Sunday 10 March 2013

Malvinas, Falklands...? What difference does it make?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A very small but important kettle of fish, and wool,
and provisioning.
 
  The Falklands.

File:Falkland Islands topographic map-en.svg





     Stated briefly, the demise of Hugo Chavez, in the way of all flesh that has had repeated ...shall we say...pelvic infections during his younger years, now presents a growing issue of disorder throughout the leftwing in Latinoamerica.   Ecuador, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and certainly Venezuela now are casted off into an uncertain sea of many serpents and sharks, and very few charts to show the way to a successful crossing of the troubled waters.
     The elephant in the group has gradually withdrawn from the sirene song of free oil and the constant singing of "The International" and the constant genuflecting before images of various little disciples of Satan like Fidel and Che'.   That pachyderm, of course, is Brazil.   The once seat of the Portugese throne, and recently regarded as the Red China Miracle of Latin America has fallen on hard times.   Brazil is being totally awashed in unfathered children, and in the middle of the worst violence and criminal turbulence since the fall of slavery in the country (By decree of HRH Princess Isabel of Brazil, in 1888).   Presently the onslaught of inter-gang murder and mayhem, along with a general and very intense crime wave throughout the country, threatens the various world events of great interest, including both the Mundial de Futbol Soccer (2014) and the Summer Olympics (2016).    A crummy and declining electrical grid, plus crumbling highways and railways plagues those sectors that are being disregarded while the "official class" makes pretty the scene for the coming events.
    There is no other alternative except to use extremely "active" measures against the street level criminal activity which has long since passed even epidemic proportions.   Beatings and assassination of gang leaders and principal followers make Mexico's body count in the drug war look almost reasonable.  We have frequently pointed out that Mexico's war against the cartel was sneered and snickered and defamed by the Obsolete Press, primarily because its Commander in Chief was Pres. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, who is a member of Mexico's equivalent of the Amerian Republican Party.   Silly them, because they kinda...like...you know...forgot to tell the public that 60,000 over six years in Mexico, of whom 90% were cockroaches, over a population of 110,000,000 is statistically nowhere near 250,000 in four years over a population of 135,000,000 "souls".   The reason for the silence?
     Like Obama, Brazil had Lulu da Silva, a socialist, redistributionist, global warming dude.  He had to be good, because he, like Hugo Chavez, only cared about the poor.  So we cover for him in the Obsolete Press and defame Mexico and Texas and Conservatives in general.   We can be certain that the Olympics and the Mundial de Futbol will both be plagued by unreported and reported violence.    I remember the the Games in Red China kicked-off with a "deranged" Red Chinese-type person stabbing an American woman to death in front of the Great Hall of the People.

     So, like the glowing press for Hugo Chavez....a totally corrupt demagogue and thug....and the absence of reporting about his tsunami of murders and street-level crime during especially the last 5 years (a becoming worse by the day) and the collapse of the currency, we have the parallel event of the sputtering renovation of threats and hysteria in Argentina concerning the Falkland matter.   To-morrow the people of the Falklands will vote on the  will of the citizens of those Islands, concerning their collective disposition to remain affiliated with the United Kingdom, or if it their wish to unify with the Silver Republic.
Here, Madame President Comrade
Cristina gives herself a sobriety test
as the warm Argentine sun rises over
the Falklands, 500 miles to the south
east.    T0-morrow, the Islanders will
vote to remain in the Commonwealth
 of HRH Elizabeth II and the left-wing
"anti-colonialist" world will be so, so
RESENTFUL!!!!   REVENGE!!!
    So, while President Dilma Rousseff, the president of Brazil and head of the "Workers' Party" and her predecessor, Ruiz Inacio Lulu da Silva, also of the "Workers' Party" are resting up from their secular pilgrammage to the side of Hugo Chavez's coffin, and trying to put a prettier load of make-up on the face of their form of oppressive marxism, and distancing themselves from Chavez's hysterical, narcissistic, and psychotic form of what he tried to call "socialism".

