Burro Hall

The Jefferson Institute, Querétaro Branch Office

2012-02-02T05:11:00.000-06:00

There's probably an excellent explanation for this.

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

People Are Talking - Apparently Very Loudly

2012-02-01T06:05:00.000-06:00

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

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

Awkwardly-Named Local Business of the Month

2012-01-31T18:36:00.001-06:00

"The Taliban" scrap yard, San Miguel.

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

Hey, Everyone! It's a Cute Doggie!

2012-01-31T06:57:00.000-06:00

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

The Burro Hall Child Protection Act of 2012

2012-01-30T08:30:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blessed Are The Profit-Makers

2012-01-29T16:40:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Do You Say "Fourth Amendment" in Mexican?

2012-01-27T14:57:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

2012-01-27T12:19:00.000-06:00

Everybody has his own way to relax, we suppose.

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

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

Dirty Tricks

2012-01-26T18:34:00.000-06:00

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

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

Turf & Surf

2012-01-26T18:12:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

First Execution of the New Year

2012-01-25T21:42:00.004-06:00

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

Searching for signs of foul play

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

" SWINE FLU KILLS 1"

El Grifter

2012-01-25T16:27:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

Propagandapalooza!

2012-01-24T11:23:00.000-06:00

PRI spokesmodel/presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto was in town yesterday to do some presidential campaign spokesmodeling. This should be pretty routine (Querétaro is a reasonably important city a short drive from the capital) but everyone gets all aflutter because there's a celebrity in town - especially the completely impartial PRI fanzine Plaza de Armas. Today's front page screams headline "PRI Will Return to the Presidency," over a picture of Peña Nieto, Governor Calzada (who we believe is required by law to appear on the front page of every paper at least five times a week) and Plaza de Armas publisher Sergio Arturo Venegas, who delivered Peña Nieto a copy of yesterday's Plaza de Armas heralding the Great Man's arrival in our humble little cow town.

We would love to sit in on PdeA's front page meeting. "Okay, whadda we got?" "Well, boss, this afternoon you delivered a copy of today's paper to Peña Nieto." "Fuck me! We got photos?" "Exclusively, Sir." "Great work, people! Tear up whatever you've got and lead with it - and don't spare the wood!"

We're not sure how long Peña Nieto is in town, so there's a chance tomorrow's paper will feature a picture of Venegas delivering him a copy of today's paper with the picture of him delivering yesterday's paper, and so on, and so on...

Sh*t My Dad Says

2012-01-24T10:02:00.003-06:00

Great Moments In Lazy Journalism

2012-01-23T13:07:00.000-06:00

(Not Mexico.)

Today the Huffington Post continues its quest to be the Least Reliable Source for News About Mexico by featuring an article by Chris Owen (whose qualifications are stated thus: "Chris Owen is a travel writer from Orlando Florida charged with sharing frank, inside information on cruise vacations with travelers") titled "The Ten Most Deadly Cities in Mexico For Tourists." Now, perhaps we don't speaka the eenglish so good, but we expected what followed to be a list of the ten Mexican cities in with the most tourist deaths. "Take a look at the gallery below based on per capita deaths for the surprising results!" he suggests.

And the results certainly are surprising (or, given our low expectations for this sort of thing, entirely unsurprising). What follows is a cut-and-paste list of the ten Mexican cities with the highest murder rates, including such touristic hotspots as Ciudad Juárez, Reynosa, Tepic, Culiacán and Chihuahua. Also, someplace called "Torrean," which we assume to be Torreón cleverly disguising its identity so as to lure more tourists to their deaths.

We're the first to admit that tourists can and do get killed here, and Acapulco, Mazatlan and Tijuana - tourist magnets all - are on the list. But if you're going to "share frank, inside information" about the deadliest places "for tourists," you have to do better than to link to an article about beheadings in "Torrean" which explicitly references "the victims, all of whom were linked to organised crime..." The most damning thing he comes up with is a Canadian guy hit in the leg by a stray bullet in Mazatlan. The headline of the linked-to article is, "Canadian Shot in Mexico Says 'I Feel Safe Here.'"

According to his bio, Chris Owen "is open to sponsored trips where he will write, blog and tweet his way through your product with a keen eye for detail..." Maybe we could pool together our funds and get him to visit Mexico someday.

Gung Hay Fat Choy

2012-01-23T10:25:00.003-06:00

Happy Year of the Dragon from Burro Hall.

Window display, DelSol Department Store, Querétaro

Great Moments In Outside-the-Box Thinking

2012-01-22T15:32:00.000-06:00

Our well-known antipathy towards Christmas extends even to decorations. But every year we make a token effort to tart up the offices, if only because it boosts morale among the interns and is cheaper than actually paying them an aguinaldo. But this year we didn't because, well, damndest thing, we just couldn't find any of the decorations. We looked everywhere, and even queried the maid, whose organizational creativity is the stuff of legend, but she claimed to have no idea.

But then today, in a pile of old papers, we found the receipt for the Burro Hall mainframe. Not wanting to misplace such a thing, we climbed up into the storage room, dug out its box, and went to put the receipt inside. And there, dear reader, is where the Grinch hid Christmas.

It's really not even worth saying anything to her.

Sábado Gigante

2012-01-22T14:02:00.000-06:00

* Yes, we know it's Sunday. If you want us to meet your deadlines, we'll have to increase the subscription fees, okay?

* The Mexico portrayed in Mary Cuddehe's excellent article would be inoffensive to every single Republican presidential candidate but one, depending on who Romney's sucking up to that day:

The doctor listened to Daniela, then slipped out of the room and made a call. Guanajuato hospitals are expected to report suspicious miscarriages just as they would a gunshot wound. It wasn’t long before a couple of officers arrived, followed by a lawyer from the district attorney’s office, who took out a note pad. “So, Daniela, how many people have you had sex with?” he asked, jotting down the answers.

* And then of course there's religion as a tool of the rich and powerful, which is also something of a tradition down here.

* Actually, the Nation's been pretty good on Mexico this month.

* South Carolinans boo the existence of Mexico. They're probably still pissed about their support for Abraham Lincoln.

* And while looking for the previous link, we discovered that Texas has a Benito Juarez-Abraham Lincoln High School. Not sure why their teams are called the Huskies, but whatever.

* Why are we not surprised that the nutty nativists think SOPA was created by illegal immigrants to silence True Americans?

* Daimler Benz, which only stopped using slave labor less than 70 years ago was forced to apologize for using Che Guevara's image to pimp their shitty cars. Of course, the apology was made to offended right-wingers, rather than those who felt Guevara was the one tarnished by the association.

* Jewish exiles in Mexico fighting fascism in the 1940s.

* It only a took a month, but the inspectors assaulting an indigenous vendor in this video are finally losing their jobs. Maybe some social do-gooder group should distribute video cameras to every poor person in Mexico.

* "2,501 Migrants" by Alejandro Santiago Ramirez.

* "Mexico probes Irish adoption trafficking link." Really, how screwed up is your country is the Irish are taking advantage of you?

* There's a tad too much pop-sociology here, but this is still some solid advice for gringos getting pulled over by Mexican cops.

* Seems like every couple of months someone writes a good long article explaining why mexico isn't Colombia. Here's the most recent.

* We don't mean to get all "Queer Eye" on you, but Mexico's drug lords sure have some tacky tastes in home decor.

* We loves us a good Mexican cemetery.

* Our grandfather would have recognized a lot of the printing presses still in use in Mexico City.

* A Cinematic Love Letter to Riding a Bike Through Mexico City. Romanticism aside, this seems really fucking dangerous.

* New magazine: Mexico Review.

* We enjoyed this little piece of outrage over a Brooklyn merchant selling swastika earrings. Why not just export them here?

* The myth of American monolingualism. (We submit ourselves as the counterargument's Exhibit A.)

* Our associate at the Mexfiles, who serves as co-director of our Fat Gay Nazi Literary/Condo Promotion Cabal, sends in this item about the arrest of a gangster with the nom-de-narco "El Pitufo," or "The Smurf." Of course, there's an entire state named "Chihuahua" here, so silliness isn't that out of the ordinary.

* We try not to post too many wacky images making the rounds on Facebook, but thought this one was actually kind of amusing.

* File this one under "harmless local oddballs."

* Correction of the Week: "This article initially said that Mexico’s Congress had the second-shortest working year among Latin America’s larger countries. In fact it is the shortest."

* Mexican Mitt Romney on Twitter.

* America's wealthy my be repugnant, but they've got nothing on Mexico's Uno Por Ciento. Here's how businessman Miguel Sacal Smeke asks one of the little people to change a tire on his Porsche.

The Peña

2012-01-20T08:45:00.000-06:00

We were passing by Billy's, the worlds greatest (seriously!) tattoo parlor/document processing center the other day, when we noticed they'd added "art gallery and tchotchkes shop" to list of services. The New Economy is all about diversity, we suppose. Anyway, we think they may have finally found a way to open up our wallets.

Call us crazy, but we're pretty sure the naked guy is future president of Mexico Enrique Peña Nieto.

It's been a while since we've purchased art, but we're sending the curators of the Burro Hall Collection down there this afternoon to look it over before Carlos Slim can get his greasy mitts on it.

Incidentally, if you think this hurts his chances in July, let us introduce you to the junior senator from our home state of Massachusetts.

Urchin Update

2012-01-19T20:11:00.002-06:00

While taking the perro out for his evening constitutional, we noticed his namesake street urchin was sitting and playing the accordion for money against a different wall of the governor's office (the governor's wife being in charge of the agency charged with keeping child laborers off the streets and in school) because he had been supplanted in his usual spot by another accordion-playing street urchin.

Jesus, the people who run this state...

#Occupy God Street

2012-01-19T18:52:00.000-06:00

It seems a general rule of thumb around here that, the more legitimate the religious celebration, the quieter that celebration tends to be. Christmas and Easter, for example - the Superbowl and World Series of Jesusness - come and go with nary a single early-morning firework. (We don't consider midnight to be early morning.) But a complete piece of bullshit like the pilgrimage to San Juan de los Lagos - an annual trek undertaken in honor of the fact that some sick kid got well like 400 friggin' years ago - something like this comes with multiple mornings of pre-dawn fireworks and megaphonically-enhanced warbling, and several days in which hundreds of marginally-literate God-botherers camp out in the plaza up the street, with their religious idols on display like some annoyingly pious comicbook convention.

Commandment #1: "I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image...you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I am a jealous God." Just sayin'.

And then, when morning comes, it's party time! We've been complaining about this annually, going back about five years now, and we'll probably do the same next year. We can keep it up as long as they can.

