The good, the bad and the annoying
The good…
I try to be nice to everyone (and to those who have contributed, be patient … I’ll catch up my thank you notes as soon as I can). So far, I’ve paid off half the electic bill and half the phone bill, so we’re making progress.
The $200 back utility bills, the auto repairs and insurance, the hardware and software that needs replaced still need to be considered (I’m operating off free-ware word processing, which was well-worth what I paid for it, but lacks a decent spell checker and can’t switch back and forth between Spanish and English, like the commercial products. And, this old Millenium operating system crashes regularly, sometimes meaning I take 4 hours to do something that should only take me 45 minutes tops). If there’s anything left over, I might splurge (I’ll admit it) and go to the dentist to get a filling replaced.
Anyway, I hope I can stop pestering people by the end of the month. Only 800 bucks to go.
The bad…
Not complaining, but I put in a heck of a lot of hours now… and try to take at least half a day off now and again. I think most people understand that… but not everyone apparently:
In my thread on the “Minutemen” and their associated racist chums, I received a comment from “poncho@earthlink.com” (IP # 71.116.182.225 – that’s Verizon out of Reston, VA, which could be anyone anywhere), which I felt deserved some kind of response.
“Poncho” is in regular (Times Roman) typeface. My edited responses are in Tahoma:
The Mexican ruling class that is made up of almost exclusively White Elitist Castilian Spaniards who hate the brown peasants, and will do anything to drive them out of Mexico.
- HUH? Do you ever actually read this site. Or Mexican history? Joel Poinsett, the first U.S. Ambassador insisted the Spanish be thrown out of Mexico, and they were in 1838. There were Castillian immigrants during the Franco era in Spain, but most of them are pretty old by now. If you mean there are rich people in Mexico and poor people, yeah, but there’s also a sizable middle class.
They, “the White elitists”, have succeeded in driving approximately 10 percent of Mexico’s population out of their own country and into the Unites States of America.
As noted, the “White elitists” thing applies more to the United States or Canada … or even Cuba… than to Mexico. Poor people leave because the U.S. trade policy since NAFTA kicked in has exacerbated a bad agricultural system, leaving Mexican farmers broke. Are you sure you’ve read this site?
Help end Mexico’s Apartheid government.
Thanks for your interest, but you don’t know jack shit about what you’re talking about. Ah well… read on, hopefully, you’re teachable
And the damned annoying…
“Poncho” wrote back… THREE FUGGIN TIMES!
The first time, he added on to his “apartheid” post some reference to Cesar Chavez:
César Chávez was one of our last honest and incorruptible leaders, and was vehemently opposed to illegal immigration because he understood supply and demand economics. He knew that illegal immigration is a tool of Big Business used to drive the workingman’s wages down, and that it is allowed by the US government because it benefits Big Business, and Big Business gives big campaign contributions.
I didn’t bother with the Chavéz business, since it’s factually true… and repeated ad nasuem on the anti-immigration sites. Chavéz, of course, was a union organizer, and his concern back in the late 60s was with scab labor. He wasn’t anti-immigrant, he was anti-scab. And, I don’t think any of what I’ve said supports exploiting labor. Just recognizing that labor exploitation exists.
Besides, how much time was I supposed to waste on a troll? I questioned why he was using the name for a raincoat, instead of the short form of Francisco, and figured that was the end of it.
WordPress automatically holds as probably spam anything with more than one link. And, wouldn’t you know it? This time, up pops “PONCHO” as “pancho@earthlink.com” (and still at IP# 71.116.182.255). He sent another post at 11:04 pm March 10. C’mon… Sunday is a day of rest, and I spend way too much time keeping this site going as it is.
Geeze. When I didn’t bother with the newly christened “Pancho” by the end of the day, the dickhead resent the exact same post… this time calling himself “coward@earthlink.net” (and, yes, the IP was… you got it… 71.116.182.225
I’d thought it might be fun to turn that post over to the always witty Nezua, the hardest workin’ hombre in blog-biz, but even he deserves a day off.
Poncho, aka Pancho aka Coward was yakking on about the “Castillian apartheid”… again. How tedious. What’s funny was the examples he gave (and the links that threw him into el purgatorio of commentdom) were to Carlos Slim and Maria Felix: the son of a Palestinian, and a woman proud of her Yaquí heritage (“Coward”… er… Pancho… or whoever the fuck he is) provided a quote from a Maria Felix fan club site (http://www.mariafelix.com.mx/vida.html) that said this… but I don’t think the born-again… and again… and again… PONCHO understood what he read. It was in Spanish after all.
I’m not a Mexican… but I respect Mexicans. I respect their good manners, their contempt for cowards (that includes people who sign themselves as such), and share their dislike for demanding gringos. Besides, it’s my site… “WordPress doesn’t block IP addresses… however, it does let me mark them as spam. Life’s too short to waste on stupid people.
mexfiles.net 
ah, it is true that i mean to take on so much more than i end up with time for…i did want to respond to that, but in the end you are right. life’s too short. 🙂