     And since everyone brought up the word "make-up" perhaps we should finally turn to the first returnee from the crocodile-teared, sob-fest in Caracas, the murder and killing capital of South America.  Cristina Fernandez Vds de Kirchner...the latest pink star in the leftern sky, simply had to return ex post haste-o to Buenos Aires in order to (1) try to keep her government afloat in her own sea of Obama-like red ink, street protests from every significant sector in the Argentine population (including labour unions) and (2) whip up a war frenzy so that Argentina can go out and liberate the Falklands again.  The last time was so much fun that they might enjoy another round of 900 or so dead in a two month war over a few piles of rocks with a bunch of sheep grazing on them.

     The results of the election should be known around 19:00 hours, due to the fact that there are so few voting.  The "congress" of the Falklands self-government council has only eight (8) members.  There is some difficulty in logistics in terms of gathering up the ballots because of the wondrously disjointed, craggy, island-by-island construct of this peculiar, isolated, and fascinating little speck on the globe.
    British Naval resources have been self-degraded by about 35% since the last war with Argentina back in the April-May, 1982....although there have been quantum advances in terms of technology.   The Argentine armed forces will not be deployed because they are a shell of their former selves.   Their efforts in the 1982 war were stiffer than might be supposed, especially their air power, but the failure to put their best troops out and to supply them correctly cancelled any advantages held by Argentina's proximity to the front, and the almost equivalent ability of their air power.
    
     If one reviews the film accessed through this linkage, he/she will know more about the  1982 Falkland's War than 99% of the rest of the Planet.
                                          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FGWz7NFQnU
 
 
    One must wonder if Presidente Cristina will be so foolish as to make the same mistake as the military jefe during the last war.   That she is in desperate political straights, is obvious, but it just does not seem possible that she cannot see that even as she is losing the political battle at home, a military disaster over a bunch of rocks with a population of 3,300 souls would send her even faster to the dust bin of history that is her inevitable home. 
 
To-morrow's vote will be announced in Stanley, and we shall see where the wills of man and woman take this issue in the hours following.   Thank you all for your continued interest, comments, and  following.
El Gringo Viejo

Saturday 9 March 2013

These are the people who whined, "Who is going to take care of me, now?"....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
 
Cannon
Fodder
on the hoof

Main Image
THIS WILL SOON BE THE IMAGE OF AMERICANS WHEN AND
IF OBAMA LEAVES OFFICE .   THESE ARE VENEZUELANS OF
THE DEPENDENT, LOW-INFORMATION, LOW-INTELLIGENCE
GROUPING.    THESE ARE AMONG THE ACTUAL ONES WHO
WERE HOWLING, "Who is going to take care of me?'  THIS IS
THE IMAGE OF THE COMMON OBAMA VOTER AS WELL
ALWAYS LATCHING ON TO A PERSONALITY TO
PROVIDE COVER FOR PERSONAL CHARACTER
DEFECTS, AND ERRORS IN CONDUCT.
ALL NORMAL DUMBOES, LIKE YOUR
HUMBLE SERVANT, KNOW THE
ANSWER TO THEIR QUESTION
AND TO THE MISS FLUKE
DEMANDS, MUST
NECESSARILY BE
"TAKE CARE OF
YOURSELF".




    This would have been the Obama voters if Romney had only closed his campaing with reasonable aggression,  instead of going on a two-week semi-victory lap and pulling his punches.  But can anyone imagine being so useless so as to be forced to ask aloud, so that other people could actually hear the words spoken, "Quien me va a cuidar?" ?     Scenes such as this cry out for the establishment of batallions of mobile spaying and neutering vans....24 hour -  7 days a week.
     El Gringo Viejo is speechless with scornful detestation for such people....in Venezuela, Argentina, the United States and everywhere they are found.   Paint a 666 on their forheads and throw them into a Mao tunic and give them a bag to carry dung to the dung heap for Chairman Mao.

So Sad...from the voice from the other side of the mountain

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The White House tours have to be suspended because of the dreaded sequester. Now Barry can leave his dirty underwear out and pizza boxes on the coffee table. It only costs $18,000 a week to facilitate the tours compared to $181,000 an hour to ride in Air Force One (and Two). Imagine that a single one way trip to Hawaii could keep the tours running for well over a year. What cut would be the most effective to inflame the low-informed-voters that can cause the greatest amount of indignation against Republicans and conservatives? It is not conceivable that the sequester could not cause epidemic proportionate suffering. How can it be that the “sun came out and the birds are singing…” etc. It is sad that something so trivial can be the biggest story of the day.