When not annoying the holy living fuck out of the people who live here, they hang out in their tent city singing Jesus songs. And it occurs to us that everything your drunken wingnut uncle said about the "Occupy Wall St." crowd actually applies here. They live on hand-outs, panhandle for change during the day, consider personal hygiene an afterthought and lack a coherent message.

Case in point, this morning's wake-up song to the neighborhood, in which they wandered the street with a loudspeaker beseeching us all to pray for them. Dudes, you're fucking pilgrims! All you do is pray! If you need us to get out of bed at 5 o'clock in the fucking morning to pray for you, maybe that's a sign God's not really paying any attention to you.

Bums? Layabouts? Unemployed parasites? Here's just a couple of random shots of pilgrims kicking back in the middle of the day, exhausted from a long morning of waking up every hardworking person in a three-mile radius.

This is the problem with Mexico - police corruption everywhere, but never a pepper spray-wielding cop when you need one.

Welcome to Copyright Infringement Central

2012-01-18T08:07:00.000-06:00

Let's face it, if we were interested in truth in advertising, that's what we'd call this site. We reprint excerpts from newspapers, magazines, books and online sources without permission, pluck photos randomly off the internets, doctor images at will (like this, this, this, this, and, of course, these) and, at the same time, generate a considerable amount of original content which we put online for free and make no effort to discourage others from appropriating (see here, for instance).

Which is to say that if we were, again, interested in truth in advertising, the Stop Online Piracy Act would be called the Shut Down Burro Hall Act. If you live in the US (as most of our readers do) please contact your representatives and tell them, "Burro Hall says fuck that shit." You're welcome to steal that phrase verbatim. For now.

The Apocalypse Is Pretty Much Turning Out The Way We Expected

2012-01-17T15:40:00.000-06:00

It's time for an end-of-the-world update! As you may already be aware, 2012 began with a symbolic reenactment of Cama-Zotz, the Maya bat-god, attempting to murder the "Hero Twins," Hunahpu and Xbalanque. In this modern re-telling, Justin Beiber attempts to murder the Lennon and McCartney classic "Let It Be" in front of a worldwide audience in New York's Times Square. At 2:41 in the video below, Beiber/Cama-Zotz utters the prescribed incantation which shifts the world's attention to Mexico and unleashes the apocalyptic countdown:

"Ladies and gentlemen...Carlos Santana!"

Now we see that Sinéad O’Connor and Björk will be closing the Cumbre Tajín music festival in Veracruz...on the Spring Equinox! This is significant because the the Winter Equinox, at 11:12AM on December 21, 2012, is the prophesied end of the world, so the Spring Equinox is really the last one we get to enjoy, and Björk's new album is supposed to be one of her best. And of course the Maya predicted all of this, right here in the Mayan Calendar:

Let it be, indeed.

Sh*t My Dad Says

2012-01-17T12:57:00.001-06:00

The Feedback Loop

2012-01-16T15:44:00.002-06:00

We link to our disgraceful local paper Plaza de Armas a lot, hoping that we might shame them into being less of a self-parody, while secret hoping they continue, since they're such a great source of material (see here, here, here, here, here, just to pick a few at random). We never gave much though to the consequences of linking to them, but now PdeA editor in chief and son of the publisher Sergio Venegas Ramirez - whose picture appears six times in the front section of today's paper, plus once in the society section - used today's column to crow over PdeA's 85,119th-place ranking among websites currently available on the intertubes, a ranking which puts it ahead of all other Querétaro-based news sites.

As we read through the rankings (culled from Alexa.com), we realized they fell roughly in the same order in which we tend to link to them (PdeA being number once since that's the dead-trees newspaper we usually buy every morning. Checking the referral data on Alexis, we see that Burro Hall is PdeA's 57th-largest source of traffic (most of the ones ahead of us are search engines or classified advertisers), and an article we wrote for Voice of Mexico three months ago is actually the 80th-largest source of traffic.

In short, it seems a sizable portion of Plaza de Armas's web traffic comes from people who refuse to take our word about how ridiculous, say, today's column by Sergio Venegas is, and need to click through to see for themselves.

You're welcome, amigos.

The Never-Ending Holiday Season

2012-01-16T09:43:00.000-06:00

Seriously? Seriously? It's a month away, people.

Profile in Huevos

2012-01-15T17:58:00.000-06:00

We're not sure how we missed this (well, we're pretty sure the incessant demands of The Man played a role), but the 2010 Burro Hall Sportsman of the Year, bullfighter Cristian Hernández, is back in the news. Hernández, you may recall, was an up-and-coming young Queretano who, on June 13, 2010, became the first person in the 65-year history of the Mexico City bullring to do this:

Of course, that sort of thing doesn't win a man the MMX BHSOTY. Instead, we awarded it to him for his startling and courageous honesty in the the aftermath:

"There are some things you must be aware of about yourself. I didn't have the ability, I didn't have the balls [me faltaron un par de huevos], this is not my thing."

Now comes this outstanding article in last Sunday's Domingo Magazine, detailing Hernández's return to the ring.

Journalist Mario Gutiérrez Vega first fills us in on Hernández's life story, in which he was more or less pushed into bullfighting by his parents. Twelve years before fleeing the ring in Mexico City, he'd done the same in Querétaro's Plaza Santa Maria - though it's hard to hold it against him because he was 10 years old at the time. He was gored in Juriquilla in 2009, and again in Querétaro in April 2010. The last one shattered what was left of his confidence. He would not return to the ring for two months, in Mexico City on June 13.

Getting dressed that morning, his hands were sweating. The bulls that day were from a ranch known for their difficulty. Hernández kept his fear to himself, before it finally overtook him in front of the entire world, turning him into an international punchline.

And that's more or less where we lost track of the story. He never came by to pick up his trophy, and we assumed he'd gone back to the family business selling carnitas at Mercado de la Cruz. But apparently, on December 10, he returned to the ring here in Querétaro, with a performance that was generally considered adequate - at least by the "didn't shit is pants and run out of the plaza" standard he managed to set for himself. And then on New Year's Day, in the same plaza, he was solid enough that the crowd petitioned for an ear, though it wasn't awarded.

Last month, faced with what we believed was an uneventful year in sports, we awarded the 2011 Burro Hall Sportsman of the Year to a dead horse named Revuelo - a move that sparked outraged among the critics in the sporting press and - without airing too much dirty laundry in public - didn't exactly sit very well with our board of directors, either.

So after careful reconsideration in light of Gutiérrez's article, we have decided to name Cristian Hernández, the 2010 Burro Hall Sportsman of the Year, as 2011 Burro Hall Sportsman of the Year, the first back-to-back recipient since Larry Bird won it in 1983-1984-1985-1986 and 1987. Muchos saludos, torero!

And of course, if Hernández is for any reason (you know what we're talking about) unable to fulfill his duties, the title will revert back to the new MMXI BHSOTY First Runner-Up, the late, lamented Revuelo.

Now Ain't That Some Shit?

2012-01-14T17:05:00.000-06:00

Now that all the Christmas crap has been packed away for another year (well, until September, anyway), it's safe to mention how much we think the Nativity scene's Satan looked like Cee Lo.

Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's close enough to justify reposting this:

And It's Never Been More Affordable

2012-01-13T16:31:00.002-06:00

Great Moments In Spin: Mexico Updates Death Toll

The new official tally provided by the attorney general's office included data only through September, and showed drug related killings increased 11 percent, to 12,903... still, a government statement sought to find a silver lining, asserting that it was the first year snce 2006 "that the homicide rate increase was lower compared to the previous years."

Mexico: Getting Worse More Slowly!

Stop Dragging My Heart Around

2012-01-12T18:01:00.000-06:00

Great Moments in Mexican Cardiothoracic Surgery:

Mexican emergency team drops heart in street while rushing it to waiting transplant patient

Mexico City police say they used a helicopter to deliver the heart in “a rapid, precision maneuver.” But after exiting the chopper, a medic stumbled and the plastic-wrapped heart tumbled out of a cooler onto the street.

...The medic returned the heart to the cooler, and the Health Department confirms it arrived at the hospital where the recipient was waiting.

There has been no information on whether the transplant was successful.

Tech Notes

2012-01-11T22:44:00.001-06:00

Sorry posting has been a bit light, but this will probably be the case for the next couple of days. We could do a lengthy write-up of Houston's Hotel Derek - an alleged business hotel that costs a couple hundred bucks a night, charges $3 extra for coffee with its $17.95 breakfast buffet, and yet appears to have wired the entire hotel with 14.4 modems, which makes simple web surfing unbearable, and something as complicated as posting a 300kb photo of a skinned cow's head take as long as the drive from here to Austin and back - but that would just be pointless venting, and would probably not get posted to the site before the Mayan Apocalypse. So we'll just post this cringe-inducing instructional video from San Miguel's premiere language school teaching you how to get a Mexican waiter's attention. Thank you for your patience.

An Offer He Couldn't Refuse

2012-01-10T20:13:00.000-06:00

Later that morning, Johnny Fontane finally got that part. And it was perfect for him.

Mercado de la Cruz, Jan 5, 2012

Mascotas Perdidas

2012-01-09T09:23:00.000-06:00

We were reminded recently that it's been a while since we posted any "Missing Animal" flyers from around town. Specifically, we were reminded by this piece in El Universal about animal rescue groups, which makes the point that many street dogs weren't born on the street, but were Christmas gifts that lost their luster after a while.

On Sept. 15, two kids attached fireworks to Sinforosa, lit them, and let her fall from the third floor. Calabazo was burned as a puppy. Boby's ears were nailed to a tree. It's not known how long he had been there, unable to move, dehydrated and exposed to the sun, when he was found.

And then, because things that are fucked up anywhere are even more fucked up in Mexico:

Lemon-Pie is a dog from Zacatecas who was tortured by a group of presumed gang members, who cut his toes off one at a time, practicing on him before cutting off the fingers and other body parts of their kidnap victims.

We're generally not opposed to animal testing here, but seriously? On the other hand (so to speak) we'd like to believe that any future digit-chopping kidnappers we were to run afoul of would know what they were doing - since just about the only thing worse than having your thumb cut off with pinking shears is having it cut off by someone who's doing it for the first time. Anyway, while we convene and ethics panel to discuss the matter, please keep an eye open for the following missing pets:

Pichi, the black Schnauzer, comes with a 3000-peso reward.

This truly amateurish sign is, rather amazingly, for a dog missing from the printing/stationery shop a few blocks down on Independencia.

These next two were snapped on a visit to Mexico City. (As we said, we've been remiss in posting this stuff for a while.)

