Dr. Hayward really is an intellectual: We are stunned that this missive could escape Gulag Cal Berkeley...

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     During these days, the present Bishop of Rome has invited and is receiving a large delegation of Oil and Natural Gas producers for the purpose of refining approaches for the remediation of Global-warming-cooling-climate-change.  Since the Bishop of Rome has proven to be a complete secularist, and liberation theologist practicing progressive, it is well that he should continue in that persona so as not to confuse us, The Unwashed.

    Were your humble servant so disposed, he might remind His Holiness that he would be better served by studying weather and climate history as it pertains to the past 100 years or so.   As we have pointed out on other occasions, my grandmother, Esther Lee Christian and my great grandfather, Peter Bonesteel Christian, lived in a community named Llano de Enmedio, State of Vera Cruz.
     P.B. Christian had bought a 2,100 acre finca in the high hills and mountains of the very tropical Sierra Madre Oriental in the 1880s, and re-established the tropical orchards that had been producing oranges, mangoes, avocados, and various other tropical and neo-tropical bounties.   He was an associate and stockholder in the company Washburn & Christian Mills in Minneapolis when that company was the largest milling operation in the world.  It later reconstituted under the name General Mills which is a well known corporate title to this day.
     For several years P.B. Christian and his daughter operated and enjoyed their little hideaway, and sent tonnes and tonnes of produce down the Pantepec River to connect with other transportation of the harvests, mainly to Mexico City.   Some of the produce was shipped to Galveston and New Orleans as well.
     My grandmother made several trips back to Minneapolis just to visit and keep relations fresh.  She also made social inroads, particularly with one Mexican gentleman from Mexico City who was a buyer of quality tropical fruit for the Mexico City market.   We have indications that the relationship was something formal and serious, but there was a tragic end when it was learned that the boy was murdered by bandits on the road back between Vera Cruz City and Mexico City.  It was apparently quite a to-do in Mexico City because the family was well-known and highly regarded in that theatre.

     The main reason I present any of this material for the OROGs and other readers is to reinforce that we know from whence we speak.  During the progress of the 1890s, there were three different devastating freezes, at least two of which had the visit of abundant snow.   The mighty and prolific orchards of the Christian family were degraded with each onset.  By the third hard freeze, the finca (or hacienda) was reduced to being a place that could only hope to support a couple of crops of corn per year.  Such farming could never justify the effort. 
     So, sadly, they packed their possession they cared to take back to Minneapolis into huge canoes and floated / rowed back down to Tuxpan, where they also had maintained a flat in a fancy district of the downtown, and while there booked passage on a freight and passenger steamer that connected Tuxpan with New Orleans.   This would have had to have been in 1900.
    From there they loaded up their possessions on the City of New Orleans limited express passenger train, and travelled up to Chicago, where they changed to the Burlington line for final arrival in Minneapolis...all done in less than a week.
     Oddly enough, Peter Bonesteel Christian returned to the south, but stopping on the border...and helped establish the cities of Donna and Weslaco, Texas.  He became actively involved in the real estate and farming business, including the venture into Valencia oranges and various types of grapefruit. Later, in the 1913 - 1916 period he managed to convince his son-in-law, Norman Newton, the husband of Esther Lee Christian to come down to the Magic Valley and buy some magnificent orchard and farming land!!  There would be no more farming a thousand acres of wheat and enduring the six-month Winters of Gwinner, North Dakota.  After all, the Magic Rio Grande Valley had a 400 day a year growing season, P.B. Christian would declare, only half in jest.

Not global warming or climate change.   Just a common
everyday, category 5 hurricane with winds of 195 mph
and waves of 40 feet.

     As best we can tell, no one, during those times suggested that there was "climate change" or any other such bilge.  The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was not pronounced to be a harbinger of "global warming", even if something between 7,000 to 12,000 people were killed in the event.  No accurate count could be made due to the lack of a constant census and the presence of so many "world citizens" due to the workers in the docks...Galveston being the number one port for Texas at the time.

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The following is a commentary from a true authority concerning the topic.  The comparisons and analytics are marvelous.

      Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.

     Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.

     A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades. 

The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out.

     This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. Observing the movements that had arisen to address issues like crime, poverty and even the U.S.-Soviet space race, Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly.