 
We have much larger problems. The idea that proposed spending cuts are cuts is preposterous. Any cuts associated with a budget, we have not had one from this President yet, are simply a reduction in the amount of proposed increase in spending, not a real reduction in spending. In fact, spending will still go up by at least 5%. This pompous imposter we call king… I mean President, says “we have commitments we have to meet, we are obligated to raise taxes to pay for things we have committed to” (paraphrased). Actually the elephant in the closet is the ObamaCare atrocity that has not been funded. Without that, we could keep current spending levels. It is sad that truth about spending is not the story of the day.

 
ObamaCare is the largest single invasion of personal privacy ever in the history of this country perpetrated on its citizens. Except for John Roberts’ absurd deciding vote on the Healthcare law, ObamaCare would be DOA. Even Obama and the Democrats said the bill was “absolutely” a fine, not a tax which would have been illegal under the Constitution. What was the payoff for the Chief Justice? What dirty thing happened? We need to know. This stinks to high heaven that the IRS is the enforcer of this unconstitutional law. It is sad that the Supreme Court has the power to shred the Constitution without recourse.
 

 
Then there are the drones. It is just another invasion of personal privacy. The issue being made of the issue is that drones might be used to kill American without due process. Yes, that is bad; however, the larger problem with a government drone program is what can happen to our privacy. Who knows what the drones constantly circling overhead are doing. Are Americans to be watched 24/7 by the CIA, Military, IRS, or the President’s secret service? This is what Americans should be concerned about. Obama pulls troops out of the war zones and putting in drones. This removes guns and men from the military. There is a similarity between that and his use of drones and the attempt to remove guns from civilians. Theoretically, drones could be used to find guns and gun owners. As paranoid as this might seem, it is not beyond this man’s modality to use technology to control the population. It is sad that we have evil at the controls of our country.

 
These are random concerns of a very concerned citizen. It is sad because what is happening is seemingly not stoppable. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Our hope today is in primarily 4 brave men. We have to watch, support, and pick one of Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee. These are the new leaders of the Conservative movement and Tea Party. We need one of them to come out in front to challenge in 2016. In the interim there is the 2014 mid-term election where we have no more important task than to keep and increase conservative numbers in the House of Representatives and take the Senate. Nothing less is acceptable.

 
ooo000OOO000ooo


Allow me this last note of privilege, to the increasing number of our readers:

El Gringo Viejo is a very special and talented associate and best friend for over half a century. His insight and detailed knowledge are incomparable. His passion and conviction for conservative values are inspiration for this writer. All OROGs should continue to read and participate in the Journal. Pass his information to your friends, associates, and any acquaintances you may have for the good.
God bless us all,
JRH

aka - EL ZORRO


Jackson, Penn, Carter, and Chavez, Gag...


     A finer group of dregs and slugs could not be assembled.    We send a black man from South Carolina to the United States Senate, under good process and order, and the Obsolete Press refers to the act as a "sop", a "token" ...or having an "Uncle Tom"  who can be controlled by the Tea Party.   The Democrat National Socialists send a woman to the Senate from Massachusetts who is at least 123/124ths Caucasian and they call her Pocahontas.
    The DNS people specialise in frauds, grifters, shake-down artists, embezzlers, and all nature of thugs such as demagogues and shysters.  They, like Fidel and Hugo, like to "take care" of people.  If they don't feed the people, after all....who will?    If they do not "give" the people medical care....who will?   If they do not house, educate, entertain, and polish the peoples' back porch floor....who will?   Georgo Bush?

      Let us consider the case of one of America's premier shakedown artists.   Perhaps the greatest poverty pimp to come down the pike, rejected and run off by Martin Luther King, Jr. during the last days of his life, Jesse Jackson has made quite a record of useless, low-class demogoguery and it has paid out well for him.    That stated, it must be pointed out that his main squeeze from days past....a secretary who worked for Jesse's Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity)....was paid well to keep her mouth shut about their mutual "love" child to save humanity.
      While Jesse was busy shaking down nervous businessmen who did not have sufficient testosterone to tell Jesse the way to the exit, and please leave by the back door, Jesse was also taking grant, contribution, and endowment money and paying dane geld to his squeeze person so that she would keep her mouth shut and her baby quiet.    That worked out well enough, except for the rule that if more than one person knows a secret, before long, everyone will know the secret.  It will still be a secret, but at least everyone will know what it is.  
      It turns out now, of course, that Miss Main Squeeze of the Moment has moved against the Reverend Mr. Jackson for failure to pay agreed support for Miss MSM and her "love" child.  There is nothing in the Obsolete Press about this because of the Obsolete Press's absolute adherence to even-handedness concerning such matters, so the law suit against the Saviour of the Poor and the people included in the Campaign Platform of the most Reverend Mr. Jackson as divulged below, (creditting a quick review of Wikipedia) is pretty much an unknown matter.    To wit:
 
