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Sita’s presentation on Pancho Villa, Tequila and Mexico went extremely well. She’s a star, anyroad the location for the conference was pretty spectacular being on the 12th floor of a hotel in the town centre. Daniel’s on the right.

We’re still stocking up on booze for the ‘dry weekend’ and are planning to go to San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato… Last night Jana and Victor invited us round and it was a fine party, and we spent a fair bit of time on the roof where there we had a grand view of an impromptu fireworks display down the road. Good times… Tonight it’s more Chicano/Latino studies fun, but this time in the Santo Coyote. I’ll be having the arrachera please.

and it’s mainly for the chorus: “Vamos a aclarar el panorama, hay pinguinos en la cama…” and the rest of the rhyming-dictionary-3rd-rate-singer-songwriting…

Just for the record: Fantastic meal in La Matera again with Victor, Jana and family last night. Picked up Sita’s fancy new business cards. Tidied the house a bit and now I’m off for web designery… ooh and I’m at 1070 at the scrabble. 4 off my all time best. This can’t last… More meaningful posts soonish. Cheers : )

I briefly made it into the 1000s again in Scrabble at the weekend (I’m back at 950 now…) I’m enjoying the 3 minutes per side games most. It’s like table tennis without the exercise. Although, apparently the harder you think, you more calories you burn… Anyroad, to celebrate here’s a few handy tips:

If you’re starting, make sure the vowels in the word aren’t adjacent to the double letter score spaces on the board. Your opponent is more likely to score highly if (s)he can put a high scoring consonant on those squares. Eg if they’ve got a J, X, Q, Z, etc. they’re in fine form. Ex 1,2

When starting, see if you can reach the double letter scores with your word. Can you rearrange the word so the highest scorer is on a double letter score?

If you’re starting and your tiles are rubbish, change some of them. Often your scrabble partner will change theirs too. And if not, I don’t see a huge advantage in starting except for the double word score. Hopefully, you’ll have a longer word to start the game which means a more enjoyable board ready for bingos, instead of the dreaded X-shape made of 3 letter words. Which starts off ok, then gets harder and harder. Ej 5:

It’s all about the bingos (7 letter words). Playing low-scoring words is fine as long as it’s strategic and heading towards getting a rack more likely to get you a bingo. RETAINS has the letters you should aim to keep until you have a bingo.

That’s all for now, the best ones are on the back of the lid of most scrabble boxes. And to protect your marriage, invest in a good scrabble word dictionary.

Simplicity, that’s the name of the game when it comes to seafood and mushrooms, reckons I. Butter, salt, garlic and robert’s yer father’s brother… And a litre or so of lighter fluid for that slightly chemical edge, naturally…

Another weekend of gastronomic thrills and spills. Friday night we went to Lunico, the new Italian restaurant on Ave. Mexico. V.v. good food there. And the wine was a Zinfandel/Shiraz concoction from Chile just perfect for washing down the bovine chunks. The Greek-Italian owner charmed the socks off Sita with his mediterranean shmoozing. “Oh yes, not just anyone orders the Zinfandel/Shiraz and medium rare steak… bla bla bla”. Anyroad, the next day I ran errands in the morning, watched Mexico bow out of the world cup gracefully. The flag for the car I bought didn’t seem to help them… Then José came round for a sophisticated dinner evening (portabellas’n'burgers, since you ask) and we watched a film “Benjamin Smoke”, a documentary based on an extremely odd geezer in Atlanta. (see the review iFrame for more info soon). The lightening was strobelike most of the night, but I won’t foist another video on you just yet… Have a picture of a lime with droplets of the previous night’s precipitation instead:

You know when you’ve been tango’d

Today I nipped into Santa Tere for tacos and DVDs in the morning since the England match was only on Sky and chilled with a Sunday paper in a cafe on Chapultepec (They had Nacho Libre but the quality wasn’t great so I passed, shall wait for it to come out in the cinema methinks). Came home then went to Centro Magno to watch “The Squid and the Whale”. Which was brilliant. Review presently. then fired up the barby again and grilled the life out of some onions, shrimp and zucchini courgettes. Delicious.

If you’re wondering what I’ll be eating tomorrow, well, my usual chocolate chip croissants for breakfast, followed by a slap-up meal in La Matera in the evening. Just for the record, the plan to eat in an Argentine restaurant was formulated before Mexico’s defeat at their hands on Saturday…

All the local businesses are into the World Cup too even allowing for the time difference: Translation: “Enjoy the World Cup Here! Free beer with every breakfast ordered”

EDIT: Just putting the brief film reviews up here as well as in the iFrame:

25-6-06 The Squid and the Whale (2006)
Or the less intriguingly titled Spanish version: Historias de Famila (Family Stories). Philip Larkin would approve of this gripping film about a family falling apart and the effects on the kids. Has some great comic/cringeful moments and recreates 80s New York just like it looked in Ghostbusters. Great performances and oddly heartwarming. Thoroughly recommended.

24-6-06 Benjamin Smoke (2000)
Banjos are my anti-drug… Innovatively shot, but ultimately hollow documentary about an Atlanta-based transvestite and his unique take on music.

3-6-06 X-Men: The Final Battle (2006)
An appropriately dazzling climax to the (undersold) trilogy. Centred around some relatively high concept sci-fi about minority relationships, but buoyed by spectacular effects and snappy dialogue. Vinnie Jones is brilliantly cast as a mutant whose superpower is smashing through walls. Recommended if you’re into this kind of thing… Reminded me of a recent Onion infographic about how TV series were trying to increase ratings: ‘LOST: A crate of radioactive vegetables washes up on shore giving all characters superpowers.”

22-6-06 The Break-Up (2006)
Your enjoyment of this film will depend heavily on your tolerance for Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Anniston. I thought my threshold was pretty low, but I laughed out loud several times at this well-observed comedy. Starts off as High Fidelity then goes into War of the Roses ‘Lite”. Not a suitable ‘date movie” by any length of the imagination…

I finally got round to checking out my web stats today. They’re an odd bunch them anonymous googlers… Here’re my top 5 keywords that arrived at these here pages:

1: “this is how i got those pesky cats to stop crapping in my yard”
2: “it has been brought to management’s attention that some”
3: “mexican swearwords”
4: “cockeral sounds”
5: “pendejadas”

Hope they all found what they were looking for… Anyroad, as promised here’s the full set of photos from yesterday. and below a nifty little video autoproduced by the latest version of Picassa and hosted by our friends at YouTube. It’s Javier the barman mixing a Batanga for Sita in the Capilla cantina in Tequila. She’d worked hard for it…