Luna, a light brown Lab whose family apparently never took a picture of her with her entire face in the frame.

Akiles. The flyer doesn't specify what kind of dog he/she is, but it's wearing a blue sweater, which should make it easier to find.

Blood Waterfall's drummer isn't technically missing, but the band is looking for him anyway. Is it you? If you're into hard rock / alternative metal and between 15-19 years old, call the numbers below.

Mexican Government Unveils Perfect Metaphor for Mexican Government

2012-01-08T17:28:00.000-06:00

Last night Felipe Calderón threw the switch on the "Pillar of Light," a 340-foot monument commissioned in honor of Mexico's Bicentennial, which careful readers of this blog will remember was actually 479 days ago, in September, 2010.

Some Mexicans have suggested the quartz-clad light tower be dubbed “the monument to corruption.” Costs nearly tripled from about 400 million pesos to more than 1 billion (equivalent at current rates to about $75 million), and auditors found 95 improprieties in contracting that resulted in criminal charges against at least four public employees.

...Authorities have said a government board incorrectly authorized payment for the architect even though he turned in incomplete designs. The construction management company bid out construction contracts without following normal procedures and before they even had final drawings.

Foundations for the tower, which is supported by steel columns, had to be dug much deeper than originally planned.

The project has drawn criticism because only about one-third of the building materials have come from Mexico. The stainless-steel columns had to be imported from Italy, the quartz panels from Brazil and a specialized lighting system made by a German-owned company.

Hooray for Cocks!

2012-01-08T16:20:00.000-06:00

Soccer season, which ended just a month ago, started up again yesterday! A friend of ours snapped this photo while driving on the highway - it's a litte hard to make out, probably because you're not supposed to be taking pictures on with your cellphone while driving - but then you're definitely not supposed to be doing what the photo depicts, which is a large group of fans of the Querétaro White Cocks standing atop a taxibus, waving team flags while the bus roars down the highway towards the stadium.

We're pretty confident the bus made it all the way without being pulled over, since cops here tend to concentrate their efforts on things like stopping cars because they have Massachusetts plates and interrogating the driver why he's not carrying certain pieces of documentation, the answer to which is unfailingly, "because I am not required to." Which, now that you mention it, happened to us just three days ago.

But we digress. The Cocks may have lost their season opener 0-2 to Club America on the field, but in the critical "Which team's fans stabbed more of the other teams fans to death?" tally, Querétaro triumphed 1-nil. Viva los Cocks!

Sábado Gigante

2012-01-07T09:22:00.000-06:00

* A 110-pound Bengal tiger, exquisitely named "Deborah," escaped from an attorney's office in Saltillo this week. A few months earlier, an African lion was captured in Nava. We've written in the past about escaped elephants, lions and kangaroos, tigers, and lions and tigers. Seriously, is it any wonder that narcotraffickers are escaping from jails on a daily basis here? We can't even keep animals with plum-sized brains and no opposable thumbs in captivity - and we're gonna lock up Chapo Guzmán?

* For some reason, it's big news that the US, which has three times the population of Mexico, consumes 25% more tequila than Mexico. All the news articles have noted that this works out to .4 liters per American versus .89 liters per Mexican - but even this is based on total population, and since most (not all, but most) children aren't in fact downing an entire bottle of tequila every year, the actual number-per-Mexican for adults is about 1.5 liters a year. So for every Mexican you know who doesn't drink tequila, someone else is drink 3 liters a year.

* Yet another reason everyone, including criminals, should be reading Burro Hall: Becasue then you'd know better than to send crystal meth via Fedex or cocaine-filled toy frogs via DHL. (Coke-filled breast implants are still a great idea, though.)

* We want to be proud of Mexico for constructing the world's highest suspension bridge, but we just can't imagine working up the courage to drive our car over a 400-meter high bridge built by the same people who took five weeks to lay a gas pipe outside our offices. Furthermore, despite Guinness certifying it #1, the Calderón administration has been touting it as #3 in the world. Maybe the Guinness guy got mixed up because we just too part in the record for Most People Washing Their Hands At one Time.

* Yesterday was the traditional gathering of everyone who works in the main government office to share in the traditional rosca de reyes. And who was the lucky person who found the little doll hidden inside, which was obviously in no way rigged? Why, it's First Lady and 2010 Person of the Year Sandra Calzada!

* With Willard Romney promising to veto the Dream Act if America makes the mistake of electing him president, it's worth pointing out (again) that he is descended from Mexican immigrants.

* We think it's kind of cool that Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico, is an adjunct professor of Forestry & Environmental Studies at Yale. I guess this is one ex-president we can't accuse of enriching himself while in office.

* Windy City peeps need to check out the National Museum of Mexican Art and tell us how it is.

* The perro's namesake street urchin on Flickr.

* Photoblog by Querétaro-based photographer Aron Covaliu.

* Querétaro's Noticias newspaper finally enters the digital age.

* Presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto may be linguistically, um, challenged, but without him we wouldn't know how similar the phrases "thank you very much" and "many tortillas" are in Nahuatl.

* Art for the End of the World.

* The head of Querétaro's registro Civil would really, really like people to start digging up their dead relatives to make room for more dead people, please.

* YouTube's "Top Ten Videos Watched By Mexicans in 2011."

* There's no Mexican space program yet, but here's a glimpse at what could be:

á é í ó ú ñ ¿ ¡

Fine, Let's Just Kill Everybody

2012-01-06T23:06:00.000-06:00

Well, we tried. After several aggrieved parties demonstrated their displeasure with the state's human rights commissioner by putting coffins with his name on the outside his office, we tried gently to point out that perhaps this is not what passes for discourse in a society that aspires to a certain level of civility and rule of law. We figured this blog was just so goddamn powerful that if we post about something a couple of times, the problem is solved.

But now we have the no-doubt-well-meaning ladies from the Citizens Council on the Environment, who are angry with the head of the state Environmental Protection Agency, Arturo Eulogio Ortiz Montes, over something that we can't be bothered to learn the details of because we just assume it's a safe bet that they're right and he's wrong. And they've taken their complaint public, calling for his resignation and posing in front of his office and on the front page of the local paper making the universal sign for "we will slit your fucking throat from ear to ear and laugh at you as you die."

"They Call For Eulogio's Head"

Look, we don't mean to stagger to the fainting couch every time someone behaves in an impolite manner, but really, in what way is this sort of thing appropriate anywhere, let alone in Mexico, which has kind of a "we will literally slit your fucking throat from ear to ear and laugh at you as you die" problem at the moment?

Enigmatic Crime Scene Photo of the Day

2012-01-06T15:16:00.001-06:00

Courtesy of the Querétaro Municipal Police:

Suspect is considered armed and pious. Approach with extreme reverence.

Baby Gets Nothing

2012-01-06T12:52:00.001-06:00

It's Three Kings Day! Christmas 2011 is finally fucking over! So this seemed like a good day to check in on the town's publicly-financed Nativity scene, a massive, two-acre diorama torn from the pages of the Gospel of Continuity Problems. In an effort to make this stuff as realistic as possible, the Baby Jesus doesn't actually show up until the morning of the 25th - meaning that, for a month or so, an un-pregnant Mary sits there with her arms in the "cradling an invisible baby" position, waiting for the child to be plopped into her arms by municipal employees just as it happened in real life - while, on the other hand, the Three Kings, who didn't even start their journey until after the baby was born, have been crouching outside the manger since late November, gold, frankincense and myrrh in hand. On Christmas Day the baby appeared, and still they stood there, taunting him with their gifts. And today, according to the legend (and, here, let Johnny Cash it explain it all to you), they arrived, saw the baby (which, in our Nativity scene, they've been staring at for 12 days) "and they knelt down and paid him homage." (Matthew: 2:12)

Except in Querétaro, where, as of 11AM, they were still standing there, clutching their gifts, perhaps afraid to enter as long as a donkey the size of a Hereford bull is roaming around untethered. Or maybe just confused by the presence of ducks in the Palestinian desert. Either way, baby gets bupkis.

Now, we come from a country that doesn't celebrate Three Kings Day, so we've never really understood the appeal, other than the obvious, mindless one, which is: "We get presents!!" But American kids do that on Dec. 25. Why would Mexicans want to wait? (Especially since, from what we've seen, "waiting your turn" is not exactly a national trait.) But we think we've finally figured it out.

See, according to the Bible's fine print, Herod had tried to used the Kings to lead him to Jesus, sort of the way the CIA used bin Laden's courier to lead them to him. (Again...Ladies and gentlemen, Johnny Cash.) But, in one of those completely plausible twists that happen all the time in the Bible, the Kings were warned about this in a dream and came back by an alternate route, and the Jesus family escaped to Egypt. When Herod learned he'd been duped, he had his troops slaughter every male child in Bethlehem.

In other words, the child - my child - who gets visited by the Kings (a) gets presents!! and (b) lives a safe and happy life (for 33 more years, anyway), revered literally as the Messiah, while everyone else's child is disemboweled by centurions. Really, can you think of a more Mexican holiday than that?

The Long and Winding Road

2012-01-05T14:34:00.002-06:00

We know that English is a hard language to spell, and "abbey" is an especially hard, not to mention rarely-used, English word, so making fun of a Mexican for misspelling it "abeey" would seem like something of a cheap shot. Unless, of course, it was the name of your own fucking night club, and you had spelled it correctly on another sign twenty feet away.

The best part is, this sign's been there for a year and a half. Ni modo.

Burro Hall Literary Cabal Book Club

2012-01-05T12:35:00.001-06:00

A number of weeks ago, we received a copy of Gorostieta and the Cristiada: Mexico's Catholic Insurgency 1926-1929, by Friend o' the Blog Richard Grabman, which we promised to read and review. Almost immediately we sold our souls to The Man and have still not been able to set aside the time for it. But not reading a book has never stopped us from reviewing one before - or, for that matter, writing an entire term paper on it, as evidenced by the B- we received in "The Novels of DH Lawrence" in college, despite not even purchasing anything but Lady Chatterley's Lover from the book store. So trust us, it's fantastic, and you can, and should, purchase it dirt-cheap here or here.

But don't take our word for it! Here's Gancho:

I've not had the pleasure of reading the book yet (though I will!), but the Cristiada is a fascinating and all-too-overlooked period in Mexican history, and, based on his writing at Mexfiles, I can only imagine that Grabman's opus is well worth your time.

