Stuff

…that we´re leaving at the end of October. That´s basically 8 weeks away, a veritable bummer. Still, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Anyone interested in renting a very nice house, in sleepy Colonia Ladrón de Guevara? We´ll be back. Oh yes. I´m going to subscribe to Orbitz´s price alerts and any time a return flight from Oakland, California dips below a hundred bucks each way I´m coming back for tacos al pastor and a Pueblo Viejo…

Lots going on this week… meetings galore, restauranting tonight with one of Sita´s dissertation advisors, Wednesday possibly the cinema- 2 x 1 night, Paris Je T´aime, Thursday catching up with Aldo who´s back from Brazil, Friday not sure, and Saturday it´s the 4th annual Pocilgafest, invite only… If today´s cheque clears okay, I´ll also be booking myself in for as much dentistry as me teeth can handle before crossing the border back to the land of perfect smiles…

Have a video from the ´tube of one of me favourite bands, Black Box Recorder. All these years and I´d never seen one of their videos. I´ve made up for that now.

Also, new bits on me blog: A link to google translate which is probably going away very soon since it can’t handle me English. Also, below my recently commented photos there’s links to photos I’ve commented on. All very exciting I’m sure you’ll agree. That’s all for now. Cheers!

Thanks to Flickr, and specifically El Charro Negro, we heard about a mariachi competition in the centre yesterday and arranged to meet up in La Fuente to go and see the spectacle. It fully lived up to expectations. Each band came and played just one song and then wandered off. Groups came from all over Mexico and most wore the traditional local dress. I still haven’t got the hang of the settings on me camera. Sachiel pointed out that the ISO’s too high on most, I didn’t even know how to change it. Still I’m extremely happy with me zoom lense. Well, the set’s over at Flickr and here are some faves, that will probably end up in the photoblog…

It’s about 15 blocks away and I noticed that although ‘Cus travels forward in a straight line, he’s at an angle of about 15 degrees as he moves. I think it’s time to get his legs realigned. He’s certainly done a fair bit of mileage in the last 6 months or so.

Only 200 pesos to returf the lawn apparently…

There´s this here jewellery site which is a few 100 lines of PHP away from completion. Another work in progress for cosmetic surgery. A translation of a film script, rehoming a domain, Signo Tequila is also in its infancy. And that’s not counting walking the dog, paying rent, cooking up burgers, chasing bouncing cheques, calling landlords and a fair bit of scrabble.

Tis going to be a busy day tomorrow.

…is a nice way to see what people you´d lost touch with are up to and also an alternative scrabble interface. But it´s best when you go to the recently updated bit and see gems like this:

“Monica added “shoes” to her interests.”

Maybe you had to be there…

Despite the neglected state of the film reviews box on this site, we´ve seen a fair few lately. The Simpsons is just like a 90 minute Simpsons episode with slightly more CGI of Springfield (4 stars), but today we saw one of the best comedies I´ve seen in years, Knocked Up. Brilliant it is. There. That´s my review. 5 shining comedic stars.

While we´re on the subject though, Next was perfectly fine aeroplane viewing. The Queen was awful. Awful awful. I was trying to work out who was the most odious character. Sita reckons the Duke of Edinburgh, but I´m still torn between Cheri and the Grieving British Public. I´m glad I missed the aftermath of all that 10 years ago, as two days after she popped her clogs, I was flying to Guadalajara…

Team America: World Police has moments of genius. Idiocracy: nice premise, shame about the film. Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol is a) not as funny as it was when I was 12 and b) really does not do well dubbed into Spanish (Loca Academia de Policía IV) especially the sound effects bloke and Bobcat Boldthwait… Still such are the delights basic cable has to offer at 5 am on Thursday mornings…

…sounds a lot like Lilly Allen, but that´s not necessarily a bad thing:

Martin, Ana´s bloke has been here for the last month or so and today sees him heading back to Belgium. It´s been grand having him around and not just because he bowls as badly as I do… Don´t be afraid to leave comments, Sr. Devos 🙂

In other news, this video is painfully funny and comes from Sita via Notorious Fig…

…and can´t wait for the next series starting in February neither. But… this Lost teaser…is nowhere near as disturbing as Look Around You´s explanation of the Helvetica Scenario. Shudder… I live in fear of Calcium´s Queen Atom breaking loose.

..but since I was talking about camera settings yesterday, note what a difference there is when you take a photo without flash and then with… I’m tempted to do one with Mrs. Bristow…

I was having a fine old time today in Tequila. Sita’s contacts are paying off nicely and we were “gifted” all manner of tequila-related multimedia on everything from mp3s to a set of vinyl records from the 70s. Including a VHS of “Tequileros” which had parts filmed in Columpio, my favourite Destilado de Agave factory.

Anyroad, driving back we noticed there were workers close to the road in the field jimando, ie harvesting and chopping the leaves off the agaves, so I leapt out with my camera and started photoing them. They posed and everything. Naturally, when I got home I realised I had me camera on the wrong setting which has led to some very grainy shots, still it was a great experience. And I’ll not make that mistake again. With highly configurable cameras comes great responsibility it appears.