     The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism with which divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of climate change. 

     Then comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”

     While opinion surveys find that roughly half of Americans regard climate change as a problem, the issue has never achieved high salience among the public, despite the drumbeat of alarm from the climate campaign. Americans have consistently ranked climate change the 19th or 20th of 20 leading issues on the annual Pew Research Center poll, while Gallup’s yearly survey of environmental issues typically ranks climate change far behind air and water pollution.

      “In the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate activists would rather not make.

     A case in point is climate campaigners’ push for clean energy, whereas they write off nuclear power because it doesn’t fit their green utopian vision. A new study of climate-related philanthropy by Matthew Nisbet found that of the $556.7 million green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of nuclear energy.” The major emphasis of green giving was “devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry.”

     Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses. Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.

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Mr. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Disparate Points, somehow related one to the others...

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     There are several topics that bounce off of the calcified inner lining of the skull of this Old Gringo.   Somehow, it seems that each is related to the other.   For instance, male irascibility.  Some of the Old Men are high school "students" who have tired of the long life they have had.  They are the ones who are tired of being picked on and disrespected and dismissed as irrelevant personalities.
     Frequently these teenaged grumps have been almost forced to take medicines that treat "Male Derangement Disorder",  frequently beginning in the fourth grade of primary and lasting until the shooting spree at a school or movie theatre near you.    Three or four thousand ancelapathy dihydratezironicide (read directions carefully), tends to dull the brain down, reduce socialisation ability, accentuate a sense of "apartness", making Jack a terribly dull boy.
     By the last years in high school or while at college, Jack tires of the cage into which he has been placed, and seeks revenge by lashing out at those he perceives as people who are having a happy life.   By this point, besides the normal psycho-medical treatment and prescriptions he has used, it is probable that Jack is smoking dope, because as everyone knows, including Billy Jeff Blythe and Barry Soetoro, it cain't do no harm, nohow, anyway.  

     So a white-trash boy, mixed up with the Klan, goes into the premier Negro Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina where the regularly scheduled advanced Bible-study group has gathered to argue, discuss, analyse, and dig into the inspired Word of God.  The boy kills eight of them, as if they were troublesome o'possums, or targets on a barn wall.  They were truly the salt of the earth.

      Another Baptist Church, in Texas just southeast of San Antonio, has a visit from another white boy who decides that since some girl did not return his attentions, it is necessary to slay everyone in the congregation one Sunday.

The University of Texas Tower

      This portion will truly be brief.  All of the "town-hall meetings" and "gun-control laws", and community sensitivity mixed with midnight basketball will not explain, solve, make up for, or prevent events such as the school and church shootings.  El Gringo Viejo, when he was much less "viejo" than now, was on-campus on this day, trying to intercept a fellow named Sontag, who was the son of one of Hollywood's very integral behind-the-cameras cinema and photographics specialists.
  He (the son) and I were both park leaders of nearly adjacent Austin Parks and Recreation Department parks in the near - downtown part of the city.   It was a "prestige" Summer Job for universitarians in those times...$2.92 / hour and the title of PARK DIRECTOR.  
     A particular oddity on that day was that my mother, upon hearing of the shooting going on down on the "40 Acres (local term for the campus of the University of Texas)" was comforted a bit by knowing that all her men were safely away from the scene.  Little did she know that her husband (my father), her second son (my brother Norman), and her last son, your humble servant, were all there under different missions and purpose...well within the reach of the rifles of Charles Whitman.  Each of the three of us contributed to restoring a bit of order to the wounded and the "pinned-down" in the mayhem...even while exposing ourselves to improbable but every possible gunfire. 

     Many of those affected directly...the older children of to-day's schools...are not aware these things actually began "way, way back in the olden days" perhaps fifty years ago.  Very few such incidents occurred before perhaps, but the Charles Whitman event is a good baseline marker.  The Whitman case was especially egregious due to the number of dead and wounded, especially foreigners.

Charles Whitman

     Whitman was a Marine who had been furloughed or placed into a reserve unit because he had some problems with finishing some academic requirements to qualify as an officer in the Marines through advance university studies. He had been deployed for a while at Guantanamo.  There was some thinking within the Corps that he had been tinkering with prescription drugs and, of course, marijuana.    
     He began to have trouble with his studies at the University of Texas...and he consulted a campus psychologist.  Whitman told  that psychologist that he felt like going up to the top of The Tower and shooting people.   Supposedly, such a self-observation should have set off alarm bells at several different levels, but, alas...in this case, not so much.
   

