calling commissioner gordon

We usually do not get Spring weather in Melaque.  At least, not Spring as I knew it in Oregon.

Our weather tends to come in three cycles: hot, hotter, and seventh circle of Hell hot.  But something strange is going on these days.

In early March, the weather started heating up.  Right on schedule to drive us into the hotter season.  The temperatures rose hand in hand with the humidity.  The Jack and Jill of the apocalypse.

Then something odd happened. 

It got cool.  Not cool by Alberta standards.  But certainly cool for Melaque.  The temperature dropped into the 60s at night -- and then stayed there into the late morning.

Yesterday afternoon a cloud cover rolled in -- looking like one of our July thunderstorms.  But it was far too cool for that.  My neighbors started pulling out their gloves and parkas.  Even I put on a wind breaker.  And I usually stick to short sleeves until the temperature drops into the 40s.

As I sit on the patio writing this, I am not alone.  Several days ago I saw what I thought was a burr caught in a spider's web.  It turned out that the "burr" was the spider.  Well, still is the spider.

Our cool weather does not seem to be slowing down its activities.  Probably because the insects seem to like this weather.  The presence of evening bats -- not to mention leg welts -- are proof enough that there is plenty of vector for dining.

When I found the spider, I did a bit of research. 

Based on its web, it is an orb web spider.  I watched it constructing the nest, so, it is not borrowing some other spider's handiwork.

But I had no idea of its name.  I still don't.  Birds I know.  Spiders not so much. 

I thought it might be a cat's face spider.  But not with those spikes.  It looks like something Bruce Wayne might have conjured up.

Any help out there in the audience?

As for me, I am going inside to put on that wind breaker.

stirred, not shaken

I was having one of those Poe-lite evenings last night.

You know the drill.  Midnight dreary.  Pondering weak and weary.  Volume of forgotten lore.

Well, not quite.  It was midnight, but hardly dreary.  And I was in high gear on the computer.  But there was an unexpected gentle rapping on my chamber door.

I was mid-sentence in one thing or another when everything started swaying.  My first reaction was that I was simply tired.  In that canoe-on-a-Vermont-lake-in- the-moonlight motion.

But I am world weary enough to recognize that romantic notions are usually further down the list of possibilities.  And that was true last night.  It was an earthquake.

I have written before about the earthquakes I have experienced here and in Oregon (all shook up; shake, rattle, and roll).  And this one was rather classic.  My computer table moved a bit.  One of the little speakers frog-walked to the edge.

But it lasted long enough for me to get up and head for the door.  Mexico has experienced two earthquakes recently large enough to damage property.  So, I was more wary than usual.

As it turned out, I barely stood up and it was all over -- lasting less time than my last blind date.

All of the scientific data is on the map at the top of this post.  The epicenter was about 30 miles off the Pacific coast -- or less than a hundred miles from me.  There are more faults in this area than in a Chevy Volt.  After all, I do not have to drive very far to see the plume of an active volcano.  You can see Melaque on the left side of the map.

But, unlike "The Raven," my night did not resolve into the incomplete chords of melancholy.  Earthquakes are an interesting conversation topic.  But fearing them should be right up there with fearing being attacked by piranha in the bath.

twist and pout

Our heads lie to us.

At least, mine does.

I walked into town this morning to see how the semana santa preparations are going.  I will write more about that later in the week.  But someone has already fired the fun starting pistol.

As a rule, I do not buy much on these jaunts if I am on foot.  Once I start buying groceries, I quickly realize my eyes are bigger than my calves.

All was going routinely.  I stopped at my favorite NOB-oriented grocery store -- Hawaii.  The owner, Alex, is a wily merchant.  Much of the white tourist merchandise has been shuffled to make way for the people who will be patronizing his store for the next two weeks -- Mexican tourists.

I poked around a bit to see if I wanted to come back later in the week to buy anything before I head off for a month to parts Middle Eastern.  The decision was easy. I can survive on what I have.

Then I saw a new addition tucked under a shelf.  Bags of red and back licorice.  From the American Licorice Company.  Big bags.  One pounders.

I am not that fond of licorice.  After all, it is nothing more than jellied corn syrup.  I could do just as well by eating spoonfuls of sugar directly from the bag.  But that is the logical guy speaking -- the one who thinks he controls his own choices.

There is a more romantic spirit up there somewhere that makes decisions based on associations and dreams.

When I started my law practice, Costco had just opened in our town.  I can still recall the first time I saw the huge plastic containers, nostalgically disguised as glass candy jars.  They looked as if they would be a great addition to a professional office.  I could offer a chewy red whip to my clients as they recounted the woes of their marriages or the details of a contract that needed my expert drafting.

In the ten years I was in private practice, I always had two of those containers at the ready.  One red.  One black.  Those were probably the happiest ten years of my career.  Often barely making ends meet, but always ready to help my clients.