Campaign platform
In both races, Jackson ran on what many considered to be a very liberal platform. In 1987, The New York Times described him as " a classic liberal in the tradition of the New Deal and the Great Society".[2] Declaring that he wanted to create a "Rainbow Coalition" of various minority groups, including African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, family farmers, the poor and working class, and homosexuals, as well as European American progressives who fit into none of those categories, Jackson ran on a platform that included:
With the exception of a resolution to implement sanctions against South Africa for its apartheid policies, none of these positions made it into the party's platform in either 1984 or 1988.

 
All OROGs will note that Jesse had the same slack-jawed, stupid, canned-phrase idiocies spewing from the mouths of his focus group assemblies as does Barry Sorotero.   These people never change, because the stupid and dull who want somebody to take care of them always want the same thing.   They want someone to take care of them, give them money, and to take the money from the people who have anything more than the stupid, lazy slobs who want other peoples' money.   Free Money!...boom,boom,boom,   Free Money! ....boom, boom, boom!
 
 
We also remember that Jesse laid claim to having been "....at Martin's side....", at the time the fatal shots were fired.  His blood, ostensibly, splattered on Jesse...Jesse tried to stop the bleeding....Jesse was a mess, smeared and covered in the sainted Martin's  blood....according to Jesse.   And according to no one else.   All the other people there at the time declared definitively that Jesse was not there at the precise place of the death of MLKing.
     Jesse was personna non grata within the sight of MLKing.   King had turned his back on Jesse, literally, one or two weeks earlier when Jesse kept interrupting an organisational talk being given by Mr. King.   Jesse was interrupting with baited questions about the lack of fervour on the part of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.   There had been a lot of "internals" going on because King was shedding some of the marxists in his organisition, and on that day of questioning, Jesse became one more of those.
     The groupie-fix suffered by Jesse, however, caused him to be guesting in a hotel room, one floor below Mr. King's room on the day of the assassinatation.  There is disagreement, however, concerning whether or not he was even on the hotel grounds at the precise moments.   The earliest anyone can say that he "might" have arrived on the scene is about 20 to 25 minutes after the shooting.
     This inclusion is excerpted from to-days screed, from a Chicago local television station facebook commentary line, and was submitted by a fellow who seemed to be known and deferred to by the facebookers....who, by the way were a mix black and white group, almost all (97%)  dumping down on the Jesse clown.   To wit:
 
Larry, that's not exactly how it happened. Jesse was not present at the assassination of Dr King. After a year of trying to attach himself to King, the camp knew him as the hustling grifter that he is, and ran him off weeks before the murder. Jesse showed up at the Chicago City Council meeting a week later, waving a bloody shirt, and the lie had wings. He may not be The devil, but he is A devil.

     Folks, you all know this without having to be told.  We have written before about how Jesse would tell audiences about how he would spit into the soup of the patrons of the country club where he worked as a waiter....I believe it was a college job.     He made the mistake of gloating about it among the mainly Black staff, as if it was great fun, and as if they, being almost all Negroes, would "side" with him and find his deportment humourous.  He learned a bitter life lesson when in fairly short order he was facing the Food Service Director in order to pick up his last check.
       Jesse has been running his extortion racket now for almost forty years.   He has never worked, since his days as a tuxedoed waiter at that country club, and simply lives by his extortions.   We remember how he declared, while he was counselling William Jefferson Blythe, who also had a zipper problem of some sort or another, that he was going to have to "retire" from the public view and "get right" inside of his soul.  He intimated that he might be out of the public view for considerable time.   That absence lasted a little less than three weeks.    We still remember the images of Billy Jeff lumbering around with his Bible in his hand, being contrite, humble, and so penitent that it made one want to snort in disgust...I mean feel really sorry for the guy.    A person had to feel sorry for Sir Edmund Hillary, too.  Seeing her ride off to Morocco at tax payers' expense to take a camel safari, in spite of having a concussion....no, wait, that time it was a "bad back"....She and Chelsea racked-up over 450,000 dollars of expenses on that camel ride....brought on by a broken heart, when she found out that Billy Jeff was actually "doing something" with that chubby, narcissistic Jewess intern from California.   She kept secrets real well, too.
      What a bunch of reprobates  about whom we have this afternoon.   They fit well at a Chavez funeral...someday within this century perhaps....they will have to gather at the edge of the abyss again to dispatch another soul to eternal damnation...when Fidel finally croaks.  Perhaps he will order the repatriation of the money he has stolen over the past half-century so that the people of Cuba can buy a couple of extra tins of sardines a month.