     The psychologist gave him a prescription and told him to come back in a week.   Details are not included in this transmission, but suffice to say that the psychologist's analysis did not cause him any particular alarm.   My father, also a psychologist, thought that the campus psychologist was daft. 
     In fairly short order however (within the lapse of 10 days), Whitman had killed his wife and mother, and then, that same day, proceeded to put into operation what later was found to be a frequently stated project;  going up into the University of Texas Tower and shooting people.    The date?  1 August 1966...mid-day.

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     The next great problem is the dissolution of the family unit.  This might be a sore point in to-day's more "understanding" environment, but the "Progressives" buying votes with AFDC, Section 8 rent subsidy, food stamps, Head Start, Medicaid, and such left the "minority" family in a position that there was no need for a classical job-holder male in the house (apartment).  The new "Alpha Male" is the United States Government.

     Lamentably, the "dependent class" is taking advantage of these  freebies.  Those who avail themselves of the "free money" are almost always doomed to multigenerational, beggar status.  Some, a few, manage to keep the faith and see the light of self sufficiency still

     If one depends on the Central Government for all manner of sustenance and personal "progress", it is fairly certain that a large percentage will become adapted to what they see as a reasonable "displacement" of assigned social and cultural duties.

It is simply natural law.

El Gringo Viejo

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Everybody is Wrong...Mexico is wrong, Canada is wrong, Trump is wrong

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    We are asked occasionally about my opinion concerning events that involve Mexico.  During the past couple of months some of our visitors at the Quinta, while sitting on the long, West-facing corridor, jawing about the conditions of the world, the topic of Trump and his  NAFTA policy will inevitably come up.
     Sometimes the attempt to explain is similar to trying to be reasonable with a cat, or an adult  female human.  It's enough to turn a nice old curmudgeon into a plain and simple grumpy old man.

     To be sure, as a free-enterprise, free-trade personality, my opinion is very strong in terms of approval of free trade as free trade can reasonably be.   The Mexican observer, understandably, normally will begin with the refrain, ''...there has never been a nation that openned its markets so quickly and so totally to another in the history of nations, without prejudice or warfare."

   This observation is, in its 99.9%, correct.  The United States did the same, of course, except for the pointless prohibition of Mexican transport tractor-trailer rigs being permitted access to delivery to interior destinations in the United States and Canada.  Texas, for instance, has facilities for qualifying such equipment to guarantee safety standards required in Texas.  Those standards are very stiff and non-negotiable.  Insurance that is not sponsored by guarantors in the Grand Caymans, of course, is required. 

     Further, it is estimated that as much as 35% of the rolling stock in Mexico can meet the Texas standards.  But, with rare exception, there are few Mexican rigs running in the United States.  Most are found in Arizona, I believe.  Texas is still mired in drayage and changing out tractors, hooking-up in McAllen / Pharr / Brownsville and, of course, Laredo / Colombia, and Laredo / Nuevo Laredo.

     It is also salient to point out that Mexico and / or Canada can land at place #1 to place #4 in terms of being the among the ranking trade partner to the United States on any given month.  Together, Mexico and Canada are Number One in terms of trading partners.
     For the Republic of Texas, Mexico IS our number one trading partner.  Everything from agriculture to finished goods cross both ways, depending upon the season and the need for which or whatever engines, parts, surgical tools, or insulation...etc.etc.etc.
    Forget tourism...every time there is another announcement from one source or another about the dangers of travelling to Mexico, the flood of Texians and other types of Americans increases to destinations both common and exotic in Mexico.  

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     One of my favourite trite and childish responses that I have made on various occasions when people demand that I guarantee or assure that they will be absolutely safe when they go to Mexico, is to say something base, mean, and childish such as, "Mexico is pretty clear right now.  I would carry extra guards with automatic weapons if you are buying a lot of Chinese meth to import to the USA.  And I would avoid going to places like rural Baptist Churches outside of San Antonio, Texas, because I hear that they kill Gringos by the score there."

