Kent's Place

19 November 2008 - I had an amazing thing happen to day. My Motorola H-700 Blutooth, who had been lost for several days, found its way home. When I got back from attending my Spanish class and eating, there it was sitting on top of my mailbox. It was a moment that reminded of the Mexican lady in Morelia's General Francisco J Mujica International Airport that had asked me to change a $500 Peso note into $100's but I had been so tired that I tried to give her a $100 USD note instead. I would have never known where the $100 bill had gone but she told me that one of them was an E.E.U.U bill instead of a Mexican note. All I could do is profoundly say "muchas gracias". The BluTooth could have been used by anyone with a cellphone but they left it where the thought that it belonged.

15 November 2008 - I have been following a local group called Arranque Norteño. They are based in Pasco, Washington. They are mid-range Norteño, which I can enjoy listening to. It is a little lighter than what I hear when I visit my Mexican friends. They have a website called "arranquenorteno" on MySpace. If you click the link, it will take you to their site.

18 September 2008 - You can feel abstractly about a bombing in a place you have never visited but when you know the scene you are being shown, such as the bombing in Michoacán, you feel considerably different. When I was in Michoacán in March, I walked through the area the bomber threw the granade into.

18 May 2008 - This is the day that Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980. I was riding with a friend to try and go to a hamfest in Yakima, Washington. It was like driving in a black blizzard.

I keep reading about the Bugatti Veyron being the world's fastest production car. However, on September 13, 2007, Shelby Super Car's tested their Ultimate Aero on Washington State's highway 221 where they averaged 256.18 mph. Highway 221 is a two lane road that runs past dryland wheat farms and ultimately passes Columbia Crest's winery near Patterson, Washington. A video of their run is on Youtube and you read about the car on the SSC website.

20 March 2008 - I spent an interesting week in Zinapécuaro, Michoacán, México. I saw a festival, for a lack of words, around El Señor de Araro. It wasn't your usual vacation because I was staying with the family of people I know. More in my vacation blog 2008.

28 January 2008 - I am catching up because we had 8 inches of snow and most of the schools are closed. Since I can't go to my Spanish class, I am catching up on things that should have been done a long time ago. Most of the changes are associated with my "Volcano Links".

30 July 2007 - It has been several days since Juan Carlos' birthday party. It had its share of problems. It was the day that the vendors started showing up for a local "Art Show in the park". The available tables were disappearing faster than you could count. In the end, they brought tables down. When Juan Carlos finished opening his presents, he was so excited he was close to levitating above the ground. That must mean that it was successful. There were a lot of people that didn't speak English there. A new girlfriend and a wife that is slowly learning English. It also included a couple that had just made it out of Cuba. I could understand much of the conversations. I still don't have any confidence on being on my own in Mexico but it is getting better.

26 July 2007 - I was at a feliz cumpleaños for the daughter of some friends. It may be tacky in some societies but it seems to be accepted to give money in others. A primo (cousin from Mexico) watched and wanted his party to be here in the USA. If you ever get a chance to go to a birthday party for an Hispanic, go because the food is always awesome. At any rate, Juan Carlos is going to be 11-years old. I was told that a lot of people in Mexico are poor and a birthday present maybe a bar of soap or a cookie. So, having him watch his cousin get say $200 in cash must have been an eye opener. Where the sweatshop workers may get $0.25/hour, $200 is a lot of money for a kid to get at their birthday party.

8 June 2007 - I was exchaning emails with a friend and the megadeaths in the 16th century in Mexico came up. Historically, people have blamed Columbus for the massive die offs in Latin America; however, 2/3 of the deaths can be attributed to what is referred to as Cocoliztli or the pest disease. For more information, see "Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico" on the USA's CDC website.

26 May 2007 - I was just reading a story about the village that the sea swallowed. I think that Bethan Jinkinson only told half of the story. For example, after the Sumatra earthquake, the coast was dropped a significant distance when the earthquake released stress. When you tell a stoy about the sea swallowing a village, you need to know whether the sea is rising or the coast is subsiding. Islands as they move away from a splitting zone subside. The level of the oceans are also rising in the order of 1 mm per year. To graphically see subsidence, all you have to do is look at the Hawian islands to see this process. If the island is subsiding 2 or 3 mm per year and the ocean is rising 1 mm per year, the dominant force is the subsidence. Don't blame global warming for a different natural process. It probably has a share but lets us know all of the facts.

A similar story was about an island that is disappearing. The same processes that is affecting the Hawaiian Island could be affecting the island. You need to know if the island is subsiding or the sea is rising. When meters of land disappear a year, I would look at subsidence first. Both are probably to blame but to only blame the smaller factor borders on sensationalism in journalism.