Um, okay. Look, the end of the year is a busy time for a lot of people. Except Aguachile, apparently:

For a quick, entertaining, enlightening, and, most importantly, even-handed read on the Cristiada and particularly Enrique Gorostieta Velarde, a general hired to be the leader of the rebellion, I recommend Richard Grabman's Gorostieta and the Cristiada: Mexico's Catholic Insurgency 1926-1929. It proves a quick and accessible overview and background to the event, and seeks to hone in on Gorostieta himself - a highly ambitions army officer that, irony of ironies, had long been considered an anti-clerical and possibly atheist....Yet what motivated him to join the rebellion, then? For one good and highly readable attempt at answering this question, which appears to have been the author's motivation, you can check out Grabman's book.

That's three rave reviews, and you still haven't bought it yet?

Cheesecake Factory

2012-01-04T18:18:00.000-06:00

Among the many year-end reviews in the local media was one of the papers running a feature on "The Most Beautiful Women in Querétaro" - though we think it might have been more accurate to call it "The Most Beautiful Nieces and Daughters of People Who Work at the Paper." Here, we present our bad pictures of their pictures. The newspaper didn't actually rank them, so neither will we. Consider it a ten-way tie for eleventh place.

Live Free or Die

2012-01-03T15:10:00.000-06:00

So, first there's this:

Mexico City Hopes to Lure Chicagoans by Touting Cheaper Health Care

Banking on worries over rising health costs in the U.S., government and hospital officials in Mexico City are courting Chicagoans searching for affordable medical care.

On Wednesday, about a dozen Chicago health professionals and several others embarked on a health care tour of Mexico City, part of a campaign to raise that city's profile as a center for medical tourism. The campaign is aimed at residents in Chicago and other cities with large Mexican immigrant populations who need cancer treatment, heart surgeries, dental procedures and other health care.

And then this:

Undocumented Quadriplegic Sent Back to Mexico Dies

An undocumented immigrant who was paralyzed in a construction accident and deported in 2010 against his will to Mexico because he could not pay his Illinois hospital bill died over the weekend, activists confirmed to Efe on Monday.

Quelino Ojeda Jiménez, 24, died at 2:00 a.m. Sunday at a hospital in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, said Jesus Vargas, an immigrants' rights activist in Chicago.

We're not sure what comes out looking worse: Mexican healthcare, American healthcare, or the utterly depraved immigration policies of the United States. Two-for-one margaritas are looking pretty good, though.

Great Moments in Tithing

2012-01-03T08:49:00.002-06:00

We thought we might lay off the pope for a while, but then [via the Mexfiles dude] this comes along:

Even the Narcos Can Help Pay for the Benedict XVI's Visit to Mexico

In a sort of "confession," the Archbishop of León, José Guadalupe Martín Rábago, agree that even narcotraffickers could help to pay for the popes visit to Mexico, since the Catholic clergy doesn't have the means to ensure that none of their donations come from organized crime.

Given that he's coming to preach a backwards doctrine of homophobia, anti-contraception and acceptance of poverty, we hardly find the de facto auctioning of papal indulgences to mass murders to be the most offensive part of his visit. In fact, we kind of admire the honesty. As the old joke goes, we've already established what you are, Madam - now we're just haggling over the price.

#8: Thou Shall Not Steal

2012-01-02T13:14:00.000-06:00

Well, despite the state of Querétaro's best efforts to poach the visiting Pope Something-or-Other from our neighbors in Guanajuato, the Vatican announced yesterday that His Popliness hath forsaken us:

Pope Benedict XVI will head to the Catholic-rich state of Guanajuato in his first visit to Mexico in March, and skip the country’s heavily populated capital.

The Mexican Episcopal Conference says Benedict will arrive on March 23 in the city of Leon where President Felipe Calderon will welcome him.

The organization said in a Sunday statement that Benedict also plans to greet worshippers in the city of Guanajuato.

He will officiate a Mass in the city of Silao beneath a hill where a 67-foot statue of Jesus Christ stands.

The pope will return to Leon to address bishops from Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean before heading to Cuba on March 26.

The Vatican had said Benedict would avoid Mexico City because of its high altitude although it’s the country’s biggest city.

If anyone wants to rent a house just two-hours drive from Guanajuato the week of March 23, ours will be empty.

Sh*t My Dad Says, 2012

2012-01-01T13:54:00.000-06:00

The Hangover

2012-01-01T12:16:00.003-06:00

Piñatas and Panties

2011-12-31T19:01:00.001-06:00

Feliz 2012, and a joyous End o' the World from all of us at Burro Hall.

99 Problems

2011-12-31T16:43:00.000-06:00

Ah, Querétaro. It's the second-safest state in Mexico. Forty-nine families a day have been moving here from the crazier parts of the Republic. Unemployment is reasonably low, quality of life is reasonably high. It's the home of Burro fuckin' Hall, for chrissakes! And so of course we managed to set an all-time state record for suicides this year, with 99 queretanos taking matters into their own hands - up from 78 least year, and squashing the previous record of 85 in 2007. Weird, to say the least. Nineteen were minors. (And that 99 number is as of Dec 22. That no one has killed themselves over Christmas is maybe the strangest part of this; we seriously consider it every time we hear "O Holy Night.")

The local paper, perhaps frustrated by its inability to work a photo of the publisher's family into the story (seriously, father and son are both on the front page today), decided to go with this super-classy graphic:

Of course, even the suicidiest year ever, which works out to 5.5 per 100,000 population, is still less than half the rate up north of the border, so things could definitely be a lot worse.

The Lonesome, Well-Attended Death of Jesús Angel Vela Lares

2011-12-31T13:33:00.000-06:00

A year ago last September, a businessman named Jesús Angel Vela Lares treated himself to a night out at the Fantastic casino in Querétaro. It's not clear whether or not he came out ahead - probably not - but he more than broke even on the cut-rate alcoholic beverages. Around 4am, he wandered out the door and wove an uneasy path down Constituyentes, which is a six-lane highway. Jesús Angel Vela Lares was on foot.

At that point, and over the next two hours, at least five of the 300 police-state security cameras that blanket this city kept Jesús Angel Vela Lares in their sites. Soon, a couple of Querétaro's vastly over-armed police officers showed up and tried to persuade him to use the sidewalk. Jesús Angel Vela Lares responded by running smack into a tree. The police then did what you'd expect - they got in their car and drove off, leaving him there. Jesús Angel Vela Lares staggered to his feet and continued ambling down the six-lane highway. Another patrol car came and went. Drivers swerved to avoid him. The cameras kept rolling.

Jesús Angel Vela Lares turned onto Bernardo Quintana, another six-lane highway, and eventually staggered into an auto service store's parking lot, where he fell over a trash can, got up and then fell down a flight of stairs. He got up, made it to the sidewalk, and dropped to the ground, slumped forward on his knees. Another patrol car arrived, watched him for a few minutes, and left. The cameras were still rolling a half hour later, as another man came up, rifled Jesús Angel Vela Lares's pockets, and made off with his wallet. A fourth patrol car picked up the wallet thief and, after several more minutes, went back to the parking lot to check on Jesús Angel Vela Lares, who was dead from a heart attack at age 44. The eight hours of combined video tape of his last 110 minutes was the basis for the State Human Rights Commission recommending charges be brought against the various cops and officials who watched him die. So maybe those 300 cameras are good for something, after all.

Have Yourself a Merry Moral Crisis

2011-12-31T09:01:00.000-06:00

The local archbishop took a few minutes out of his busy Christmas schedule this week to lecture us all on our impending moral crisis. We realize this is literally his entire job, so we should probably just tune him out the way we do with Christmas music, but it does get a little tedious after the 40th or 50th exhortation. Halloween creates a moral crisis. The equinox is a moral crisis. They nation's rising crime and mayhem is a moral crisis. And now, in the middle of the annual orgy of generosity, charity, family-orientation and general, all-around Jesusyness, what's his message? We are mired in a moral crisis. That the local news reports this stuff straightforwardly and without comment, the way the state-run media in North Korea report utterances from the Dear Leader, only heightens our despair.

Meanwhile, in related news, twice-weekly nonstop service from Querétaro to Las Vegas is expected to begin in 2012, which should keep his Holy Excellence busy through the end of the world on Dec 21.

Robbed!

2011-12-30T11:27:00.004-06:00

We take a backseat to no one when it comes to supporting tough, highly-restrictive laws on the financing and promotion of political campaigns, but even we found ourselves going, "Dayum!" when we saw this thing. Apparently, the results of last month's very hotly-contested mayoral election in Morelia has been overturned because someone violated the "no political ads within three days of the election" rule. That's ballsy enough in its own right, but the specific violation was that Mexican boxer Juan Manuel Marquez - who was not a candidate for office in Morelia or anywhere else - fought a televised bout in Las Vegas - which, despite the name, is not in Mexico - while wearing a small PRI logo on his shorts.

And because of that, Wilfrido Lazaro Medina is no longer the new mayor of Morelia. Look for "Lazaro Was Robbed!" to replace "Marquez Was Robbed!" as the nation's hottest boxing-related topic.

Dreaming of a White Isthmus

2011-12-29T16:29:00.000-06:00

There's a restaurant a couple of blocks from our offices, Maria y Su Bici (which is actually really terrific, if you're ever stuck in Querétaro for some godforsaken reason), specializing in the food, flavors and overall mezcal-soaked ambiance of Oaxaca - home of Benito Juárez, Mexico's shortest, second-brownest president. As part of the decorative theme, they wanted to display some examples of traditional Oaxacan peasantwear. It's hard to tell if this is another example of latent Malinchistic aspirations, or simply a dearth of good Zapotec mannequins, but the result looks like an EZLN/Abercombie & Fitch mash-up:

The young lady would literally burst into flames if she dared expose skin that alabaster to the Oaxacan sun. Her husband, meanwhile, looks like he's heading to Yale on a rowing scholarship.

For comparison, here are some randomly-selected couples from Oaxaca's Guelaguetza festival. See how many differences you can spot.

Sh*t My Dad Says

2011-12-29T07:43:00.000-06:00

Punk'd

2011-12-28T22:00:00.000-06:00

Today is Día de los Inocentes, the Mexican equivalent of April Fool's Day. This has always struck us as a little weird since, in the Christian tradition, the Day of the Innocents commemorates the day, three days after the birth of Jesus, that King Herod ordered the slaughter of every newborn male child in Bethlehem. That this somehow became the Day of Goofball Pranks has always kind of baffled us. As pranks go, ripping a newborn out of his mother's arms and impaling him on a spear seems to us to be the prime example of "carrying the joke too far." But then, we've always found Mexican humor a little... broad.

As far as we've seen, Mexicans don't invest a lot in DdlI jokes. Instead, it seems to fall mostly to the news media to publish silly stories in the hopes of punking a few readers - "[World Famous Soccer Star] to Join Local Soccer Team!" read one. "[Politician Unlikely to Run for Mayor] to Run for Mayor!" You get the idea.