     I simply tire of banal self-centre'd, irrational, incompetent, questions.   If a person does not feel comfortable going to some place, then do not go.  Do not require that I or some facsimile of me guarantee someone else's safety.  It is not possible....not in Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin-America, Anglo-America, or anywhere...even, lamentably, in  the Republic of Texas.

     The figures provided by the private Human Rights Commission in Mexico is famous for always blaming the military for almost all cartel-related killings.  They are also famous for inflating death figures, famous for pointing out places where "scores of mutilated bodies" have been buried either by the military or by the cartels...and then when excavations are made, with forencisists present, nothing is found.   True enough, too frequently such macabre places are found, but they are almost always associated with a Cartel member having had a "coming to Jesus" moment or one of the intended victims managed to escape and find an Army or Naval Infantry unit who could intervene. 

     Please understand that what Mexico is living through is difficult beyond common belief.  I know that.  I live in the middle of it.  It is also well to understand that Mexico is also a steadily improving physical and moral engine, against all odds, and the country has been a good and noble trading partner as it stumbled into first-world status.
     Mexico will practice their form of demagoguery as does Trump, and neither is acquitting their position well.  We include the Canadians in this indictment.  The Mexicans have been slightly deceptive (but 'slightly' in this economic arena is a matter of scores of billions of dollars of deception) because of the fact that they allow "legal" Red Chinese parts and finished industrial product to clear the magnificent AAAA - minor league port of Manzanillo, Colima on Mexico's magical West Coast.   Ships come from almost every major port in the Pacific arena to off-load commercial cargo destined for Mexico, but more especially to Europe, Mexico, eastern Canada, and the United States.

     The problem comes from Mexico not counting the imports of Chinese goods as later Mexican exports, at least to the extent of the Mexican value-added in terms of off-loading, loading, transport, and import / export co-ordination.  Mexico has improved its highways leading to and away from Manzanillo to accommodate this east - west and west - east trade, treating the route as though Manzanillo is the new Panama Canal.
   The United States could reasonably scratch her head and wonder why the goods in question were not simply off-loaded in San Diego or Oakland or Seattle if they were intended for the American and/or Canadian markets.  The Red Chinese, being essentially inhuman, corrupt,  communist automotrons will do anything to cheat, lie, steal, and scheme in order to destroy the only remaining engines of liberty.

     Those engines are the Republic of Texas and, to a lesser extent, the American Union.  

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     Trump failed especially in the fact that he assumed the persona of an All Star Wrestler...strutting and puffing-up in the ring, bellowing about how he is going to destroy everyone who challenges him.  These matters are best conducted in private, and with reason. 
     Mexico is caught in an election period where the majority of the population is quivering with the certain possibility that a stark raving mad marxist could possibly win the presidency of Mexico.  This is due to the quirky, left-over weakness in  the Mexican Constitution of 1917 which states that the winner of the Presidential election is the one who gains the most votes.   There is no run-off to determine the Presidency by a majority of the wills of the electorate.   There is no electoral college to protect against the dominance of huge States over the smaller ones.

     Vincente Foxx...a member of our party as a PANista  (Mexican conservative

Why does Mr. Trump hate me?  Nancy Pelosi
says Mr. Trump hates me.

Republican) has done this same low-class posturing, but thankfully, at least Trump has not stooped to the pointless crass profanity as has Vicente in his condemnations of Trump.
   Vicente has mischaracterised Trump's brayings pretty much as has the Obsolete American (and Mexican and Foreign) Press when they were saying that by calling Mara Salvatrucha XIII ''animals", Trump was calling all people with a Mexican background "animals".
   Trump knew he was not calling all people with Mexican or Latin backgrounds "animals" but he did not provide a "before disclaimer" and an "after disclaimer" so as to disarm that huge army of dull, stupid, self-involved degenerates in the Obsolete Press before they had a chance to run to the microphones and point out that Trump hates Mexicans and Negroes and babies and women and homosexuals and porpoises.  
    The problem is that Trump opens himself up to these irrational outbreaks by not thinking one phrase ahead as he speaks.   He makes the same mistake by thinking that he is dealing with intellectual inferiors at times when he is actually riding into a Sitting Bull - Custer set-up.

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     This matter of tariffs and quotas could have been, and still can be, fixed in a fifteen minute conference call.   We pray that that call be made.   We sincerely appreciate your continued interest and comments.  We respond to all e-mails, as most already know.

