Local

I loved Little Miss Sunshine^{WP, IMDB}! Deeply. Hadn’t had this fun with a movie in years. Please do go watch it. Now. (Particularly if you live here in Guadalajara. I doubt it’ll be on theaters beyond this week—there are some 7 people per screening.)

(...and a teriyaki New Year!)

Last night’s dinner, courtesy of Nippon-do (Miguel Ã?ngel no. 224 Tel: 36-41-29-69) —in my opinion, Guadalajara’s best kept oriental secret. They even cooked it all at 10PM so we would eat it hot!

Vaya que es sorprendente. Curiosamente, me entere de esto en The Economist, no se que tanta difusion se le haya dado en periodicos nacionales pero mi familia no estaba enterada.

El IFE (“the independent electoral authority”) publica aquella encuesta como la Evaluación de la gestión institucional a la luz del Proceso Federal Electoral 2005-2006 (Parametría).

” Hay varias otras gemas en esta encuesta a 2,000 personas del 8 al 12 de Septiembre del 2006, como el que 38.6% de los encuestados afirme que no participaria en futuras elecciones (aunque 76.6% esta muy o algo de acuerdo en que “La democracia puede tener problemas, pero es el mejor sistema de gobierno”) o el que la mitad (!) de los encuestados afirmo haber votado por Felipe Calderon, que los partidos politicos son considerados tanto la institucion politica mas corrupta del pais como la menos importante para el desarrollo del pais, que la principal razon (15.9%) por la que se cree que hubo fraude es la tardanza de los resultados, que 47.1% esta muy o algo de acuerdo con la frase “No me importa un gobierno NO democrático en el poder si logra mejorar mi nivel de vida”, que 43.6% cree que es mejor vivir en una “sociedad que respete derechos/libertades aunque haya desorden”, que un 40.8% esta muy en desacuerdo con las acciones de resistencia civil que promueve AMLO mientras que solo un 13% esta muy de acuerdo con ellas…

Almost got myself killed driving—too distracted—to the worst theater performance of my life. Saw a girlfriend’s mean true colors. Lost my car keys, panicked, found them later in my own satchel. Back home, found the little brother of one of my high school’s closest friends died tonight. Ran at 2AM to the wake, dazed, crashed into the neighbour’s pickup. So many old friends there, so adult now. And my friend impossibly tall, so beautiful, so sad—his little bro killed himself.

As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures¹. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.

My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.

The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li Zhensheng^WP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News Soldier^AM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:

I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.

The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond Age^AM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.

So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.

Some days ago my cousin Cris got married to Julio in a beautiful, simple civil ceremony. They’re having a (huge) Catholic ceremony come December but as of that Saturday they’re already husband and wife. It was the first time I got to see a civil wedding (in Mexico, they’re usually done privately, shortly after the religious service, a furtive formality between the mass and the party) and since I was Cris’s witness, I even took part in the ceremony itself. I loved every minute of it.

The lunch—delicious carnitas ^{WP, F} (we all ate too much)—was held at the family’s over-used reception room and most of the guests were either bride’s or groom’s family (each, as tradition has it, at opposite sides of the room) with a small contingent of the couple’s mutual friends (all looking disturbingly middle-aged from my vantage point). Chemito superstar came from Monterrey in a one-day round trip and got the bride crying :).  Most anyone looked stunning. Most anyone looked happy.

The party would extend well beyond sunset with the polemic smuggling of a TV to watch the Chivas-America soccer classic and the road back home would prove an adventure onto itself owing to treacherous potholes and a monsoon, but it was the actual signing of the marriage contract that so impressed me that day. On one level, of course I was excited and bewildered and happy that Cris was (finally¹!) marrying. And it was the first time it happened to someone so close—all weddings before I felt an spectator, only indirectly related to the bride or the groom.

The judge arrived, the music stopped, and we all gathered around a simple table where Julio, Cristina, and their witnesses sat—everyone expectant. The judge declared the ceremony started with a sibilant, annoying voice, asked the parts to the contract if they had come on their own will (no dramatic “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” though), and proceeded to read a long, overly politically correct text that is still a marked improvement from the 140-year-old anachronism that used to be mandatory at weddings (turns out that was only discontinued 6 months ago). They were then asked to read a brief formulaic statement to each other and finally, in a great anticlimax, bride and groom, and later their witnesses and their parents, got to sign a seemingly endless string of documents amid nervous laughs. The judged pronounced them husband and wife (”...in the name of Law and Society”), the ceremony was over, and in a roar we all came tumbling down to congratulate the newlyweds, tears sprouting all over the place.

So you see, it was actually a very simple affair—and yet dramatically different from a religious ceremony. To begin with, it felt unbelievably more intimate to me. Yes, I was the witness and I was there at the table and I loved the bride and all, but I still think people all over felt very much more involved, standing at arm’s length around us, smiling and crying at the happily terrified couple. The ceremony may have sounded formal, it was, but that’s nothing compared to the rote convolutedness of a religious service. It pretended to be nothing more than the signing of a human contract—which is, of course, what it is—and I delighted in such simplicity—it felt so unadulterated, so raw, so human. Alas, there was still, to be sure, the specter of the State all over the place², but I was so cheerfully entranced by the absence of God that I didn’t notice it then. I was happy.

Yesterday I went to the first International Gastronomic Fair in Guadalajara and it was on the whole quite bad, but I did chance on several interesting finds (photoset):

Adolfo (a best mind) has onsite photo coverage and there’s also a Flickr photopool on Mexican elections (442 pics so far).

(The title’s of course a snowclone^WP from Howl^WP, so don’t take the hyperbole^WP too personally: all sorts of minds have been destroyed :)

Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?

Esta va por que por a la mayoría de nosotros Jalisquillos al hablar de Guadalajara (pensando en la ZMG) nos da por decir que es una ciudad de 7 millones y pico de personas, y esto, para mi inacabable sorpresa, no es cierto. La Zona Metropolitana de Guadalajara (ZMG)^WP generalmente se considera comprendida por los municipios de Guadalajara, Zapopan, Tonalá, Tlaquepaque, Tlajomulco de Zuñiga, y El Salto. Según el INEGI en su conteo de población por municipio Jalisciense, 2005:

Guadalajara	1,600,940
Zapopan	1,155,790
Tonalá	408,729
Tlaquepaque	563,006
Tlajomulco de Zuñiga	220,630
El Salto	111,436
ZMG	4,060,531

(Jalisco mismo tiene apenas 6,752,113 habitantes—INEGI: Población por Estado al 2005.)

(Y ya de pasada, los Guzmanenses siempre andan diciendo que su ciudad tendra unas 250 o 300 mil personas cuando resulta que ni siquiera llega a 100 mil—el municipio de Zapotlan el Grande del que Guzman es cabecera tiene apenas 96,050 habitantes.)