Our favorite of the day - by which we mean, "most in keeping with the original proposition that bayoneting babies is funny" - came from a.m. Querétaro, with it's headline "General Motors Coming to Querétaro!" GM, they insisted, was planning to build one of the largest automotive assembly plants in Latin America right here in town. Over $3 billion in investment, with more than 10,000 precious new jobs created.

HAHAHAHAHA! Psych! Oh my God, you should have seen the look on your face! Fucking priceless! No... sorry. No new investment. No new jobs. Nope. Heh-heh-heh. No. Sorry. Nada. Nothing. Ha.

Have a nice day.

Delicious, Chocolatey Nun's Farts

2011-12-28T13:22:00.002-06:00

Don't blame us - that's the actual name of a candy manufactured in Querétaro. Judging from the packaging, nuns' farts leave little steaming piles of nun-poop! Mmmmmmm! From a marketing standpoint, we can see how this would appeal to your average 12-year-old, though the candies themselves (which we think are terrific) are basically a milk chocolate-covered rum-soaked truffle, with enough alcohol to warrant a heavy-machinery warning, and so maybe not appropriate for the young'uns.

Of course, lest anyone in this staunchly religious town be offended by the name, the packaging goes on to explain that it's a misspelling of the name originally coined by the Barcelona-based Italian confectioner who invented them: "Petto di Monca," or "nun's tit." So there you have it. Though the matter is obviously debatable (and feel free to have at it in comments), we suppose we'd have to concede that "nun's fart" is less offensive than "nun's tit" - though neither conjures up something we'd like to have in our mouths.

How Mexicans Think of Christmas in America

2011-12-27T12:34:00.001-06:00

Given the way the American media's distorted coverage of Mexico as a blood-soaked nightmare, we probably shouldn't complain about today's local headline: "SANTA GOES CRAZY IN DALLAS: KILLS SIX!"

(Except to point out that it wasn't really Santa Claus, of course.)

If I Could Talk to the Animals

2011-12-27T10:27:00.000-06:00

You'll all be relieved to know the baby Jesus did show up again this year! Here, his mom explains how the burro is the most delightful of all God's creatures.

Meanwhile, because the town's nativity scene includes dioramas of just about every religiously significant person except Buffy the Vampire Slayer, here's St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, seen here blessing a... a...

Holy shit, what the fuck is that? Can anyone out there identify this thing? It could be some kind of jungle cat - or then again maybe a feral dog of some sort. A hairless warthog? Chupacabra? Anyone?

Well Tonight Thank God It's Them Instead of You

2011-12-26T19:47:00.000-06:00

Remember to respect your Elders!

Mormon missionaries in front of Querétaro's Dancing Fountain, Christmas Eve 2011

O Come Let Us Adore Him

2011-12-25T08:21:00.001-06:00

The Man Comes Around

2011-12-24T18:40:00.003-06:00

Let Johnny talk you through the story of Christmas:

Nativity, Seen

2011-12-24T16:07:00.000-06:00

The city's Nativity scene has been up since, like, mid-summer. It's this weird amalgam of Bible stories, Mexican folklore, and whatever papier-mâché animals they happen to have laying around at the time. Here are a few pictures, because we don't feel like typing words.

We don't know who the bride is supposed to be, but she's purty...

The Mexican butcher selling dried beef, mentioned, we believe in the Gospel of Mark.

Creepy children.

Even the statue of the Third King is wearing blackface.

This is what we're having for dinner at the Burro Hall office party.

Can we just agree this is the worst likeness of a zebra ever? It looks like two guys in a zebra suit.

The famous crocodile of the Palestinian desert.

There's no baby yet, but there is a burro, which is all you need.

If We Sent It By Mexican Post You Wouldn't Get It Until April

2011-12-24T07:57:00.000-06:00

Every year we hold a competition among the interns to see who can come up with the best holiday card design and thus keep his or her job after December 24. This year's winner - ¡Felicidades, Lazaro! ¡Nos vemos el lunes! - puts the Christ back in Christmas, with a meditation on how we might strive to emulate his life. We guess the takeaway here is "keep it short."

Warm holiday wishes from the board of directors, staff, interns, small domestic animals, lawyers, accountants and all the other assorted leeches and hangers-on here at Burro Hall.

A Burro Hall-iday Tradition

2011-12-23T23:40:00.000-06:00

It's that time of the year again, when we repost this item from 2007 and ask our more knowledgeable readers to enlighten us. Which, at the risk of being churlish - and let us here reiterate how much we love you all - you never fucking do. Why do you all hate the baby Jesus?

Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Have Yourself a Mammy Little Christmas

One of the most popular Mexican Christmas traditions is the posada, a nightly procession reenacting the night before Christmas, in which the processioners go from house asking for shelter and are turned away, usually in song. To our way of thinking, this is quintessentially Mexican. While the rest of the world takes this time of the year to "accentuate the positive" - celebrating the birth of the Messiah, the Redeemer of Mankind, etc - Mexicans repeatedly and obsessively dwell on the night Mary and Joseph - nice couple, a bit down on their luck, but still favored by God - asked for one little favor, nothing lavish (and, by the way, something they'd totally do for you if the positions were reversed) and were told to fuck off. These people know how to nurse a grudge - and this happened 2000 years ago, to someone else, half a world away. (This is something Americans may want to keep in mind during the current orgy of anti-Mexican sentiment; it'll be the year 5000 and these guys will be acting like it happened only yesterday.)

So in addition to the regular processions comprised of the miscellaneous faithful, there's an official town Posada Float, pulled by a tractor, rigged with a sound system, that travels around the streets of the Centro Historico every night, stopping every few hundred yards for a song. There's a chorus of little angels, a white-bearded Joseph, and Mary sitting sidesaddle on a burro. The angels sing a beautiful little song on behalf of the couple, asking for shelter for the night, and are angrily turned away by Hattie McDaniel.

If we may pose a question here in the spirit of honest holiday inquiry, what the fuckin' fuck? We expected attorneys for the Aunt Jemima Corporation to step in with a cease and desist order. We know Mexico has a somewhat less-uptight attitude towards blackface minstrelsy than we do up north, but putting aside the offensiveness of it for a minute, it just doesn't make sense. The angels, the donkey, the Holy Parents, all more or less period-correct for an event that happened 1-Day B.C....and then - sho 'nuff! - out pops this antebellum galley slave! Can someone with a better understanding of all this explain it to us?

¡Felíz Navidad, Cartel Assassins!

2011-12-23T19:13:00.000-06:00

This sure seems like a great idea:

Rules Eased on Gun Sales to Noncitizens

WASHINGTON — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is relaxing restrictions on the sale of guns to noncitizens because Justice Department lawyers have concluded that the rules had no legal basis, officials said on Thursday.

In a letter to firearms dealers on Thursday, the bureau said it would soon drop a regulation that bars the sale of guns to noncitizens until they can document that they have lived in a state for at least 90 days, such as by producing three months of utility bills in their name at a local address.

...This month, the department published an October memorandum by the Office of Legal Counsel that said another aspect of the A.T.F.’s regulations went too far. It was a rule carrying out a section of the Gun Control Act that generally bars “aliens” who have “been admitted to the United States under a nonimmigrant visa” from buying or possessing weapons.

Well, that's a relief! We've been thinking it's just way too difficult for, say, Mexican visitors to Texas and the Failed State of Arizona to obtain high-powered weapons. Cheers to the ATF for cutting through all that nanny-state red tape. The Totally Awesome Zetas! just got totally awesomer.

Tour Guides with Guns

2011-12-23T11:05:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was "Police Day" in Querétaro, and in honor of the event, Gov. Calzada inaugurated yet another police force, which is exactly what this town needs! In addition to the Federal Police, the State Police, the Municipal Police, the Transit Police and the various offshoot, subdivisions and SWAT teams associated with each of them, we now have the Tourist Police. We have no idea why.

At first we assumed this was a special force aimed at arresting, detaining and just generally policing tourists, though why this would require its own police force is beyond us. Furthermore, the vast majority of tourists in Querétaro are Mexican, not foreign, so again, why would they need their own police force? Los Angeles is 3,000 miles from Brooklyn, but we can more or less deal with their policemen without incident (maybe more so than the locals).

But no, apparently the Tourist Police received special training in "cultural and historical themes" (as well as "specialized defense," whatever that is), and are required to understand English and be able to "orient and guide" people around the city.

In the rest of the world, these people are called "tour guides." There's a central tourist office here, and a handful of information kiosks scattered around town not to mention the dozens of privately-run tours of the Centro. But because Querétaro's solution to everything is to add more inadequately-trained people with guns into the mix, we now have a platoon of armed tour guides trained in "specialized defense," just in time for the holidays.

War Horse

2011-12-22T17:54:00.005-06:00

The bull scored a few points at the plaza de toros in Morelia last weekend, which is sure to delight the anti-bullfighting crowds out there, except that it came at the expense of rejoneador Diego Ventura's horse, "Revuelo" - a name that means "commotion," so extra points for irony.

It's hard to tell from this angle (this one is better, if more cringe-inducing) whether it was the initial fall or the subsequent goring that did the most damage, but the horse eventually limped off (to a nice round of applause) to the veterinarian, where the standard treatment for all equine ailments was administered. Though Ventura, who'll be in Querétaro on Christmas Day, has been doing this for 15 years, this is only the second horse he's lost, a testament to his great skill as a rider. The front page of his website, however, is hard to describe without using the word "gay" in the pejorative sense teenagers sometimes use it.

Seriously, for what reason would it be a good idea to do this in water?

Back in the old days, horses had it even worse, since the picador's horses weren't covered in leather mattresses like they are today, and the whole idea was for the bull to gore them. Even Ernest Hemingway starts his Death in the Afternoon with: "At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses." Of course, Papa being Papa, he was totally cool with it by the third page of his 517-page book.

(As we were searching for that quote, we came across the book's review in the Sept. 25, 1932, New York Times, which we link to here just for the hell of it.)

Since the year is almost over, and the only other serious competitor is the Querétaro White Cocks's Manuel López, who scored the winning own-goal in the Mexican League semifinals, we're going to just go ahead and name Revuelo the Horse the 2011 Burro Hall Sportsman of the Year, the first posthumous non-human recipient in the award's illustrious history. Vaya con Dios, caballo!

No Car Seat For You!