El Gringo Viejo

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The Art of the Deal...fundamental reality

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     Several hundred years ago, when we were in business, we had to practice the 'art of the deal' as a matter of course.  Daily, weekly, hourly, minutely, monthly, and at every turnly.  Our business was in the arbitrage of tourism - touring, excursions, many destinations, thousands of clients, ever changing conditions, currency fluctuations, competition, duplicities, constants, variables, and, of course, the lady who wanted me to pay for her dentures that she left in her hotel room.

     One example of practicing the nuances of "The Deal" was the fact that we had to defend ourselves, actively and passively, from a rapacious competition.  In the main, their "Deal" was to post the lowest price possible.   "Why waste your money?  We have the same tour that El Gringo Viejo has, but he charges 300 dollars while we only charge 150 dollars for the same tour to Mexico City!!!  Don't get ripped off!!"

     Of course, the poor Yankee Snow Bird could reasonably assume that he and Mrytle could both go to Mexico City for the price I was charging just one person.   The problem was that the cheaper trip had the not so small print that would point  out that on  the 5 day trip, only two nights were in Mexico City.   Actually, only two nights were spent in a hotel of any kind.  The other two nights were spent aboard a bus, making the fourteen hour run from Mexico City to McAllen on two rest stops and one 30 minute meal stop (not included).  

     Our excursion would be 8 days and 7 nights (with hotels),  all breakfasts included, and major local touring included, excellent tickets to the National Folklore Ballet, all entrance fees to archeological and historical sites, luggage handling, meals (lunches) on the road, and so forth.  Our hotels were always the low range of deluxe (four stars in Mexico) or higher...and always in the middle  of the "action" and zones of interest, museums,  shopping, entertainment venues, etc.

     Plus they had me or a reasonable facsimile...and we were (and still are) a formidable fountain of information, opinion, facts, history, archeology, ethnography, and experience in Mexico.  People of the level of my brother the egg-head...Chairman of the College of Geology, Geography, and Earth Sciences of Louisiana State University for instance.  He was fascinated by my business and decided to leave his lofty position in academia to do something that would be really fun.  He was a great favourite among the clients.

     In developing itineraries and negotiating prices for the various hotels, carriers, etc. I would always weigh first the quality of the place or service being considered.  When arguing a price, my greater concern was not to reduce the price down to bare bones, primarily because I did not want my people to wind up with a "run of the hotel" assignment like the other tour operators.  My objective was to always make a sincere attempt to segregate our clients into the best section, the best selection of rooms, etc. and for that I would leave a little meat on the bone.    It would also give me more latitude to whine, moan, and demand if there were avoidable shortcomings in the accommodations or services.
    If everything was working between good and excellent, as was the normal case, then the hotels and services people could be happy that I was paying a little more for their attention and good service.  A woman in Tuxpan told me one time that I treated her hotel like I treated my clients and everyone at that facility seemed to appreciate seeing us arrive.   She gave us a 20% group rate discount...while the others who wanted to use her place demanded 50%, "...or we'll take our business elsewhere".  Not a good demand to make to a hotelier with a 91% occupancy rate.

     This is all stated while remembering that the business of a business is not to make the providers or the operators or anyone beyond the clients, "happy".  The business of a business is to produce profit

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     We move on now to the point of this brief editorial.  All OROGs know that this particular writer is not the biggest fan of Donald John Trump.  The vote he gained from me was in full recognition of his strengths, the horror of the alternative, and the resignation to the fact that disgusting slugs and blowhards must be tolerated at certain points in the life of a Republic.  It was the most difficult vote we have ever made.  We have voted in every partisan election since 1968.

    While my sensibilities may have been injured, it is amazing to note the manoeuvrings, positioning, and posturing of the Obsolete Press during these times.   Case in point:  the North Korean issue.

     The President and his people decide that enough is enough and the time has long passed for Little Rocket Man to come to his few senses and set his people free while desisting with all manner of dangerous toys such as nuclear weapons and long range, highly inaccurate missiles.