Here’re me faves (that’ll probably find their way to my photoblog soon):

There´s a chain of chemists in Mexico called Farmacias Similares. They sell generic medicines at bargain prices generally because the main brand´s patent has expired. They’re a fairly large corporation that competes with independent chemists. Visit their godawful website here. Their main method of promotion is having someone in a Dr. Simi costume prance around outside their shops to a reggaeton beat or worse. I snapped a photo of Dr. Simi a few days ago in Gwod:

And here he is again in Zacatecas:

Mario alerted me to an extreme sport sweeping the nation, flooring Dr. Simi… It’s like Mexican happy slapping. On YouTube there’s several videos of Dr.Simi being run at and knocked to the ground by young naco scoundrels with nothing better to do. I felt sorry enough for the poor buggers sweltering in their costumes for 50 pesos a day before seeing them have to contend with these antics.

Anyroad, just a quick post to say support your local chemist and be nice to Dr. Simi.

Plans for tonight? Bowling…

Siteground, who i´m well chuffed with have various advanced stats systems. That means I can see which sites out there are hotlinking or stealing images and using up agaveweb´s bandwidth. Turns out lots of young scamps have hotlinked to a picture of “American History X” as their favourite film. I couldn´t resist a bit of mischief and swapped the image for another movie. With amusing results….

Spot the odd film out on these people´s MySpace pages: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. There´s scrolling to be done. Looking forward to seeing how long it´ll take for them to notice.

That´s the thing with hotlinking pictures, the people serving them up at their expense can change them to whatever they like. I think I´ve been relatively benign with the swap. Word.

Fellow Flickrite Mario has a blog (usually in Spanish) and he posted a Divine Comedy song to accompany a piece about his folks which led me on to browsing more of Neil Hannon´s YouTube output…

This song, Something for the Weekend reminds me of listening to Radio 1 while working for Four Winds Landscape gardening for minimum wage many summers ago in 1996…

Dodgy´s Good Enough is another one. And Boo Radleys´ Wake Up Boo though it was released a year earlier… Ah the UK in the 90s… good times…

A nice weekend all in all. Saturday night Aranza invited us all round to bid farewell to one of the Tapatian Flickreros, Laura who´s off to France for a good while. There was much singing, toasting, guitarring and even Atticus danced… Colibrí has some photos as does Elias which capture the spirit nicely…

The Hitatchi thing finally $orted itself out… * edit Cheque bounced…. * Finished another translation of subtitles for an upcoming film presentation…

Yesterday we had a nice lie in then I bussed it to the baratillo street market. If you go late it´s extremely crowded so I ended up buying nothing (I even passed on Crochet World’s Book of Slippers, yours for 5 pesos…) and just went off photographing things in an area I hadn´t really been (on foot) before. Then a few raindrops fell so I ended up getting the bus the last few blocks to protect me camera… Anyroad here’re the photos from there and below, a couple of faves… And there’s another one over at my photo blog.

After that we nipped out to McDonalds, cos I was starving then rented a couple of videos on the way home. I’d not seen the 6th Sense before, thinking that if you know the twist there wouldn’t be much point, but it turned out to be eminently watchable all the same. Then a quiet night in front of the telly and a few quesadillas and surprisingly good red wine from Washington state. Red Diamond. Recommended…

This week… web designery, more translation, and a trip to Tequila on wednesday I think. I’m looking forward to hitting the agave fields with DSLR in hand.

I didn’t like aubergines / eggplants before seeing these pictures, but now I’m not even going to try them every once in a while to see if my tastes have changed…

B3ta’s last competition was to illustrate misheard song lyrics. My faves? This one, this one (requires UK pronunciation) and this one.

If you’re on Facebook and liking the Scrabulous application, why not go the whole hog and download the game from here it’s not as pretty as Scrabulous, but I’ve yet to see it go down for 48 hours. Create a username, install the app, play a few games to establish your rating then watch your social life swiftly disappear over the horizon. My handle’s gwynfisher, and rating somewhere in the mid 1000s. Strictly SOWPODS.

All Calvin and Hobbes ever written online. Love it.

and finallly if you have a blog, this is enlightening: 13 blog clichés.

Plans for today, mooching around with my lovely camera then a pachanga round Aranza´s house off of Flickr at 8. Which means “any time but 8”. Aranza came round yesterday for a scanning session of old-school photos and discussed the respective merits of US/ Latin American academic endeavours. I was largely lost as I can barely maintain my side of an academic discussion in English let alone Espanish, still it was lovely to see Atticus make another new friend. I love the tags she put on his photo here… “el galan del barrio” indeed…

…on the blog front, some posts and comments have gone missing in the server change and there’s the usual accent fun that comes from writing apostrophes on a Spanish keyboard, but it looks like all most is right once again with the world of agaveweb.

Coming soon:

1) Proper posts that don’t go on about the state of my hosting
2) 7 reasons why I’ll take Guadalajara over New York each and every time
3) 7 day trips around Guadalajara
4) A run down of our last trip to the states
5) In praise of Pentax DSLRs
6) And much, much more…

We’re leaving this wonderful country towards the end of October, plan your visits now, folks…