Wednesday, August 03, 2011

Why We Love The Inner-Nets



Wait.  They have mariachis in Connecticut?  Who knew?

Via The Daily What, via memeorandum.

9 comments:

  1. And you thought it was just New "Mexico" and "Mexifornia?" They're EVERYWHERE!, lol.

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  2. I think someone is one maraca short of a Mariachi band.

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  3. PS: (I'm baaack!) Buck, on a more serious note a lot of people don't realize how thoroughly Mexican/"Latino" immigrants--both legal and in illegal have been woven into the economic fabric over the last quarter cent. KY, for example is a mostly rural, mostly white state. 94% of all blacks live in Louisville or Lexington and Louisville is only about 17% black. Yet Mexicans/Central Americans as far back as the early 90s had come to dominate the tobacco fields cutting, harvesting and "putting-up" (hanging) tobacco in specialty barns to dry/cure. It's hot, nasty (the tobacco juice goes right thru the gloves & stains & burns the hands) and dangerous (those special tobacco knives used to harvest the stuff are razor sharp and will slice your finger off in a heart-beat) and no one else wants to do the work anymore--neither the whiter OR the blacks.

    But here's the PC kicker! The Ky. blacks talk about the Mexicans in the EXACT same disparaging terms as the southern whites used to talk about blacks in the Jim Crow South! "Lazy" "Steal" etc. SAME tone of voice, SAME look on their faces. LOL. Sociology teaches us there is ALWAYS an in-group and an out-group--the gemeinschaft and the gesellchaft. (Just plug in the group of your choice!) And it REALLY IS "cultural" as much as race.

    I remember in the UK in the pre-Maggi Thatcher socialistic Labor dominated government 70s era the standard term was "the British Disease" to describe their work ethic. Remember those triangle "men-at-work signs with the picture of a guy shoveling a pile of dirt that they would put up at road construction projects? And the standing joke being you would always see the sign, but never the actual work crew because they got to work late, promptly took a tea break, took long lunches, another long tea break in the pm and left early? Well, one day I had to take the base shuttle bus to personnel at Bentwaters from Woodbridge (my 1954 XK-140 Br Racing green "fixed-coop" Jag was in the shop) and, as it was raining I had on an oficer's plastic raincoat--remember those dark blue things? (You couldn't pin rank on them as the water would leak thru the pin-holes) so you couldn't tell I was an officer. Well, the rest of the bus was all enlisted--southern whites, & blacks, northern whites and urban blacks, phillippianos, Mexican-Americans, Jamaicans--the full spectrum. We happened to pass one of those "men working" signs along the road and, per usual, no work crew in sight.

    Man, Buck you should have seen and heard it. EVERYBODY, ALL, commenting in total disgust about the Brits (the whites) and their work ethic with the EXACT words, tone of voice, and facial expressions that I used to see & hear whites use to describe blacks in Baton Rouge in 1962! Somethings never change--just the faces..

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  4. ***"...'Fixed-head coupe'..." SORRY, I'm into the Barbancourt extra heavy tonight..

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  5. Lou: At the very LEAST.

    Virgil: You have the BEST stories. Why don't you get off yer lazy ass and start a blog? Kee-rist, you'd have a built-in audience of thousands from Day One, just by virtue of your comments at Lex's place and your other usual haunts. Do it, man!

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  6. Sounds too much like honest work, Buck. I'm just a loose cannon on the deck of life..besides, it would cut into my Barbancourt time too much..
    I'd actually have--GASP!--PERISH THE THOUGHT--these things called obligations and the "publish or perish" syndrome--(SHUDDER)

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  7. PS: Or as Mongo says about the little blog he started: "Now I have to actually feed the beast!" LOL!!!

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  8. Shoebox even had a comment to make about the whale and the mariachis group today:>)

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  9. ...these things called obligations and the "publish or perish" syndrome--(SHUDDER)

    Well, I sure hear THAT. But this lil backwater of a blog is the only thing that gives structure to life as I know it now. Which is sad commentary, in and of itself.

    cladd: I saw that!

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Just be polite... that's all I ask.