Enough!  These louts sicken even my iron stomach.   We are hearing what must be El Zorro riding up in the darkness.   He is probably riding early because of the Daylight Savings Time....02:00 Sunday Morning!
El Gringo Viejo

Friday 8 March 2013

A revisitation to an earlier post...an earlier time: Sequester Monster and the attack of the sabre toothed locusts


For Love of Politics
Great Read
Not a lot on Fort Marcy Park, or
the Davidian Compound Massacre
or Cattle Futures Trading, or lost
supeonaed legal charges tabulation
and assignments, or corkscrewing
into Kosovo, or any of several
thousand other lies, felonies, or
self-indulgences to which any
person with real class would
never advantage herself.
But, what the heck...
"What differnce
does it make?"
     As a certifiable blowhard, El Gringo Viejo knows what another certifiable blowhard looks and sounds like.   Last night on O'Rielly we had a twopher, with both O'Reilly and Bob Beckell looking like a couple of Great Blues, swimming in an uncomfortably small swimming pool.  Poor Bob was easily tooled into a shoe box by O'Reilly, when Bob admitted that it is necessary to drag inner-city, "minority" females into the sunlight of reality concerning the issue of promiscuity, welfare dependency, birthing at 14 years of age with no high school diploma, etc.
 

     It all goes back to the pledge of solution by panacea.   Bob was touting how his union thug father admonished him to always vote Democrat because the Democrats cared about people, while the Republicans only cared about money.   He all but admitted that the concept of a "social safety net" has turned into a multi-generational quagmire of of dull dependency, and a self-defeating sense of automatic self-entitlement.   It has resulted in two generations, at least, of children born without souls....in such numbers so as to genuinely endanger they themselves and everyone around them for miles around.    Interestingly, it matters naught if the race or ethnic group is this, that, or the other.   The multi-generational curse of soulless children occurs among all races, all ethnic groups.

I Surrender!     We have to remember when the Democrat wing stood up and cheered when George W. Bush, during one of his State of the Union speeches, decried the fact that his attempt to salvage the stupid Social Security Ponzi Scheme by privatising a small portion of it had failed to gain approval in Congress.   The fact is, he was right, but would have been "righter" if he had fought for complete privatisation.   And for specific, numbered accounts where the assets within those accounts pertained only and exclusively to the holder.   And that those accounts would have an investment plan...one of four or five choices....that the account holder would be "allowed" (even El Gringo Viejo might be a closet Government meddler) to place the money on various initerest bearing instruments.   AND.....that the possession of said account would be considered part of the estate of the deceased, to be transferred according to will and testament.    But, of course, the control group marxists and elitists cannot stand this notion because, Who would be left to make their beds?   We cannot allow too many people into the Hamptons.    We simply cannot allow any more people to move into Taos, because they disturb Shirley Maclaine's seances.  we have to remember that she demanded that the entrance gate be closed after she moved into town there. 
     These people deal with their own focus groups and think that we are all stupid....all those insignificant people out there clinging to their Bibles and their guns and their outmoded, backwards ways.   Obama's conscientious effort to frighten us and menace us with the removal of HIS central government support and flood of ever-more-worthless greenback dollars, just will not work the magic of before.   El Gringo Viejo, as millions of others, would prefer to starve than to receive any unprepaid pittance from the central government. 
    

Officials of airports cited by Homeland Security
Secretary Janet Napolitano as examples of how
the sequester would delay airline travelers say
she's wrong — they're not delaying flights one bit.