2011-12-22T11:23:00.000-06:00

Contrary to popular belief, we don't go out looking for car seat violations to feed this blog. What usually happens is that we'll stumble upon on while we're out, happen to have a camera on us, and if we're lucky, get the shot. Yesterday, we weren't lucky, so we have no photographic record of the worst offense we've ever seen.

We'd thought we'd seen it all, including multiple instances of parents driving while holding a baby on their lap, but yesterday we saw a woman driving down Corregidora St. with her baby sitting in the front passenger seat, unaccompanied, un-seatbelted, and being held upright by Mommy's hand pressed against its chest because, given it's age, it probably couldn't have sat up on its own even if the car wasn't jostling along in traffic.

By the time we caught up with her at a red light a block away, she had pulled over to pick up a couple of young adults, so the shot below is just your standard, everyday outrage of an adult without a seatbelt holding a small baby in her arms in the front passenger seat. Nothing to see here, folks.

If you happen to see the parents of this child, do not ask them to contact us because we are declaring them ineligible for a free car seat. Instead, we're asking to you kidnap the child and deliver it to us, so we can smuggle it into the US and give it to one of the many childless, overprotective couples currently waiting to adopt.

Sh*t My Dad Says

2011-12-21T16:19:00.002-06:00

Countdown to Ecstasy

2011-12-21T15:00:00.001-06:00

We're not looking to harsh anyone's winter solstice/holiday mellow, but according to the Maya - whose entire civilization collapsed into the toilet 1100 years ago, so, really, why wouldn't we trust them - the world will end a year from today.

That's all. Look, it's probably nothing. Go back to whatever you were doing.

Armed & Anachronous II

2011-12-20T22:04:00.004-06:00

A couple weeks go, Querétaro held one of those guns-for-cash things, whereby you show up with a firearm and the military buys it back from you without a lot of uncomfortable questions like, "You know guns are illegal in Mexico, right?" and "Did you perchance use this thing to rub out a snitch?" Even though QRO is the least-gunny place in the country right now, they still managed to pick up about 680 pieces, all of which were destroyed today in an elaborate ceremony in the city's central Plaza. Amid a phalanx of officials and Generals from the 17th Zona Militar, the gun were admired, photographed, denounced, meticulously logged one at time by make and serial number, and then laboriously sliced into non-lethal pieces.

InQro.com

And from the buzzsaws rose the unmistakeable smell of... burning wood? Jesus H. Christ on a holiday furlough, will you look at these "weapons"? Did everyone who turning one in actually ride with Pancho Villa? Because he's been dead at for 90 years. Seriously, if we were packing this kind of heat the night we got our ribs broken, we'd still have gotten our ribs broken.

InQro.com

If anything, these babies are worth something. Why are we destroying them in front of the media? Why not auction them off to collectors of antique weapons and use the proceeds to fight crime? Do we have to think of everything for you people?

[Armed & Anachronous I here.]

Once Again, We Are Passed Over for Person of the Year

2011-12-20T21:34:00.000-06:00

It's the end of the year, and if you're like us, you've been positively pissing yourselves wondering, "Who will be the Plaza de Armas person of the year for 2011?" We had to suspend our office pool after we realized every single person had picked "Sandra Calzada for the repeat." Hey, if you'd seen how many times she'd appeared on the front page of the paper, you'd think this was a reasonable assumption. Other contenders were her husband, her two kids, her sister-in-law (the head of public security) and her father-in-law, the former governor. In fact, if you took the Calzadas out of the running, we actually stood a a pretty decent chance of taking the thing.

But anyway, 2011 is almost in the rear view mirror, it's all over but the shouting, and the most important, most influential, most inspiring queretano of 2011 is... some guy we've never heard of!

Okay, so that's not true. Having gotten over our initial "WTF?" reaction, we now recognize the man (he's the smallish one between the two members of the family that owns PdeA - seriously, muchachos, this is getting out of hand; we've been reading the New York Times for 25 years, and we wouldn't recognize a single member of the Sulzberger family if they turned up in out kitchen making latkes tonight) as the newly-elected rector of the Autonomous University of Querétaro. The election, as we recall from Plaza de Armas's coverage, was somewhat contentious, and there was a Bush-Gore-like standoff for a while, and then Herrera won, and then that was that. This happened like a month ago. So the most important, most inspiring, most influential queretano of the year is the head of one of the city's many colleges, who's been on the job for a few weeks. Seriously, you can see why we're not kidding when we say we're pissed off that we weren't chosen.

Chickencock Update

2011-12-20T11:06:00.000-06:00

As promised, we sent the interns out to visit El Pollo Es Mi Gallo. Here's the "restaurant" that's shelling out big bucks to plaster billboards all over Querétaro:

It's not even a new chicken joint - this hole-in-the-wall has been here for years, under the name Pronto Pollos.

Cinco de Burro Hall

2011-12-19T23:54:00.001-06:00

Burro Hall - it's not just a website, publishing empire, a philosophy and a way of life; it's also a physical structure, a stately Mexican hacienda, as important to the publication of this site as Hef's mansion is to his. And today marks five years since we burst in the the dead of night, bound and gagged the owner, and set up shop here.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Greetings from Burro Hall

We moved into the new house yesterday, lyrically named Casa de la Sirena - The Mermaid House - by its owner, after the large hand-painted tile mermaid on one wall of the courtyard. We've got most if it chipped off by now, to be replaced with the new Burro Hall logo: a donkey with enormous testicles wearing an Uncle Sam top hat. We just need to find some flashing red lights for the eyeballs.

The house is lovely, if a bit eccentric, and we're sure the next few days will be discovery-filled. For instance, we've discovered that bathrooms outnumber closets here 3-1, and that wireless internet is utterly ineffective when your walls are two feet thick.

But last night, we took out the garbage. Having lived in apartment buildings since we were 18, this was actually the very first time in our adult life that we've done that. See what we mean about discovery-filled?

Tonight, we took out the trash for the 1,825th time. It never gets old.

Choosing Sides

2011-12-19T17:34:00.002-06:00

So over the weekend, the US Congress took a few minutes out of its busy schedule of threatening to shut down the whole US Government to search behind the Congressional couch cushions to see if they can continue helping out Mexico in 2012 in it's War to Stop America's Drugs From Getting to America. After careful deliberation, they decided to toss the Mexicans $248.5 million bucks under the Mérida Initiative, to combat the murderous cartels who deliver us our drugs. Mighty neighborly of us, no?

Well, estimates vary, but during that same 2012 period Americans will probably put between $20-30 billion into the hands of those same cartels. We had one of the interns put this into bar-graph form so we could see whose side the US is fighting on in this so-called war:

Meanwhile, back in Washington, elected officials are driving themselves crazy trying to figure out why the stupid lazy Mexicans can't just win this thing and be done with it.

A Children's Treasury of Presidential Candidates Speaking Spanish

2011-12-18T13:54:00.001-06:00

Mexico's next president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has gotten off to kind of a rocky start - actually, he's been proving himself the Baryshnikov of stomping on his own dick. But his latest embarrassment - the surfacing of a three-year-old video of himself attempting to speak a language we vaguely recognize as English, seems to us a blow landed slightly south of the waistline, if only because we're pretty sure this is exactly what we sound like in Spanish:

So we figured we'd be clever and try to dig up some old video of candidate Obama pandering to the Latino vote with a fractured attempt at Espanglish - but, damn! When this guy isn't busy killing Osama bin Laden, he's obviously working on his pronunciation:

Of course, you can always count on his predecessor:

But so what about the current crop of presidential guanabees? We've brought this video current frontrunner Newt Gingrich going all Torquemada on lengua materna before:

On the other hand, the only thing we could find on his rival Willard Romney is this ad recorded by his son, which leads us to assume the Mittster himself no habla the espanyol - all the more shocking because, of everyone in the field, he's the one with Mexican roots.

Searches for Clinton, Bush Sr. and a few of their predecessors came up empty, though we definitely recall seeing Jimmy Carter speaking Mexican on a few occasions. A few months ago Mike Bloomberg, the CEO of New York City and probably the politician Peña Nieto most resembles, did this to himself, to the delight of late-night comedians everywhere:

Finally, here's Jackie Kennedy, proving there's nothing she can't do with grace and elegance...

Sábado Gigante

2011-12-17T23:16:00.000-06:00

* The Burro Hall 2011 Award for Best Euphemism Ever, In Any Language: Totally Awesome Zetas! boss Miguel Angel Treviño referring to his organization's ongoing murderous reign of terror in support of drug trafficking and organized crime with, "We concentrate on our work."

* Eighty thousand queretanos can't read, and therefore, tragically, cannot enjoy Burro Hall.

* Querétaro launchs a "No More Teen Moms" campaign, which, as far as we can tell, doesn't involve the distribution of contraceptives. And abortion remains 100% illegal here. Let's just say we're keeping our optimism in check on this one.

* American Navy names American ship after American citizen with Mexican-sounding name. Republicans freak out.

* Last minute gift idea: coffee-table book of old Mexico photos by Hugo Brehme.

* Or, just go with the Mexican Flag/Penis boxer shorts.

* Querétaro's DIF is urging everyone not to give toys to street urchins at this time of year, since it reduces the opportunities for First Lady Sandra Calzada to be photographed.

* President-to-be Enrique Peña Nieto is no lady.

* Because Mexicans can find the toxins in any silver lining, funeral directors in Juárez are fuming over the declining homicide rate.

* Speaking of toxins, we wish the US made it as hard for lead batteries to enter Mexico as they make it for Mexicans to enter the US.

* Dump on the Totally Awesome Zetas! if you like, but first ask yourself what you're doing to reduce your carbon footprint.

* Drug war means hard times for Mexican artists. We're still waiting for someone to produce the Mexican drug war's Guernica. (Also, while we're on the subject of arts and craft, AK-47 jewelry seems like something that could have quite a future here.)

* We've had some "crazy uncle" issues of our own, but we're still glad we're not Chapo Guzmán's nephew.

* This is a couple months old, but a year after the alleged murder of David Hartley on Falcon Lake, most of the locals think his wife's story is full of shit.

* Season's Greetings from the Failed State of Arizona!

* Here's an FSoAZ state senatrix to who loves sexual harassment almost as much as Sheriff Joe Arpaio does.

* Meanwhile, this ain't gonna happen, but it's fun to see it even being talked about by serious people.

* Speaking of raging, stinking failures from the FSoAZ, Querétaro's record for World's Largest Taco may be silly, but Phoenix's World's Longest Line of Tacos is just embarrassing.

* Smell the flop sweat: Denizens of the Baja monkey house attempt a laugh at our expense, because that's what classy people do.

*American law-breaking beauty queens have a long way to go to catch up to their Mexican counterparts.