      Administration after administration has dealt with the Kim Dynasty, and always to no avail. Agreement after accord has been round-filed within 24 hours after the Gringos delivered on their part.  When the Kim Dynasty had the oil, food, money, porno library, and whatever else was demanded by the Kim machine, they could get back to murdering, oppressing, and generally dehumanising an entire population, while menacing all neighbours.

    And now we witness a different approach...very much a businessman's approach to what appears to be an intractable problem.   The businessman asks, "When do you want to meet, and where?" and the Obsolete Press with all its talking heads howls about "the inadvisability" of engaging so directly with a dangerous tyrant who has nukes.
     A week or so later, just when the Obsolete Press is almost calmed down to their normal level of hysteria and rabid slobbering, the President informs the world that he is withdrawing from an agreement to meet in Singapore with Kim because it appears as though they are not arriving with preparation protocol people that would be necessary for the conduct of such an historic meeting.
    Once again, flying in the face of everything the Obsolete Press declared just a few days earlier, they declare that the President is being irrational, even bi-polar.  This was no way to treat another head of state who deserves respect.  And while they pile on because of this latest horrible error and faux pas by the American President, he is already renegotiating the final touches to the re-establishment of the previous agreement.  This was done at the request of the North Korean foreign ministry.
     At each turn the Obsolete Press was left in the dust, stuttering and stammering, wrong on every major and minor point...yet terribly proud of themselves because they can still bring themselves to hate a person because he is boorish and terribly un-cool.   Only they...the Obsolete Press...are able to be cool, suave, so very informed, so...how should we say...correct in all things.

   Or not.

We leave all to rest.   As always, the attention and time of old and new readers is profoundly appreciated.
EL GRINGO VIEJO

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CHEYENNE BODIE
Que en Paz Descances

     Cheyenne, Johnny Yuma, Sugarfoot, Paladin, Marshall Dillon, and all such models of heroes of the morality play...the good against the bad...rush into the mind of one who lived through that time.

    Imagine! We survived the continuous hail of bullets, the hours and hours of verbiage without having to hear one "bleep" to cover the obtuse profanity, and almost no coarse body function innuendoes.

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A Little Catch-up About and Around the Quinta and Other Issues

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     This is just a brief piece to remind the OROG Community that we are still here and about.  We arrived back into the Magic Lower Rio Grande Valley on Monday afternoon just past.   The earliest hours of Monday were a bit of a challenge.
     What is called "la madrugada", an ominous-sounding word that actually only means, generally, the period between 00:00 hours (midnight) and what we would call "morning's first light", we were involved with a long-lasting, extensive cluster of thunderstorms.  They were originating both in the mountains...then moving East...and in the North, coming down from Texas, and moving South where the clusters unified with each other and proceeded to bring down the Tears of Angels upon us.

     We received in that area, which is roughly 20,000 square miles, anywhere between two and ten inches of rain during a six to ten hour period.   When I left at 07:00, gutter-rushes and puddles were everywhere.  Chaff and small to medium sized limbs, along with a few large limbs and trees were downed, and they paralleled the little paved route to the main highway.   In keeping with the general situation in Mexico, the small, rural road has now improved to the point that, what would have been a washout 20 years ago, has become just a drive that required only mature caution and deference.

    Our arrival at the destination in Texas was accomplished before noon.   My job, besides unpacking, was to process some of the few pictures that had been taken in the days just before the storms.  To the left are two flowerings of the peculiar trunks that shoot up out of the hennequin maguey after between seven and up to fifteen years of that plant's existence.
     In the light of the late morning, one can appreciate the truly strange, weird, peculiar,  even almost extraterrestrial nature of the sprouting.  At the tips of the branches are flowerettes that, in different times and in similar places, were taken and planted to develop another great extension of hennequin maguey plants.
     At one time, in Tamaulipas and generally around its capital city of Ciudad Victoria, there were over 2,000,000 acres of these plants...all rowed up in great lines, awaiting for that very moment when the plants began to confess to their pregnancy (as in the above photo), which would result in the sacrifice of the already dying central plant (el quiote), and the subsequent planting of her 100 - 200 babies.    The main "asparagus", which is strictly my term, as in "Texas Asparagus" to entertain my tourists on the excursions into that area, would dry into a very nice, straight pole.  That resource would be used as the apex-point for a roof of a jacal (ha - KAHL), the name of a rustic mud, stick, and rock home, and/or any of its humble but comfortable rooms.
     The leaves of the maguey would be battered and beaten by English thresher machines in order to reveal and allow extraction of the magic fibre within.  Those machines were made specifically, in England and to a lesser extent in Mexico, to make the access to fibre easier.    Great maritime rope and all nature of work clothes reinforcement was drawn from plants identical to those pictured.  They were the many time great-grandmothers the plants the OROG sees. 