I walked up and down the aisles at Hawaii several times while Mr. Logic and Ms. Blithe Spirit indulged in their little contretemps.  The fact that the photograph at the top of this post was obviously taken in my garden is a rather good hint of who made the candy decision.

That is far too much candy to eat before I leave next Tuesday.  But it will make a great airplane and cruise ship treat.  And the memories will be sweeter even than the licorice.

 

the true lion kings

The last time I was in Grenada, the Moors still controlled the city.

It was not quite that long ago.  But those four decades have included several phases of life -- all nicely folded, packed, and stored away on the top shelf.

I went to Grenada for the same reason most tourists do.  To see the Alhambra.  The palace complex where the Moors ruled their Kingdom of Grenada.

The guide claimed it was the second most-visited tourist sight in the world -- the first being the Vatican.  That sounded a bit suspicious to me.  More than tourists who stare at the Eiffel Tower?  Niagara Falls?  Disney World?

If she had said it is one of the most beautiful structures in the world,  she would have had me at “beautiful.”

My last visit was in the winter.  January, if I remember correctly.  The day was cold, rainy, and a bit rushed -- as bus tours often are.

So, when I got up on the morning we docked in Malaga, I was not particularly surprised to see a bank of clouds blocking the sunrise.  As it turned out, there was no need for concern.  By the time we completed our two-hour bus ride to Grenada, the sun lit up the Alhambra.

Like most political complexes, the Alhambra was not built in a day.  The buildings cover a three hundred year period.

The Moorish rulers of Grenada began the complex in 1237 as part palace, part garden, but mostly a fortress. 

When Ferdinand and Isabel (the backers of Columbus’s road show) drove the Moors out of Grenada in 1492, they added several Christian elements.  Isabella lived here.  Founding a convent and issue her infamous expulsion of the Spanish Jews.

In 1558, Charles V built his copy of the Pitti Palace in the Alhambra.  And like far too many of his ego trip monuments, this one was never finished or occupied.  It stands as a sad shell of his ineffectual rule over the Hapsburg Empire.

After two hours on a bus, it was a relief to wander the grounds for three hours.  And wander we did.

Like most fortresses of its era, the Alhambra sits on a hill at the foot of the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas.  It must have looked quite formidable in its day.

Today it simply looks beautiful. Both the buildings and the gardens.

Of course, the gardens are not the same as they were in the time of the Moors.  In fact, I am willing to bet they look a bit different than when I saw them in the 1970s.  But Spain has done a good job of preserving the Garden of Eden feeling the sultans tried to emulate.

I was a bit apprehensive when we visited the Palace of the Lions.  It was my favorite building on my last visit.  The lion court was nice.  But one of the rooms in the palace was stunning.

The lion court left a lot to be desired.  It is being renovated.  The lion fountain is surrounded by plywood.  Making it look like a rather shoddy zoo.

But my favorite room was there.  Just as I imagined it.

The sultan built this palace for his favorite wife -- the one who bore the honorific “sultana.”  And it has the look of the chamber of the sultan’s favorite. 

The ceiling is what stuck in my memory for the past 40 years.  The plaster work creates sculpted figures that remind me of stalactites.   And I suspect the memory will be there until the pine ship slips into the soil.

It is rather ironic that the Catholic Majesties managed to drive out the Moors, but neither they nor their grandson could improve on the wonders of the Alhambra.

Our guide pointed out a new sight in Grenada.  From the top of the hill, you can see a new minaret in Grenada.  More than five hundred years after the last one was torn down.

lent me your ears

I do  not understand Lent.  Let me say that up front.  It is simply not part of my faith.  But I thought it was part of Mexican Catholic tradition.

When I lived in Greece (admittedly neither Mexican nor Catholic), the day after Carnival, all parties stopped.  Pleasures stopped.  Night clubs were closed.  Until Easter when celebrations popped up in every village square.

I expected something like that in Melaque.  But I knew something was amiss when the next town over (Barra de Navidad) celebrated Carnival a full week after Lent started.  The excuse was that their celebration was so small, they wanted to put it on after the big one in Manzanillo.

Then came the eponymous San Patricio festival.  I know that the Roman Church allows celebrations of saint days to occur during lent -- and the big one is Saint Patrick's Day.  But eight days of full-blast partying seems to push the envelope of dispensation.

And no more did Saint Patrick get stuck back on his shelf in the church than the town started celebrating a week-long rodeo.  Complete with music that blasted over the town until the wee hours of the morning.

I thought things might slow down until Easter.  But I was wrong. 

Starting on Saturday, food trucks, amusement games, and assorted other vendors set up in the jardin.  And the carnival rides that have been here since the San Patricio fiesta were up and running.

This last burst of activity was to empty as many pesos as possible from the semana santa crowd that stared showing up this weekend.  Thesetwo weeks are the life blood of the town.  The church was filled with Palm Sunday worshipers.  But, almost to a person, they filed out into the jardin to party.

