security threat to speak of, it's a permanent presence in the middle of town. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone to care.
If Querétaro suddenly became dangerous, there would likely be calls for increased spending on security. As it happens, the state was recently declared the second-safest in Mexico, behind Yucatán. Which of course prompted the local congressman to call for increased federal funding for the state's security, as a reward for it being so secure. If we beat Yucatán next year, we'll probably declare martial law.
Our constant complaining about the constant fireworks here is probably getting tedious, but one thing we've never complained about is the quality of the fireworks here - which are, in a word, dismal. The typical fireworks display goes something like this:
Boom!
Boomboomboomboom!
Boom!....Boom.
[six minutes elapse] Boom!
Boomboom!
[three minutes]
Boom!
[an hour and twenty minutes] Boomboomboom!
Boom!
Etc. It usually feels like the fusillade starts and then someone realizes they forgot to bring all the fireworks, and over the next hour or two they wander around the cavernous basement of the church looking for stray rockets, bringing them up to the roof as they find them, only to discover no one has a match.
Anyway, Mexico could learn a lot from the people of Oban, Scotland, whose entire Guy Fawkes Night pyrotechnic display was, thanks to a mechanical error, detonated in under a minute, resulting in perhaps the greatest fireworks show ever:
If you did it like this, amigos, we could all go back to bed at 5:32AM.
We know that making fun of the anti-immigrant nativists is like dynamiting fish in a barrel, but every now and then they stray from the bread-and-butter issue of immigration and manage to reveal the empty racism at the heart of their agenda. This time, it centers on the unlikely issue of trucking, and the admission of Mexican long-haul trucks into the United States.
On Oct. 21, a Mexican truck carrying a load of construction equipment from Mexico to Texas was the first truck allowed on U.S. interior highways since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) authorized it almost two decades ago. It took that long because labor and political interests delayed the program.
...Mexican truckers probably will be paid less than U.S. truckers, but NAFTA requires that Mexican truckers are certified, along with their companies. There is also currently a shortage of U.S. truck drivers.
...The Department of Transportation says every Mexican truck is already held to the same safety and pollution standards as U.S. trucks. Mexican trucks have their brakes tested by a Federal Highway Administration inspector at a Nogales facility built in 2004.
It's been a long, complicated fight, with a lot of issues - safety, certification, inspection, etc - that we won't pretend to know a lot about. But one issue that has nothing to do with this is immigration. Unless you're batshit-crazy like the folks at Americans for Legal Immigration, in which case your reaction is this:
Unless Americans on the left and the right unite to stop the Mexican Truck program authorized by NAFTA, over 150,000 unsafe Mexican trucks loaded with drugs and illegal aliens will roll into every state and community!
...Border level drug and illegal alien interdiction efforts will become completely moot as the designers of this 'North American Integration' treason desire.
Untold numbers of innocent Americans will perish at the hands of unqualified Mexican truck drivers who are inexperienced at driving on 1st world roadway systems, unsafe Mexican trucks, and the increased amount of deadly addictive drugs and illegal immigrant invaders brought into our American communities.
We hardly know where to begin. "Trucks loaded with drugs and illegal aliens will roll into every state and community"? Drugs are already rolling into every state and community, because Americans' demand for them is insatiable, and their willingness to pay billions of dollars for them is unabated. The first time a Mexican eighteen-wheeler packed with cocaine rolls uninvited into a small American community, we'll gladly revisit the issue, but for now let's agree it's silly, okay?
But our favorite scare quote is the one about "Mexican truck drivers who are inexperienced at driving on 1st world roadway systems." Clearly, no one at ALIPAC has ever driven on a Mexican highway, most of which feature such "1st world" amenities as pavement, medians, yellow lines and extortionate toll plazas. This for instance, is the road from Querétaro to Mexico City:
Putting reality aside (a requirement when dealing with these people), the argument seems to be that Mexican truckers, used to driving thousands of miles on pockmarked dirt roads with no shoulders, guardrails or traffic signs, and covered from one end to another with donkeys and lazy Mexicans sleeping under the shade of the giant cacti will, upon coming in contact with America's perfectly-maintained 1st-world highway infrastructure, immediately lose control of their vehicles, flip over and burst into flames atop a school bus full of handicapped American orphans.
Of course, the ALIPAC screed has nothing to do with trucking, or with the long-overdue fulfillment of a multi-national trade agreement signed almost 20 years ago. Mexicans are a subhuman race of drug dealers and aliens and anything Mexican, even an American-made Mexican truck, is an evil to be vanquished by good, God-fearing white people.
ALIPAC knows how to solve the problem, though. Unsurprisingly, it involves donating money to ALIPAC. (Didn't see that one coming, did you? You did? Okay, never mind.)
American 18-wheelers driven by Americans kill about 5,000 Americans every year. Someday, now that Mexican trucks can enter the US, a Mexican driver is going to kill an American. Good Lord, do we dread that day.
Sure, it's nitpicking, but today's article in the local paper about a radio program celebrating Edgar Allan Poe "202 years after his birth and 62 years after his death" raises at least two questions for us: (1) Who creates a program honoring someone's 202nd birthday? and (2) Did no one responsible for writing or editing this stop to ask themselves, "Did Edgar Allan Poe really live to be 140 years old?"
60 Minutes' offices were across the street from CBS broadcast center - a conscious decision to set themselves apart from the rest of CBS News. Andy, looking to set himself apart from 60 Minutes, had his office across the street from 60, back in the broadcast center. Which is why, in eight and a half years at 60 Minutes, I probably spent no more than an hour or two in Andy's company, but he managed to provide me one of my favorite memories of CBS.
In January, 2000, when I was an associate producer working on a story about discrimination at a Federal nuclear facility in South Carolina. (Sexy! Must've been Sweeps Week.) The story was airing that Sunday, and had managed to attract a great deal of interest from CBS management. (Amusing back story/ statement on modern corporate media: the piece centered on a series of incidents at a tritium processing plant a few years earlier. And now, with the story about to air, CBS brass had realized that, during the period in question, the plant was owned by CBS. The plant's general counsel, a named defendant in a class-action lawsuit, was now our general counsel. Andy was decrying this sort of thing long before it was fashionable, and if he'd known this detail, he'd probably have set himself on fire.)
So there we were in the producer's office, crowded around his desk while a half-dozen executives, lawyers and assorted title-holders, having abandoned their regular table at Gabriel's, attached weasel-words to the script the way medieval barbers attached leeches. Several discussions were taking place simultaneously, half of which, thanks to Mike Wallace's provocations, had turned to full-fledged arguments, while in the middle of it, our producer struggled valiantly to keep pace at the keyboard.
Into this scene shuffled the 80-year-old Rooney, drinking it in from the hallway with an amused smirk on his face. "My God," he said, with a chuckle. "Where were all these people when the page was blank?"
And with that, he shuffled away down the hall, leaving behind a line that hit the jugular and the funny-bone simultaneously, and illuminated an obvious truth: that, for a writer, there's nothing more daunting than a blank sheet of paper. In short, it was the quintessential Andy Rooney.
In the subsequent 11 years of dealing with editors and executives, I've retold this story with some frequency, usually to uncomfortable silence.