     My oldest child...named after two of her mother's fore-bearers...planted Blue Mist weed in a huge pot, and the planting exploded with growth and production of flowers.   This greenery shown above is Blue Mist  weed as well, but perhaps more primordial because it is from the area of its "known" origination.  It is famous for being the "rest-stop" of preference for the Monarch Butterfly that moves between a couple of places in North Central Canada and a few places in South Central Mexico.   That stopping place is a quadra-generational migration between those areas which ebbs and flows during the decades.   Each year there are long moanings about how there are not as many now because George Bush killed them all except for the survivors.
    This year, however, Obama came and restored them to life. But he did it at night so that no one would know.
           All kidding aside, however,  destruction of the forests near Agangueo, in the highlands of the State of Michoacan, between Mexico City and Guadalajara, due to the value of one 100 foot trunk is around 100,000 dollars, has done a bit of damage to that race of butterflies.  But they always come back...and this year in force.

     The next picture shows a small but important planting we have near our grilling and outside cooking area when we have guests who want to burn meat.  The pictures the OROG sees is actually the flowing of oregano.   We are hoping to disperse the seeds over about 200 square feet near the "parrilla"  (grilling place), and thereby have an almost marketable harvest of "wild oregano", which is the best thing for poultry cooking and a thousand other things.

     We use a lot of these natural, local, common, and  enjoyable spice plants in our effort to have a wide selection of both Mexican and other national palates pleased with our very humble kitchen.   We have, besides the  oregano, rosemary (romero), basil (albaquar),   and such things as cebollin (say - boh - YEEN) which are true chives, that are found now in abundance in the Quinta's gardens.  We even have mint and another plant the Mexicans call "Vicks" because it has that very pronounced mentholated fragrance.  And it is used by the locals to alleviate the problems associated with sinus, nasal, and upper (as well as lower) lung involvements. 

     Everyone can appreciate the flowering and spectacular show that the Lord's Nature puts before us.  This usually means that even the  small things, such as the picture to the left...showing the "explosion flower"...are lurking around to surprise the visitor.

     Another is the "Butterfly Weed" which we have allowed to sprout here and there on the grounds of the Quinta.  That poor plant has the misfortune of having hosts or owners who are horrified at the appearance of "worms" on the plant and who then fumigate or physically destroys the poor butterfly larvae, who are only doing what nature intended.
   Those larvae, of course, become various types of very impressive butterflies, so each fumigation is an emotional and physical setback for both man and plant and beast.

     
     Here, one can see the flowering of the famous "Crown of Thorns" plant, and in the background are some of the butterfly weeds along with a good stand of "romero" or what we call rosemary.   This particular romero is, in fact from around the area...I do not know if it is native...but it has been known to be in this part of Mexico for at least the entire colonial period.

     We could go on and on about all of this.  Some of my impatience comes from having to deal with quirks in this  computer and my lack of ability and/or intelligence to understand how to fix or adjust what is going on in this computer's brain.   Frankly, it is more than just a bit of a daunting task.  

 
     We now show the "gift" we were given by a family which has an abundance of cats...which is a rarity in our community and surrounding area.  This is a pure-bred, full-scale, alley cat who is full of joy and playfulness.

    That demeanour does not sit well with our older two females, although the tri-colour does try to practice tolerance and provide instruction to the white male.   One problem we have, however, is the fact that the kitten is absolutely and certainly deaf.
     We began to notice that he did not respond to loud noises in the least.  I can clap my hands, very loudly, within 9 or 10 inches from the back of his head, and he will not even move or flinch or...hear.
Beyond that, he eats well...perhaps 10 to 15 times a day, and he likes to sleep in inconvenient places.    With that considered, it should be understood that he is a purebred cat.  He quickly understood that he was the owner of the house and would abide by his own disposition.

We shall do some more in a bit.  Thanks for the attention and interest.
El Gringo Viejo

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