Day of the Dead readings 2-November 2008

I’m dead… tired… the neighbors had a small family get-together– which meant only their close relatives…. which meant they didn’t have room in their house, so set up tables in the middle of the street.   Not a problem, nor was the band (which played all night long) that set up right under my front window.  But the band they hired to play all night long (literally) had to set up just in front of my  house under my front window.   All good, but I’m taking the day off.

“Mexicans don’t read”
Fred Reed on the supposed natural stupidity of Mexicans:

I am part of an internet list of people who take a very dark view of Mexico, in many ways justified, but in many ways not. In particular, members of the list, like most of America, cannot conceive that there might be any intelligent life at all in Mexico. A couple of my (slightly edited) postings:

“We [my wife and I] dropped the car off at the Toyota dealership and to pass the time we walked to Plaza del Sol, a minorly upscale shopping center in the suburbs of Guad. In it is one of the Gonvill chain of bookstores hereabouts. There are many.

Wandering around, I noticed a book called Fundamentals of Circuit Analysis—shrink-wrapped, but I’d guess about 600 pages of circuit analysis. Next to it was Elements of Electronic Design or something very close to that title, and many other such. A substantial pile of Differential and Integral Calculus was at eye level, both the height and pile suggesting that the store expected them to sell. Countless high school books—Biology I and II, etc at length—were there for kids going to private schools. (They feature purines and pyrimidines, the genetic code, and suchlike primitivism. Thanks to ex-president Vicente Fox, public school students get their books free.) I saw shelf sections labeled Physiology, Anatomy, Biostatistics, Surgery, etc. Wandering by the computer section, I saw many titles such as “Data Structures and Algorithms in Java,” and Network Design, as well as inevitables such as C++ and Visual Studio.

The store not being specifically technical, literature outnumbered tech stuff. Most of the lit you would find in a Border’s was there: Dusty Evsky, Twain, Kafka, all that, plus odd titles like Dracula in Acapulco. Authors were well-covered. For example, I counted 12 books by Mario Benedetti who, like a lot of South American authors, gringos have never heard of. There were Elements of Esthetics, biographies of Mozart etc, books of paintings of the Ashcan School and such, books of all the usual philosophers.

All of this was in Spanish. It was not a store for pale bwanas. There were plenty of people looking at the books. I was the only gringo.

Nothing changes…

… according to  this left-wing Venezuelan site (written by U.K. and U.S. people):

… the real difference between the two candidates on the imperial question is that McCain, like Bush, is an aggressive and radical territorialist, while Obama, like his top adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski (author of The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives), is a collected and shrewd proponent of economic and institutional hegemony.

… With Chavez and his growing band of allies spending significant sums of money in alternative banking, media and other systems, they represent a potent threat to their U.S.-aligned counterparts.

Obama at the head of a sinking empire will not call off the millions of U.S. tax dollars that find their way into anti-Chavez organisations annually. Nor will Chavez budge on his grand ambition to inspire regional –and eventually world– socialism. What could a meeting between the two ultimately produce? …

Day of the Dead Kitty:

Bruno, a Los Angeles tabby decked out in (organic vegetable-based , non-toxic) paint. 

© Heather Busch