* Daniel Hernandez's Estrella Cercana is, well, intriguing, let's say.

* And you should add Think Mexican to your daily reading/viewing.

* From now on, it's Doctor Mija Chronicles to you.

* Urban Mushing Querétaro: We're signing up the perro tomorrow. (More info here.)

* Mexican World Records Update: Largest yoga class, Largest zombie walk. We're bursting with pride.

* Parrot-smuggling is surprisingly popular.

* Fuck Yeah Cholas!

* Strange image of the week: via Tex[t]-Mex, a honky lawn jockey in San Diego.

*People in this part of Mexico continue to struggle with the difference between a flash mob and an unannounced dance performance.

Church & State

2011-12-17T11:16:00.000-06:00

We'd have to re-read the relevant passages, but we're pretty sure that when Jesus hung out with criminals he didn't come in quite this heavily strapped.

"Mexico City - Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera celebrated a mass in the Santa Martha Norte prison. He didn't mingle with the prisoners because the thick cordon of police protection got in the way."

[Thanks, Richard.]

That's Life

2011-12-16T14:58:00.001-06:00

A few weeks ago we were heading to our favorite watering hole, when he happened upon this:

We were pleased to have a camera with which to take a picture of a cameraman shooting pictures of a crowd taking cellphone pictures of a couple of lip-synching guys with whom, owing to our antipathy towards Mexican pop music, we were unfamiliar. Reyli and Joan Sebastian, it turns out, which aficionados inform us is a Really Big Deal. (Though considering the fact that Sebastian's website lists his cellphone number, really, how big can he be?)

Anyway, here at last is the video in question, "Así Es La Vida," shot entirely in Querétaro - and not just at our favorite bar, but in the seats we usually sit in at said bar.

(And yeah, that's the world-famous Dancing Fountain behind them.)

Update: So apparently the video is unviewable north of the Rio Grande, with strikes us as both un-neighborly and, from a marketing standpoint (this being, after all, a music video) kind of shortsighted. Suffice it to say the song sucks ass (you can maybe hear it here). Click here for cellphone videos of the making of the video. If all else fails, come visit.

The Racist Pig

2011-12-15T16:28:00.000-06:00

So it turns out the America's Least Effective, Most Rapist-Loving Sheriff, Joe "Joe" Arpaio of the Failed State of Arizona, is a racist goon leading his own private brownshirt division on a reign of terror against the Latino population of his county, a people whose very existence offends his understanding of what America is about. This, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which for some reason took three years to reach the same conclusion already known to everyone who isn't idiot or a racist, despite being led during all those years by a former governor of the FSoAZ.

We're not sure what effect any of this will have - even Bull Connor managed to cling to office until he became such an embarrassment that the people of Birmingham voted him out, which required a level of self-awareness that the people of Maricopa County seem to lack. But either way, we're pretty sure this is the first official DHS report to contain the line "wetbacks, Mexican bitches and fucking Mexicans."

Sh*t My Dad Says

2011-12-14T15:22:00.000-06:00

The Dead Juan Pablo II 2011 "Hell on Wheels" Tour: Additional Dates Announced!

2011-12-14T14:53:00.002-06:00

Because Mexicans loves them some dead pontiff blood, Gabriel Berumen, the man in charge of logistics (ie, the "head roadie") for the tour, has sent a letter to the Vatican asking if it would be okay to add a few dates up along the border zone (presumably safety isn't a concern, what with the pope being already dead and everything). The idea is to get him up as close to the frontera as possible so that "the Hispanics who have emigrated to our neighboring country will also have the opportunity to participate in this show of faith."

In other words, Berumen - who, we concede, probably understands Mexican devotion better than we do - thinks that Mexicans who have crossed into El Norte are willing - indeed, demanding! - to cross back south, evading the ICE, the physical hazards, the coyotes and the narcos, for the chance to gaze momentarily upon a life-size waxen effigy of the pope which houses inside itself a tiny vial of his blood - a much smaller quantity of blood than was contained in the actual pope during his five living visits to Mexico. Again, we'll defer to the man's expertise here, but if that's true, it's extraordinary.

We'd ask why they don't just drive the Fake-Popemobile over the border, but we suppose there's a bunch of reasons why hauling a bag of pope-blood into the American Deep South is a bad idea, even (or especially) at Christmastime.

Bilking the Indians: A Centuries-Old Tradition

2011-12-14T07:03:00.001-06:00

Having eliminated all crime in the city, and reduced random bone-breaking beatings of the comunidad extranjera to fewer than one a week, the Police State of Querétaro is able to focus its enforcement wing on more serious threats, like the indigenous women and kids selling cheap crap on the streets. In the video below, a team of municipal inspectors relieve a young Otomí of her merchandise in an orderly, professional manner - by which we mean they wrestle it away from her and run off down the street, without writing up any sort of citation, receipt or documentation. (The common term for this is "stealing.") We're sure the only difference between this and a dozen similar incidents daily is the presence of a camera.

We were tying to remember where we had seen this shaky nighttime, streetlight-illuminated video style before. Then it hit us:

The state Human Rights Commission is promising an investigation, so we can expect a bunch inspectors dressed as pallbearers standing outside that office any day now.

Great Moments In People Not Quite Grasping the Meaning of "Old School"

2011-12-13T10:25:00.001-06:00

"Since 2011."

The Chicken Is My Cock

2011-12-13T10:23:00.001-06:00

As gringos, we're constitutionally prohibited from participating in the political process here, so it's in no way an official endorsement when we say that we'd love to see local businessman Juan Arturo "El Pollo" Torreslanda succeed in his bid to purchase the mayor's office in next year's election. We can't say we know much about his politics or his policies, but we like that facts that (a) he, like the current governor, is the son of a former governor of Querétaro, which would put the state's two top offices in the hands of legacy hires; (b) he's the owner of the bullring in Juriquilla, which would put an end to any talk of outlawing bullfighting here, and actually probably usher in three years of terrific cartels, financed through some public slushfund; (c) he's a distinguished-looking grown man who goes by the nickname "The Chicken." Seriously if we were capable of inventing him, he'd be serving his fourth term as Brooklyn Borough President by now.

We also love him because he seems to be behind a series of enormous, expensive, election-law-evading billboards that have gone up around town advertising a new roast-chicken joint called "El Pollo Es Mi Gallo" - The Chicken is My Fighting Cock - which in Mexicanese means something like 'The Chicken fights for me." The billboards are colored in the red white and green of Torreslanda's PRI party.

E.P.E.M.G. is a real restaurant, which we haven't visited yet (we're out of town at the moment), but is apparently a tiny hole-in-the-wall place near the Mercado la Cruz, the kind of place which has trouble making change for 100 pesos, rather than the kind of place sinking tens of thousands of dollars into advertising. We hope to send our restaurant critic there in a few days and file a complete report.

Mmmmmm...corruption!

Dick In a Box

2011-12-12T22:59:00.000-06:00

We're out of town at the moment, so we aren't reporting in person on the vial-of-a-dead-pope's-blood-stuffed-inside-a-wax-effigy's tour of the city, but it looked a little something like this:

InQro.com photo

Really, what else is there to say?

Hundreds of Mexicans Chase Virgin Through Central Park!

2011-12-12T08:43:00.000-06:00

Our former CBS colleague and new Upper West Side Bureau Chief, Claudia Weinstein, sends us these pics of a bunch of Mexi-Neoyorquinos who've become so assimilated, they've forgotten that "The Guadalupe- Reyes Marathon" is just an expression.

Check back with us on Jaunary 6 to see who the winner is.

Top Gun

2011-12-11T19:46:00.001-06:00

We've said it before (like, a couple dozen times): the cops in this town have got too many guns and not enough gun-learnin'. "Someone's gonna poke an eye out," we said. Or, as happened on Saturday, some cop's gonna accidentally shoot his partner to death.

Our first thought on reading this was, "Yeah, right, an 'accident'." But seriously, have you ever heard of a competent law-enforcement officer accidentally offing his partner, not by mistake in the heat of battle, but just, "the dang thing done gone off"? If we'd really done that, we'd stick ourselves in the arm, put the knife in our partner's cold dead hand and plead self defense. Any cop who cops to accidentally icing his partner is incompetent enough that he simply has to be telling the truth. Maybe delivering a guy like that a fresh machine gun every couple of months isn't such a hot idea.

Eine Kleine Chin-musik

2011-12-10T16:05:00.001-06:00

Today's topic for debate: is the proprietor of this blog, or is he not, a "fucking piece of shit gringo"? Okay, never mind - it's a rhetorical question. But last Saturday night we found ourselves debating this very issue with a total stranger from Mexico City, him taking the affirmative position while we argued to the contrary. Ultimately, the question was deemed unresolvable, but not before we were persuaded not to press the point any further.

After a rewarding evening spent tutoring a new bartender on the construction of the perfect martini, we were walking home along our own street - the one we've lived on for five years next week - when a beefy young man and his equally beefy girlfriend passed us on their way out of a bar and said, "Oye, pinche gringo..." Though rare, this isn't the first time we've heard this from some dumb rummy, and we ignored him the way we usually do. But a block further up the street, Sancho Panza pulls up along side us in his car.

Hey, fucking gringo, where you from?

Considering it rude it ignore a direct question, we walked over to his car, stuck our head in the driver's window, and said, "Right here, idiot," and, gesturing toward his Mexico City plates, added, "Unlike you."

The next several moments were consumed in cross talk, with Sancho trying to clarify the question, his bubbleheaded escort squeaking, "No, where were you born?" and us explaining rather impatiently that we live right the fuck here and that maybe it would be best if they went the fuck back where they came from. We ended the conversation with, "Does that answer your question, idiot?" and, with that, we reached into the car and patted him on his chubby cheek as if to say "now run along, bright boy," - an insulting and patronizing gesture which, in retrospect, is the kind of thing you shouldn't do to a drunk and combative Mexican in full view of his chica.

Then we made a dumb mistake. (Why no, the preceding wasn't the dumb part - we've been doing that all our lives. Ask anyone we went to school with.) Considering the matter more of less resolved in our favor, we turned around and walked away slowly and triumphantly, like a torero at the end of a brilliant faena. In less time than it will take you to finish this paragraph, we felt the fist on the back of our head, and the grit of the pavement as we lay in the street trying to remember which organs were most vulnerable to kicking. There was the screaming girlfriend pulling him back, the shop owner's sons running into the street, and us being helped to our feet as we yelled, "Yeah, you better fuckin' run, pinche pendejo!" The final tally, arrived at after two sleepless nights forced us to at last go to the emergency room, was one rib broken, two more fractured, but nary a cut or a bruise on our beautiful gringo exterior.