All of this struck me as strange for a Catholic village.  The week of the rodeo, I talked to a woman from Guatemala who now lives in a very conservative city in the Mexican highlands.  She was a bit shocked at how much celebration was going on during Lent. 

And if you have read Babsblog recently, you know there are places in Mexico with strong Lent and Easter customs and tradition.

But not in my little fishing village by the sea.  We do not even celebrate Day of the Dead here with any fanfare.  Sure, the students put up stalls in the jardin that end up looking like science fair projects. 

But nothing like the highlands.  The attitude here seems to be summed up by a Mexican friend: "Why would I go out there?  They're all dead."

And death is not what my village is about.  It is about celebrating the good things of life.  It is almost as if Blackpool, Las Vegas, and New Orleans were dropped into a Waring blender and then filtered through a copy of Good Times in Mexico.

On my way home from dinner tonight, I saw families walking and laughing together.  I heard a mariachi band playing in my favorite vegetable store where patrons young and old were dancing to the blare.  And I ran into two tailgate parties in front of Jiggs's first veterinarian's store -- with plenty of music and joy filling the air.

My blogger pal Laurie over at Honduras Gumbo wrote about the people of Tegucigalpa going about their lives celebrating on Sunday.  She correctly pointed out: "For those of us who are using Lent as a season of fasting and praying, let us not forget to include feast days to be glad and rejoice.  After all, we have the Giver of Life in our midst, who wants us to display his love and joy to a suffering world."

Jesus was not only the great teacher of his day, he was also a guy who enjoyed a good joke and a good time amongst the people with whom he shared his life and ministry.

Perhaps that is the tradition my neighbors are keeping alive.  This is a life to celebrate -- and to share with one another.  It is hard to love your neighbor unless you are spending time with him.

    

flying under the influence of flying

I saw this odd combination in a shop window in Ponta Delgada.  Airplanes,  cars, champagne, and beer.  All coexisting in a tableaux to drive MADD mad.

You might want to click on the photograph to see the detail better.

But it did remind me of home.  Mexico is famous for its strange marketing combinations.  Where you can find light bulbs right next to the tooth paste.

And it certainly does not resolve the mystery when I tell you the shop was a restaurant.

buses and pills

“Students surrender 29 buses seized in West Mexico protest”

That was the headline in a mid-March edition of The International Herald-Tribune.

For some reason, it reminded me of my niece being kicked off of her school bus the first day of kindergarten for telling the bus driver how to drive.  It must be a family thing.

But it was not a story of disgruntled grade schoolers.  These students were from the Vasco de Quiroga Rural Teachers College in Michoacan.  They got ticked off (more on that in a bit) and took matters into their own hands in a truly Mexican style.

If you read viva veracruz or blah...blah...blah... ginger!, you are familiar with one tactic of demonstrators in Mexico.  You let the public know of your political pain by sharing it with them.  Often by blocking traffic.

And that is exactly what the students did.  After taking over their school, they hijacked a large water truck to block the entrance of their school.  They then hijacked 29 buses (along with their drivers).  And to gild their leftist credentials, they also seized four automobiles owned by multinational corporations.

How, you ask, do students get their hands on all of these vehicles?  Simple.  They placed barricades on the Morelia-Patzcuaro state highway.  When the vehicles stopped, they seized them.  The very scenario that scares the “let’s visit Mexico” thoughts out of tourists.

The situation was so bad, the bus lines stopped sending any buses into the area.  For obvious reasons.  And lots of car travelers simply decided to avoid the convenience of being stopped and asked for “donations.”

And what was it that the students wanted?  What was it that drove them to their Pancho Villa impressions?

They had two demands: 1) They wanted the government to guarantee they would have jobs in the state educational system automatically upon finishing their studies; and 2), to grant scholarships for study at the college.

Assuming there is an argument for debasing teaching positions from a profession to a sinecure, and whether these students should be at of that system at all, it appears the students are captives of their history when choosing political tactics.

Michoacan has a revolutionary past.  It is the home of a former Revolution-leading president who won the Stalin Peace Prize.  It has also witnessed its share of narco-sponsored car and bus burnings.

But, if the students were truly interested in catching the sympathetic eye of the public, they should have learned some lessons from protesting Italian pharmacists.

In an attempt to modernize and liberalize Italian society, the Italian prime minister has proposed lowering the entry barriers for several professions -- including pharmacists.  Those who have climbed the greasy pole are not happy about that.

And the pharmacists know how to manipulate Italian men of power.  If the liberalizations are not withdrawn, the pharmacists intend to stop selling Viagra.  Lysistrata updated.*

Why steal a bus when withholding a little blue pill is far more effective?


* -- I thank my brother for this press-stopping news from Rome.