It left Barry Soetoro in that unenviable position of either being stupider than a broken tennis raquet, or being a Solyndra Powered mountain of mendacity.....or even more probably, both.    Barry Soetoro and his ghoulish, really strange looking cabinet full of dolts, sasquatches, dumboes, liars, and nincompoops painted very specific pictures of what was going to be happening....nay! ....what had already happened.   The Humanity!!!   Head Start children were going to be set back....perhaps permanently.....little matter that the program is used primarily by slugs who like to lounge around in muumuus all day watching telenovelas and/or going to nail salons and/or "beauty" parlours.   It serves no purpose in terms of assimilation or preparation for regular school.
 
 
     Long lines at the airports....lie;   no vaccines for children......lie;   no space for illegal aliens with significant criminal histories....lie;   no coverage sufficient for the air traffick control  necessary for the air travel industry....lie;   insufficient coverage for the processing of meat and sea food under quality assurance certainties....lie;   layoffs at school districts throughout America, beginning in Ohio....lie.
   
      BUT NOT JUST WRONG...PLEASE.   LIES, willfully posed and passed into the compliant Obsolete Press....lies so obvious that the new social and blog media had already exposed the mendacities to the extent that the Obsolete Media almost had to capitulate.   Various of the  elements of the Obsolete Media even had to suggest, even if timidly, that the Warning of the Three Witches, roiling their cauldron, of the coming horrors was better aimed at Obama and his own, and not MacBeth and not the Tea Party reactionaries and not the Conservatives..

It was as if, perhaps, three witches were reciting that ancient spell of times past.....Perhaps the Bard of the Globe can tell the story best, that great storyteller of Stratford-on-Avon hath built the trew actors for this scene.....towards a cold and withdrawn Castle, but not in Scotland....this one being located at 1600 Pennsylvania.....

      (Enter the three Witches)
 

1 WITCH. Thrice the brinded cat hath mew'd.
2 WITCH. Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin'd.
3 WITCH. Harpier cries:—'tis time! 'tis time!
1 WITCH. Round about the caldron go;
In the poison'd entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
3 WITCH. Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches' mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg'd i the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,
For the ingrediants of our caldron.
ALL. Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
2 WITCH. Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
 
Grab your children all.   Paint the sill with lamb's blood. These people are driven to enslave you and yours.   But don't worry.  They will make the millionaires and billionaires pay for it.
Even if the White House is closed due to the Sequester.
 
El Gringo Viejo
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Trolley Bus? Trolebus? Tomayto, Tomahto.

What is this business about trolley busses and so forth?   Below the OROG finds a bit of an explanation.   As brief as El Gringo Viejo can make it.


Catedral de Tampico
The CATHEDRAL OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
also known as the Cathedral of the Diocese of Tampico.
 One can note the famous "piso de swastikas", which
long pre-dates the National Socialist movement
in Germany.  This emblem, known both in Europe
and pre-Colombian MesoAmerica is associated
with mystical concepts of cosmic harmony
and such things.  It was employed by
Christian denominations in medieval
Europe, among Buddhist monks
and their monasteries, and
even among the Southwest
Nations of Indians in
America, such as the
Zuni, Navajo,and
Pueblo nations.
 
Several hundred years ago, El Gringo Viejo was running very nice excursions into various destinations in Mexico.   Every area had its many strong points and various drawbacks.  It is a marvelous theatre for life, and it must be confessed that my experiences were essentially 99.9% positive and the rest, forgettable.  There were cutesy, quirky things that will remain with me through the rest of my shortening days.

Adolf Schicklegruber
Another in a long line of socialist
utopian engineers who passed for
"sane people" until the wheels fell
off the volks  wagen.
The rather elegant Palacio
Municipal de Tampco
Serves as the City/County
Administration and Judicial
Building
     Among those things was an outdoor juice bar on the main plaza of Tampico....a tropically worn, heavily-trafficked cornucopia of sociology in the centre of a metroplex that now, with the cities of Tampico, Madero, and Altamira all being adjacent,  totals about 1,500,000 souls.   Back in the good old days, it was about two-thirds that number.   To be more precise, there were two juice bars; one on the northwest corner of the Plaza de Armas facing the huge, Greek Revival Palacio Municipal and Courts building to the west side and then the Catedral Metropolitana, a very nice church on the north angle.   The Cathedral was famous for having the "tiled swaztika floor", which always fascinated my tourists....but the floor had been lain even before Adolf Schicklegruber had been born.   So that gave people something to talk about during the very pleasant welcome cocktail and happy hour at the Hotel Inglaterra, also on the Plaza de Armas but on the opposite side.    We spent many marvelous evenings there talking to ships' captains from around the world, and enjoying really excellent seafood in various venues, both at the hotel and any number of restaurants of varying degrees of poshness, elegance, or basic functionality.