7 April 2007 I have a new hotlist topic. It is called Terra Preta or "Terra Preta de Indio" . It comes from the areas of dark earth in indigenous areas of the Amazon. There is the Terra Preta home site at Cornell University. There is also a terra preta wikipedia article. One of the concepts that is adding to the CO₂ build up in the atmosphere is the slash and burn technique of clearing Amazon rain forest. If they slash and char, they can create terra preta by burning at a lower temperature and adding the charcoal to the soil. The charcoal adds to the fertility of the soil and does not decay into carbon dioxide like composting does. You have a net lost of CO₂ in the atmosphere, which is a plus for global warming.

What was even more interesting was the eprida process of scrubing CO₂ from the exhausts of power plants.

13 March 2007 - I picked up the self titled album by "Rodrigo y Gabriela". It is guitar music that will make you stop to listen with your mouth open in awe.

22 February 2007 - I finally joined the webcam generation. I was in Wal Mart tonight and saw the Microsoft LifeCam VX-3000. I set it up with the help of a friend from Mexico. They have been using an HP laptop computer with a builtin cam to talk to family back in Mexico and I finally saw the light.

There are some countries where getting an immigration visa is easier to obtain than it is to get a visitor visa. Last year, Catita, who lived 6 houses to the east of me, died in a rest area outside of Van Horn, Texas. Marta, one of her older daughters from Talouca, showed me her business financial information that she had to use in order to get a visa to accompany her sick mother back home. Catita only made it a short distance into the USA before she died. I can only imagine what kind of mess it would have been if she had died in Mexico. So, when one of her daughter inlaws started immigration proceedings for her own mother and I saw how much easier that it was, I was absolutely floored.

I personally believe that losing 100K visitors a year from Mexico that overstay their return date, but who you have fingerprints of, is preferable to encouraging 1,000,000 a year to cross illegally that you don't have a clue as to who they are. I conceed that I may have a smaller view of the larger picture and their logic may be better; however, whether my view is closer to being right or wrong, it would take a great deal of discussion to change my view. My attitude changed seriously after watching, via a webcam, what looked like 30 or 40 people cross the Rio Grande into Texas. In the low light, the wave pattern they created looked like V of a flock of geese crossing the river. The next night, that web cam was missing from the choices on the Texas Border Watch website. Too many people must have been pushing the report button.

I think it was one of the columnist that appears in the local paper from San Diego that joked that we need a high speed train for guest workers that ran from Mexico into the USA and returned the workers home every night. It wasn't a Dave Barry level joke but I thought it was a really good idea. The farms in Southern California would have the help they need and the workers could live in good conditions, in their own homes, every night. Their papers would be checked as they got onto the train and it wouldn't take 3 hours to get through the border check station.

14 December 2006 - I have been lazy lately and not paying attention when I purchased new CDs and bought one with what I call viral protection. You only have to go back to when Sony added their rootkit program to the computers of people wanting to play their CDs to remember why you never install software that enables you to play a CD on your computer. The album is "Afterglow Live" by "Sarah McLachlan". She has a haunting voice and when you try to play the album, Microsoft's Internet Explorer pops up and reminds you to not download and install software you don't trust. This makes me angry but it doesn't prevent me from adding it to my computer. I have an external CD/DVD player that is connected to my a/v computer. I only have to click the record button to save it on my hard drive. The sound from a DVD is noticeably better than what you hear playing a CD. I was too angry at buying it in the first place to do that. I only bought it because I liked the version of "World On Fire" that was part of the soundtrack of "Into The West". At least, Amazon has the message "[CONTENT/COPY-PROTECTED CD] in very large letters when you click on the album. This is one album that will not end up on my iPod, which is what I use to listen to 90+% of my music.

11 December 2006 - The political maneuvering over Chile's Pinochet is over. He died leaving some people to feel that justice was not done. I have an idea that Castro will produce the same result. I have friends that suffered under Allende and did not suffer under Pinochet. I think they will just be glad it is over.

2 May 2006 - I see what has to be one of the dumbest remarks that could be made on BBC News. Iran is threatening to retaliate using Israel as the target if anyone does anything. Last news article I read speculated that Israel has 200 nukes. That should make every major and semi-major Iranian city glow in the dark if they did something that dumb. After watching their responses to the Palestinans over the years, I don't think the Israelis have any compunction against first strikes. They may have even been the basis for Clancy's "take out the person responsible" trend in some of his "Jack Ryan" stories. In one of his stories, Ryan made it known that the ultimate person authorizing the WMD strike against USA would be found and punished. In Clancys book, 2 -500-pound bombs dropped from a stealth bomber did significant damage to the house of the leader that approved the attack. In the story, they even gave him advanced warning but he never made it past the door of his house. The Israeli's simply use rockets launched from a helicopter with the cross hairs on a car carrying the person responsible. A multiple rocket attack against a car is a severe punishment. Now the Israelis have a valid reason to do the first strike.

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