(Also, at some point prior to this, someone appears to have accidentally dumped half a box of staples into our abdomen, which we plan to discuss with our GP next time we're in the States for a checkup.)

After Sancho slid his drunken ass behind the wheel again, we decided the wisest route was to limp down a one-way street where he couldn't follow us. Instead, he pulled into the intersection, leaned out the window and loudly and repeatedly screamed, "Fucking piece of shit gringo! Fucking piece of shit gringo! Get the fuck out of here you fucking piece of shit gringo!" This - rather than the public beatdown of a resident of the town in the middle of a busy street - managed to attract the members of the local constabulary, who we're told pulled him over and had a word with him. We say "we're told" because, in keeping with our profound belief that there is no situation that is ever improved by the arrival of a Mexican policeman, we kept on walking. With no one to press a complaint, Sancho and his moll trotted back to Mexico City for a bout of post-bellicosity lovemaking.

Querétaro Centro is a place where nothing much exciting ever happens, so it doesn't take a lot to become talk of the town. Maybe the most surprising reaction has been from Mexican friends who have apologized to us as if they'd done something wrong - as if we'd been collectively stomped on by Mexico rather than by the kind of slow-witted drunkard you find all over the world. (Commenters who feel compelled to say things like, We told you it was a dangerous country, Pollyanna! need to pour themselves a great big snifter of shut-the-fuck-up. Seriously, we got the shit kicked out of us in Swampscott on a twice-weekly basis for the entirety of the Carter presidency, and we don't recall the State Department issuing any travel warnings.)

That said, it's slightly sobering for a middle-class white heterosexual Christian male to get beat up on the basis of our identity. Sure, you could make the argument that we got beat up for mouthing off above our weight class, but the whole altercation was bookended by the phrase "fucking gringo." If we were to go back home and jump up and down on somebody ribcage screaming "fuck you, fuckin' wetback," we'd be looking at a hate crimes prosecution. Here in Mexico, not so much. Though, depending how things work out in the Hague, we'll be keeping our options open.

Incidentally, we know the US has The Best Health Care System in the World, but a trip to the private hospital's emergency room, an exam, x-rays, the option (declined) to see a specialist, and a prescription for an anti-inflammatory and two extremely disappointing non-narcotic painkillers took a grand total of 90 minutes and cost about 120 dollars. Unfortunately, the treatment for broken ribs is to do literally nothing. Just suck it up and let the Good Lord work His magic. Fortunately, it only hurts when we laugh, cough, sneeze, belch, stand, sit, lie down or use any of the muscles between our shoulders and our hips. We had a 10-second hiccuping fit yesterday that we'll remember long after we've forgotten September 11, and after a week this crap we'd trade the perro to the carnitas man for an hour of uninterrupted sleep. Blogging will be short-tempered and cranky for the next 4-6 weeks. Thank you in advance for not taking offense, pinche pendejos.

Minor Housekeeping Note

2011-12-10T10:23:00.000-06:00

"Sábado Gigante" will return when we feel like it, which is not today. Dissatisfied readers can request refunds in person at our Guadalajara office Wednesday afternoons between Noon and 2pm. Thank you for your patience.

Calling for the Death of the Human Rights Commissioner Is Apparently a Thing Now

2011-12-10T09:49:00.001-06:00

Last month we mentioned a Social Democratic Party protest against the state's Human Rights Commissioner, Adolfo Osorio, which involved planting a coffin in front of his office with his name and "RIP" written on it. Regardless of the merits of the protest (and he seems like kind of a tool to us), there's something a little ominous (and more than a little unsympathetic) about parading through the streets with an effigy of a Human Rights official's corpse.

But hey, what do we know? Earlier this week, InQro.com posted this video of a group of sex-workers (whose complaint we can't quite figure out) marching to the Human Rights Commission with a another coffin for Osorio and, it must be said - because chicks are better at this sort of thing - a much nicer floral arrangement than the Soc-Dems brought.

And then, a couple days later, a group of self-styled "intellectuals" did the same.

Frankly, we expect a fair amount of bluntness from the local hookers, but we thought the intellectuals might have a better sense of how bad the optics are on something like this. We're all for a spirited discourse, but "human rights" is sort of a new and fragile concept around these parts, so maybe implied death threats are not the best way to bring about positive change?

It's Raining Men - Hallelujah!

2011-12-08T16:09:00.001-06:00

We told you earlier how, with the arrival of Pope John Paul II's Crime-Fighting Vial o' Precious Boldily Fluids just a few days away, the state of Guanajuato went and one-upped us by announcing that the actual, living Pope, Benedict "Sweet" XVI, would continue the long tradition of former Nazis visiting Latin America by coming to their state next year. Querétaro, not surprisingly, has not taken this sitting down, and is aggressively playing the "But Guanajuato sucks ass!" card. If it works, we'll be hip-deep in pontiffs by springtime.

They've hired an outside organization, the exquisitely-named "World Institute of Advanced Planning and Organization," to crank out a document listing the many (true, actually) ways QRO is better than GTO: bigger facilities, better stadiums, a better airport, more accessible by more highways - they even mention that we're closer to Mexico City, which is a risky argument to make (because, you know what's even closer to Mexico City? Mexico City, which kicks QRO's ass in all the previous categories), but they balance it nicely by mentioning our lower altitude, which was the pope's lame excuse for blowing off the world's second-largest Catholic country in the first place.

This is one of those situations where our civic pride in Querétaro and our antipathy to papal visits cancel each other out, but the willingness of our state to just baldly ratfuck its next door neighbor out of a visit from the pope warms our bitter little hearts. (Remember this, vecinos? We do...) Burro Hall heartily endorses this effort (largely because we plan to be out of town that week), and invites the local officials to exploit our status as an actual relic of the previous pontiff living amongst them, to whatever degree this is helpful to the cause.

Doodle Rivera

2011-12-08T11:40:00.001-06:00

Today Diego Rivera becomes the first (as far as we're aware) Mexican to receive the coveted "Google Doodle" honor, on the occasion of his 125th birthday.

Readers better versed in Rivera's life are invited to answer the question "Would being 'mascot-for-a-day' to an enormously powerful, privacy-invading, information-sucking corporate octopus like Google delight or appall the Marxist Rivera?"

Of course, he's been on the front of Mexico's largest banknote for over a year now, and has yet to roll over in his grave, so he'll probably survive this.

The Never Ending Story

2011-12-07T22:47:00.001-06:00

It's 11PM - do you know where your gas line installation crew is? We do! They're right outside our window, tearing up the pavement for the fourth or fifth time (we've lost track). Like the Seven Dwarfs, they like to whistle while they work.

Tonight is Night 26 of their 72-hour project replacing a few hundred meters of plastic piping.

By way of comparison, laying the 800-mile-long Trans-Alaskan Pipeline took just 26 months - a rate of about a mile per day through the Alaskan tundra. At the rate this clown troupe is working it would have taken them 275 years.

Tequila & Mezcal

2011-12-07T18:27:00.001-06:00

The hometown paper had a little feature today on drinking misconceptions that will not die. As part of Burro Hall's mission to strengthen cultural and educational ties between Mexico and Brooklyn, we excerpt this one item:

The reputation and quality of tequilas and mezcals has risen recently. But drinkers fall back on frat-boy practices, like asking for a lime and salt, a ritual that dates to the days of lousy tequilas. “I say, ‘Whatever spirit I serve you is good, ” said Ivy Mix, a bartender at the Clover Club in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, “and you don’t need to cover it up.’ ” Then there’s the worm in the mezcal bottle. “It was created by Gusano Rojo in the 1950s,” said Steve Olson, an owner of the Lower East Side tequila and mezcal bar Viktor & Spoils, of the widely sold mezcal brand, “when the tequila market had boomed and left mezcal far behind, as an enterprising marketing attempt to get mezcal away from its image as moonshine.”

So now you know.

And It's Never Been More Affordable!

2011-12-07T11:19:00.001-06:00

We've said it before: Mexico's a nice place to retire.

War on Christmas: Live From the Trenches

2011-12-06T16:44:00.001-06:00

The chuckling chalupas who host the Fox "news" show "Fox & Friends" made an impassioned plea this morning that certain Mexicans be allowed in public school classrooms in California.

At about 2:05, Gretchen, the bottle-blond muppet in the middle shouts, as if the California school officials are in the room with her:

"Go and interview every kid in that school and ask them what the plant is called. I bet you only one percent can even tell you the name of it! And then ask them, 'Does that signify Christmas to you?'I bet they say no."

Um, with Latinos now a majority of California public school kids, we'll wager the correct answers are actually, ">1%" and "Yes." Could a Fox News endorsement of a Latino Studies curriculum be far behind?

Sh*t My Dad Says

2011-12-06T10:53:00.001-06:00

Reading is Fundamental

2011-12-05T18:04:00.000-06:00

Sometimes a story gets so beaten to death in Mexico that we don't bother even commenting on it, until the boys in Reader Demographics remind us that most of you live in the US and, as such, probably haven't seen this. It's Enrique Peña Nieto, whose name you'll become familiar with when he's elected president of Mexico next July (just a tip for our friends out there in the gambling community), being asked at the Guadalajara Book Festival last week what three books have had an impact on him. His answer makes Sarah Palin look like Aristophanes.

You don't need to understand Spanish - flop sweat transcends language. The Bible gets a shout-out, of course. And then some book me maybe read, maybe didn't, since he can't remember the author. And then after a few excruciating minutes in which he does everything but Phone a Friend, he gives up without naming a third. Hail to the chief!

To the nation's credit, everyone's kicking him pretty hard over this. That's despite the fact that most people wouldn't have fared much better themselves.

Querétaro Really Isn't What You'd Call a "Sports Town"

2011-12-05T08:35:00.001-06:00

Last night the Querétaro White Cocks played the biggest game in the club's 61-year history, having for the first time made it to the semi finals of the Mexican league championship. Here's the Cocks' Manuel López with a magnificent header 44 minutes is, scoring the winning - indeed, only - goal of the game, rifling it past the goalie who was caught totally unprepared.

This was, perhaps, because López and the goaltender are on the same team. The Cocks lost the game 1-0. You'd expect the city to be a smoldering ruin right about now, but in fact it was completely quiet last night. And this morning, the headlines are along the lines "Hey, Thanks for a Great Season, Team! Yay!!"

Contrast that with this ESPN piece about Bill Buckner's World Series error - a mistake technically, didn't lose the series for the Red Sox (that happened in the next game.) This happened 25 years ago, yet half the people are talking in the present tense.