File:Plazacentrotampico.JPG
Gazebo of the Plaza de Armas
Tampico, Tamaulipas
     In any regard, El Gringo Viejo would try to go over to the juice bar...actually it was more like a sidewalk restaurant...after checking everyone in, moving luggage, sending the Touring Coach to the showers, arranging breakfast for the morning (always included), wake-up calls, and so forth.  Normally, the stay would be until the Touring Coach would come back, and park in the very front of the Hotel Inglaterra....in the space provided ....because the owner liked to have the fancy busses from our group especially...glistening clean and showing off that his establishment was the place of preference for the foreign visitors.   It really was a splendid place and time.
     The little, open air, but "entechado" (covered or roofed), place was always busy.  Young lovers, pretty girls, little old ladies, businessmen, school children and collegiates, harbour workers and oil refinery workers, and Gringoes, when visiting, would find comfort and good eats there.   One of the main things that the little place specialised in was the "trolebus, coktel de frutas"  or the "trolebus, coktel de mariscos".   The word "trolebus, of course, the equivalent of trolleybus.   As an edible it meant, that like the trolleybus, it came with a generous serving of everything.   So the trolebus de frutas would be a big scoop of vanilla ice cream (unless another flavour was specified), along with cantaloupe, grapes, dates, papaya, watermelon, freshly squeezed orange juice, strawberries, and anything else that might fit into a one-liter parfait glass.   The saucer under the glass would usually be mounted up with jicama slices (look like uncooked french fries), sprinkled with chile powder and/or paprika.  Jicama is a peculiar root plant that has bright white "meat" and tastes like a very, very mild radish.    For vegetablistic people it was a meal.   For carnivors it was a delightful way to start an evening of serious eating.

     The trolebus de mariscos was similar but different, of course.   It would have the little platter of jicama basing the parfait glass, but it would be filled with a tart catsup, lime, and cilantro sauce, and then filled with oysters, medium shrimp, crab, and at times anemone or whatever else wasn't moving anymore  in the kitchen....such as boiled perch filet.  These "cocktails" were actually very large meals, and for the equivalent of 2.00 USD, they were a bargain, even back then. 

Jicama, whole above, and
in "french fry" form below.
Normally eaten raw, but
can be used in salads, grilled
a bit with paprika, or in any
number ...scores....of excellent
deployments.  Use imagination!
      The show was everything, the meal was everything, the paper-boys with the afternoon edition, the shoeshine by the official "union label" shoeshiner (excellent, serious work), the oddities....like the two obviously wealthy, well-presented older ladies coming by, and one of them leaving her purse with one of the several usual "shoe-shine men" with some instructions.  She took her wallet, leaving considerable values behind, and the shoeshine man stitched a repair where the shoulder strap has separated from the body of the purse, saddle-soaped, and then polished the Leon quality leather purse up to new lustre.   That was five pesos  (about $0.40 USD back then).  In short, everything was everything.   A pleasant unorganised jumble of free will, co-ordinating with itself....and making a bit of progress each day.

      There was also the "changing of the guard", so named because of the manner by which the traffick police and foot patrol police would deploy for the late afternoon rush-hour and evening downtown gathering.   They would march out in two by two columns, about 100 strong with ten or twelve buglers and drummers, very military, and the new shift would drop off, while the old shift would join the column, until after about 15 minutes all had been deployed and all had been relieved throughout about twelve square blocks.   It held up traffick a bit, but no one ever seemed to mind.

     Ooops...there are some of my people;  I can see them getting off the elevator in the lobby.   They're coming down for the happy hour- welcome cocktail, I'd better get back to the lobby.
Thanks for listening to the explanation about Trolleybus = Trolebus....so named because it is always overstuffed and has quite a bit of everything inside.
El Gringo Viejo