It got a bit hot today in Tequila. The dog here had the right idea. Stay in the shade. Maintain as much body contact with the concrete floor as possible. Do no exercise more strenuous than opening one eye occasionally. The green shadows are from the roof tiles.
Washing clothes
Too late to post anything of note. Suffice to say washing your clothes is a lot harder in Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico…
Dr. Simi
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…
Chameleon Car
I’ve been taking photos of cars that blend in with where they’re parked for the last couple of years in Guadalajara. People have even started sending me examples by email. Anyway, there’s about 100 in the set now. A year ago I made a video of them. It’s probably time to have another go soon.
Any chance you could vote for me with the button to the right, below. It’s a vanity photo competition that might drive a bit more traffic this way. Only if you like the photos though. Thanks!
Mischief
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.
Mario´s blog…
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…
Flickreros despidiéndose
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.
Kitchen starter kit… plates, silverware, bowls, mugs, etc, etc. $350
Everything shown here on top of the cabinet.
Available Sunday, 2nd of December.
Futbolín
At the end of one of the many tentacles of the baratillo Sunday market in Guadalajara there was a section for practically antique fairground rides and games. Here’s a close up of the table football (know as foozball or summink equally unlikely in the USA)
Aguas!
Water from the taps in Mexico is of variable quality. Even if it gets to your house uncontaminated it’s sat around in tinacos (tanks) on the roof of your house for days and the plumbing isn’t always the most hygenic. So there are competing water companies who call round every day selling gallon bottles of water (garafones) for around 20 pesos. We’re sticking with Juan from Bonafont because Atticus gets on very well with him… The bloke here was doing around 30 mph in a built up area and looking backwards which is quite a skill in itself.
Random Saturday links
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…
El Templo Expiatorio de Guadalajara
It’s like, how much more neo-gothic could it be? None. None more neo-gothic.
Potassium Flower
Bananas growing in an abandoned carpark in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. Aren’t they herbs or something unlikely?
Still a few jitters to sort out…
…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…
Where to start
Just working out how to change the name servers for AgaveWeb.com then I´ll be up and running again and posting like never before…
In the meantime, Laura from Flickr was kind enough to write this brief hagiography for my profile:
playabalandra74 dice:
“Definición de Gwyn: Un Inglés tapatío con estomago de acero que resiste tacos, tortas ahogadas y demás antojitos mexicanos, afinicionado fiel a las luchas y magnifico fotógrafo del paisaje rural de Jalisco.
Gracias por mostrarnos lo nuestro desde tu muy particular punto de vista atravéz de tus fotos :D”
Window Flower
There’s more street art than you can shake a piñata at in Ajijic, Jalisco on the shore of Lake Chapala. Thanks largely in part to a large group of relatively well off upper North American retirees and local artists.
Showdown at the Ajijic corral
Atticus-centric view of an oncoming charro and his dog in Ajijic town centre.
Papá
We’re off for a week or so to the States, LA and NY. And as you may have gathered my blogs are playing up a bit so apologies for the sporadic posting. Here’s a photo from Sunday’s Flickr tour of some paternal fun since we’ll be passing by our family’s home in L.A. Keep checking back or subscribe away to the RSS or email updates! Cheers!