Radio KBwD is on the air: the Sunday edition

We're shamelessly swiping this from B-Daddy who posted it a week ago. It's an outstanding song and listening to it caused memories to come flooding back to us as we spent many a Sunday afternoon down in Tijuana soaking up that entire culture down there.

They razed the bull ring downtown where this video takes place about two years ago in order to make way for commercial interests as bullfighting's popularity continues to wane particularly in Tijuana.

They still hold corridas at the bull ring out at La Playa but the two-laned highway from the coast back into town is a death trap and overall, the logistics for whole afternoon have made going to anymore bullfights prohibitive.

We realize we probably have not made any friends with this admission (not something you ever want to bring up on a first date. Not a wild stretch, huh?) but it's all apparently a thing of the past.

Ladies and Gentlemen, from Los Angeles, California, it's Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass performing, "Lonely Bull".





From Wiki:

Alpert set up a small recording studio in his garage and had been overdubbing a tune called "Twinkle Star", written by Sol Lake, who would eventually write many of the Brass' original tunes. During a visit to Tijuana, Mexico, Alpert happened to hear a mariachi band while attending a bullfight. Following the experience, Alpert recalled that he was "inspired to find a way to musically express what [he] felt while watching the wild responses of the crowd, and hearing the brass musicians introducing each new event with rousing fanfare."[6] Alpert adapted the trumpet style to the tune, mixed in crowd cheers and other noises for ambiance, and renamed the song "The Lonely Bull".

Photo image(s) of the day

TIJUANA — It started with some police officers noticing a suspicious convoy of vehicles moving through a neighborhood in eastern Tijuana late Sunday, turned into a shootout and ended with the Monday seizure of 115 tons of marijuana — an unprecedented bust for Baja California.

The processed pot, about 230,000 pounds of it, could fetch about half a billion dollars on the street in the United States, according to one criminology source.

Eleven suspects were under arrest as of Monday evening. One of them was being treated for injuries sustained in the confrontation. One police officer also was injured.

The article somewhat unhelpfully explains that the seized 115 tons of marijuana weighs about as much as 15 adult male African elephants or a Boeing 757 at maximum takeoff weight.

Since neither elephants nor jumbo jets are in our day-to-day frame of reference, perhaps the Union-Tribune could've been more helpful by adding "appetite-wise, 115 tons of marijuana is the equivalent of 436,000 bags of Doritos.

No doubt, he was wearing a snazzy-looking jogging suit

This blurb appeared in the U-T on Sunday:

Top trafficking suspect captured: Suspected drug trafficker José Filiberto “La Perra” Parra Ramos was captured Wednesday in Tijuana and flown Thursday to Mexico City. Mexican military officials said the former Tijuana police officer played a key role in the war between rival drug gangs that brought major violence to Tijuana last year. Officials said Parra was a top lieutenant to Eduardo Teodoro “El Teo” García Simental, a suspected trafficker who apparently broke with the Arellano Félix cartel last year. Tijuana's Zeta newspaper reported May 22 that Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos, on one of his runs to Zona Norte taco stands, was whisked away without getting a chance to eat after his security team saw Parra nearby.

(italics, ours)

For any of you familiar with the neighborhoods and the uh, business zoning of TJ will understand just how hilariously priceless that last sentence is.

Quickies

Possessing the wisdom and foresight we thought was exclusive to U.S. Congress, the citizens of Mexico City voted overwhelmingly to keep the Mexican petroleum industry in a state of ancient technology and stagnating production. A non-binding referendum organized by the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) declared state-owned incompetence to be a matter of national pride and thus preferable to the infusion of state-of-the-art drilling and refining techniques for which privatization and elements thereof, would allow. Mexico: bringing you the finest in socialism and crony capitalism.


No one does the self-gratification quite like ESPN and in the case of honoring, during its ESPYs award show, the once “infamous” now “famous” black power salute by Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympic games, they rose to new heights. We’re not as hard over as Jonah Goldberg is in article here and though we do understand where Smith and Carlos were coming from we believe the act and the context in which it was executed was ill-advised.

Indeed, it can done… Somali immigrants taking the place of Mexican (illegal) immigrants in small-town Iowa. In the final paragraph the article graciously concedes that many of the Somalis are legal immigrants with roots in Minneapolis.

...and finally...12 years, two Presidential administrations and numerous challenges from environmental and, you know, “social justice” groups later, looks like we’re going to complete the border fence down towards Tijuana.

No Good Deed...

B-Daddy here. Yesterday, I traveled with my youngest (on line handle, "mew2ds") with folks from our church to Tijuana to build a house for the indigent. The work was organized by Spectrum Ministries, an organization dedicated to helping the neediest citizens of Tijuana.

The proximate cause of the need was that the family casa of the Belenvillanova family had been destroyed by a mud slide, which had pulled a portion of the house down the hill. The remnants are pictured at left. (Note the neo-Stalinist architecture of government housing in the background.) The family had moved into a makeshift shack on the lower portion of their property pictured at right. The government had told them they could not build on this land because it is unstable, so our efforts yesterday were technically illegal.

The goal of our efforts was to add a 15' by 16' room to the existing structure. By the way, this family was much better off than other families in Tijuana that Spectrum works with. Often, the families are living in a cardboard box and the shelter that is built is their first protection against the elements.

Theses projects are designed to be completed in one day by volunteers with little experience. We certainly met our goal. I thought we could have completed a couple of hours faster if we had pushed it, but that was probably my Type A personality getting in the way of enjoying the experience.

The family was very involved in the work as well, and provided us delicious lunch of stewed chicken, spanish rice and tortillas. Here are some pictures of the project progress. (You can click on any picture in this post and see a lot more detail.)

We did not pour a concrete floor, that was a job left for another day.

A few observations. Even though it was dangerous just to walk up and down the hill side to bring materials to the job, that was not the most miserable part of the day. That would be crossing the border into the United States. Our wait wasn't that bad, one and a half hours, but considering that there were 24 lanes opened, it seemed ridiculous.

One highlight not pictured was getting dinner at "Taqueria Tres Salsas" on the way back. The tortillas were cooked moments before freshly grilled carne asada was dropped into them. Topped with ciantro, guacomole and fresh salsa, they were indeed a treat.

Tijuana is very hilly, with steep canyons everywhere, but that hasn't stopped both the government and the people from just cutting into the hillsides and leaving bare earth behind for whatever project finds that desirable. It was pretty scary to look at.

The people couldn't have been nicer. The Belenvillanova family, the vendors and everyone else made an effort to communicate and be nice, even though only a few of us spoke Spanish. The Belenvillanova family teenage sons worked the hardest of anyone in putting up the addition, I definitely had to respect them for that.

Finally, here is our group shot at the end of the day.