About Things in General

     Days continue to pass at our little place and yet nothing really happens.   No bad things anyway.   That life continues, the cats and dogs come round and by for their feedings and attention....seeking their favourite cool spots to hide from the effusions of gamma and beta soakings sent down from an angry Tropical Sun.   The bigger trees continue to do well, in spite of the lack of rain, because they are still soaked  at the roots due to last wet season's heavy soakings and inundations.

       The main problem we are all watching out for is the fire issue.   There is just so much Johnson grass and other low growing "yerba" (green undergrowth, among the various interpretations....everything depends upon context with the word.    It can even mean marijuana or mint).    At the moment all the previous fires have run their course.    Real damage anywhere around us is minimal, because the fires have been incidental, like roadside situations.   Strategically, a case could be made that we might be in an advantageous situation because so much has been burned we are found in a doughnut hole of green, surrounded by already blackened areas.     These blackened areas are important because they are the ones with the dense grass that is most likely to flare up and invade the really thick tropical forests at the foot of the mountains' skirts.


      We simply wait for rain.   The hurricane season is upon us, and we are willing.....very willing.....to trade a medium hurricane for what we have now. 


          While the normal OROG is tired of me responding to this question, it continues to be asked.  I shall be brief.   To this point I still have not seen or been involved in any "situation of risk" in terms of the on-going wars between the traffickers and the efforts by the military and police to eliminate the plague that besets almost every country in the New World at this time.     It should be pointed out that every time the President has declared increased troop commitment into this State, he has complied.    The military has complied, and their efforts have paid off with steadily improving social climate here and elsewhere in the State.
            The war is assymetrical, so it takes a thousand well-trained military people to eliminate 10 cockroaches per week.  We have 60,000 naval infantry and soldiers in the two adjacent States of Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon now.    It is expensive.   It is necessary.  The alternative is to have Detroit or any other such  major American city's central urban situation  as the new norm and constant.


       That is my brief up-date and response to a few questions recently posed by reasonable people who are asking reasonable questions based upon what information is available to them.


More Later,
El Gringo Viejo  

So, we are now at the fiftieth day after the Feast of the Resurrection.    This is essentially the day of the establishment of the Church of Jesus Christ.....a rabbi who was known to be the Son of Yahweh by those closest to Him.....a Jew from an upper-class family of privilege, with a strong religious background.    So, let us celebrate the Pentecost with wine, greenery, roses, and other blooming things.   As of yet there is no ruling from the bench declaring that there is a Constitutional admonition separating Computer from religion.

Sometimes a Girl has to do what a Girl has to do.....

Sometimes you just have to drain the swamp when you're standing in the wind tunnel, Nancy.    The Old Gringo likes  Wilma's white stone necklace a lot better.

It All Began To-day for King George III

This is the day that the Continental Congress appointed the necessary committee and authorised the development of a legal document defining the act and cause for separation from the  Rule of the Crown.
In less than three weeks, Thomas Jefferson presented the finished document to the Congress assembled.   Benjamin Franklin made his famous observation that "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately "  after the approval of the Document on the 4th of July 1776  








(click on the Document to enlarge)

Private Letter to Newt and Mitt

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   The news yesterday about Newt Gingrich was not pleasant.   It affected the Old Gringo naught, however, because he will never forget that the Speaker invited Jesse Jackson to a joint session address by somebody or another back in 1990's.   The specific event is not remembered.    The right-wingers in the GOP were stunned, because if he were going to invite a person of colour, there was the number 3 guy in the GOP caucus, J.C. Watts, who is and was an accomplished person, also an ordained preacher, but also a normal person, a member of the GOP, a member of the GOP leadership, a noted athlete, an eloquent and forceful thinker among conservatives, etc........and NEWT invites Jesse Jackson, a slug of an extortionist, poverty pimp, philandering hefty bag full of  %^#&;%%^ and camel guts as a guest of honor.    Good-bye Newt, since 1995, I think it was.    One must remember that Newt is not from Georgia, which is neither here nor there, but rather from the more enlightened Northeast.    Newt is also from the Rockefeller wing of the GOP and quite closely associated with the "reasonable" people who call themselves Republicans and are generally found at the Country Club, dreading the arrival of Jed Clampett and me to their meeting.

       However, the Old Gringo will abide by Reynaldus Magnus's instruction that one Elephant shall not speak ill of another Elephant.....so there.

       Nor shall the Old Gringo raise his voice against Mitt Romney, whom he regards as the perfect candidate for President.....until he says that he believes Al Gore and a hoard of Bolshevik scientists .     Mr. Mitt, one medium volcano spews more pollutants....serious, toxic stuff....in one day into the atmosphere than what has been spewed into the atmosphere by all humankind since the beginning of Creation.   Mr. Mitt, please remember that in the 1970's Jane Fonda told me we were all going to die....because of NUCLEAR WINTER...Global Cooling!!!!    Mr. Mitt, what are you going to say when the next crowd comes out of the St. Frida Kahlo's Chapel of the Church of Karl Marx of the Latter Day Bolsheviks and declares that all cats have to be burned because they have a parasite that endangers left-handed lesbian Eskimos?

Forgive my ire as I crawl back into my darkened cave.

El Gringo Viejo

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A Bit of Admiration

We were talking on the way down from Texas State University graduation ceremonies and we realized what special children we had brought to bear on the world's situation.   Their friends and associates are all dull and boring like us, no nightly police responses for wife beating....no one starring in clips from "World's Dumbest"....no need to drive up to TDC in Huntsville, Texas once every month.

      During my time of it at Southwest Texas State University, it was a great source of pride for the Old Gringo to be able to say "I paid most of my own way through school."    My mother, but not so much my father, was flabbergasted because I had been such a gadfly....lazy, profligate, over-accustomed to being waited on hand and foot, and generally disgusting.    My father had had faith that my redemption would come as upon the wings of a buzzard.....and that I would suddenly feel like doing something and amounting to something.
       So, it is true, that in the main, the Old Gringo did actually pay his room, board, tuition, auto insurance, maintenance, tires,  and various things on his own for the last 2/3's of his stint at University.    Much of that was working at a very fine hamburger shack named Gil's Broiler, a half-block off-campus.  


       So it is a bit of a source of pride and humiliation that first my daughter essentially paid her whole way through University and advanced herself professionally all on her own.    And then her brother has done the same thing, wandering through life doing a thousand interesting things....capping it with things like being an Eagle Scout, a Coast Guard Veteran, and little things like leading Texas State Universithy in beating Dartmouth in the Philosophical World Series Debates this past Spring.    Now he is still working and heading into the ethereal world of Graduate School....happy with his place, station, and progress.


       So, it is humiliating to know what a slug the Old Gringo is and was, but then .....he helped Diana raise a pair of perfect children.....helped pretty much by staying out of the way.    So, The Old Gringo was a very effective parent after all.
More Later, and thanks for your attention.
El Gringo Viejo