First a cute (I mean, ghastly and horrifying) video from Cabo Bob, in commemoration of both days and the reviving of his blog. Look for more stuff from Bob in the coming months. Meanwhile, the video is at http://youtu.be/GOOBHyAqKno

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Another skeletal video is not a trailer for the “Mayan Calendar Girls” book, but an illustration of the “Skeleton Crew” chapter in the high-tech, advanced, award-winning, ground-breaking, commercially worthless ebook. Fortunately, the Mayan Girls came out in affordable, accessible ebooks this month: see them on Kindle or SmashWords. Meanwhile, the bare-bones video; http://youtu.be/wNDTxhsQaUc
See more than you can handle of Mayan Calendar Girls at… incredibly… http://mayancalendargirls.com

Last, and probably least because it’s not some damned video, just reading matter,  The Weekend Warrior’s notorious, unwholesome, pedophobic salute to Halloween can be downloaded here.

The Way Of THE WEEKEND WARRIOR can be read as a Kindle edition or any of the SmashWords ebook formats. Soon due in paperback: if you want to be notified of the publication, or get updates and more fun stuff from Lin Robinson and the Adoro Books gang, sign up for his newsletter. And see the titles, writing, photos and videos at his website, LinRobinson.com

That’s it until some other dippy holiday comes along and we cook up something else. It’s hard to beat Halloween though: about as fun, horrifying, excessive explosion of false faces, scary stereotypes, and absurd folkways as we’ll see until next years’ elections in Mexico and the USA.

Don’t just do something, do The Mash

Lin Robinson, Cabo Bob, and Team 2012

Here is a small shelf of books that are skeleton keys to familiarity with Spanish and Mexico. Click the links below each blurb to a site with more information on that book and the option to purchase from amazon or the publisher.

First of all, you need a good, solid Spanish/English/Spanish dictionary. The U. of Chicago paperback is the one. It’s a small, lightweight pocketbook, but packed with words. It also has a few characteristics that set it apart from the pack. One is a list of idioms in the center between the Span-Eng and Eng-Span sections. Another is a really great guide to pronunciation and use. But the single best selling point of this sucker is the fact that all verbs that don’t conjugate regularly have a number that refers to a list of irregular conjugations. Conocer and parecer, for instance, share the same number and conjugation pattern.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO DICTIONARY

If you remember from school, grammer books are a pain. The smart alternative for travelers (and residents of the tropics) would be a single page of laminated information that has all you need to know about grammar, but weighs nothing, takes up no space, and can’t be harmed by moisture or impact. The barchart laminated study guides are all that. The info on conjugation, syntax, usage, is packed in, but easy to understand. A total beginner might need a quick web tutorial or talk with a teacher to get started, but it’s a ready reference that’s easy to keep around. They have several guides to vocabulary, conversation, and grammar. A must have.
LAMINATED GRAMMAR CHART

One of the best ways to learn Spanish is by reading comics. Not books, which are too long for starting out and certainly not the newspapers, that use weird, confusing words and construction. Comix use everyday language in simple situations. They have short, one page episodes so you can take it slow but still get the jokes. Start reading and looking up words in your dictionary. Write the meanings in a steno pad, which you will periodically review. If you run into a phrase you can’t figure out, ask somebody and write down the meaning. This is a really great learning method.

I would highly recommend the Condorito comics, a cute little Condor with Bugs Bunny attitude available in newstands all over Latin America. Or in this collection if you are in the states.
CONDORITO BOOK COLLECTION

There is no character more dear to Latin America than Mafalda, a little girl in an Argentine strip from the sixties. It’s like Peanuts, but with adults…and much better. People who get familiar with Mafalda will find something in common with almost everybody they talk to. A wonderful, endearing, cynical, wise strip with unforgettable kids.
MAFALDA COLLECTION

One thing Spanish students often find frustrating is the lack of intermediate books. You get the basics down, then where do you go? There is one best answer for that: an elegant, excellently executed paperback that takes you past the beginner stage and dictionary words into the heart of actual local speech. Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish is the way all language books should be and indespensible for anybody serious about living in Mexico.
BREAKING OUT OF BEGINNER’S SPANISH

A different sort of comic is the work of Rius, the most famous cartoonist/social gadfly in Mexico. His work is a sort of underground bible of the Mexican subconscious. He is a virtual commie, a virulent anti-American. A feminist, atheist, and social critic. But he is funny and has a real sense of what Mexico is all about. He’s most full of it when discussing the US or Cuba, at his most reliable debunking the Catholic church or telling Mexican guys to eat better. You want to know Mexico, Rius is a good place to start. He has lots of books, this link is to a collection.
TODO RIUS

There is much more to any language than is taught in school. The “real Mexico”, like the “real USA” speaks an idiomatic, slang-laden dialect that you can’t figure out with dictionaries or classrooms. Anybody who wants to live in Mexico needs to know the basics of how people really talk…if for no other reason than to know what people are saying about you. This is the best-selling book on Mexican Slang, a cheap pocket-sized guide you can carry around with you. Learn and get a few laughs.
MEXICAN SLANG 101

Culture, society and language go hand in hand. Learning about a country involves picking up new words, learning the deeper meanings of many words give insight into the country itself. ANYBODY thinking of living in Mexico, much less doing business here, should read the single most powerful book on Mexican society, culture, history, politics, economics…everything. Written by the Mexico City correspondent for the New York Times, “Distant Neighbors” was simultaneously published in Mexico as “Vecinos Distantes” and most Mexicans will tell you that THEY learned a lot about their country from reading it. It changes your whole awareness and orientation of Mexico.
DISTANT NEIGHBORS

You can’t really talk about “understanding Mexico books” without mentioning the classic “Peoples Guide” by Carl Franz. A rambling, VW bus-powered rollick across the country, this is the book that so many learned about Mexico–from hippy camping to vocabuary. A fun read, a great resource.
THE PEOPLE’S GUIDE TO MEXICO

Burro, of course, if the Mexican term for “stupid”, “dunce”, etc. Therefore the perfect graft-on to form the self-explanatory terms, Burrocracia or Burrocrata.

WIth in that framework, a cute term is aviador. The “aviators” are people working on government sinecures, getting paid for positions on arts counsels, studies, and institutes that don’t require them do much work because they are political appointees and protected. So they just drop in twice a month like airplanes…to pick up their pay checks.

A more serious term is also illustrative. Mapache is a racoon and it’s probably the animals mask and nocturnal prowling that makes the word apply to election stealers, ballot box stealers and stuffers, double-registered voters, and other activities designed to corrupt the election process and ensure that the “ins” stay in and the “outs” stay out.

A recent reaction to this (since the Pan presidential victory in 2000 put the first crack in the power of the PRI party) is the emergence of cazamapaches, or “mapache hunters”. These are frequently groups of idealistic young volunteers who man the polling stations, watching out for fraud and looking for faces they know to be goons of the incumbents.

It’s a civic activity that can be harmful, even fatal at times. Which brings up another loaded word: madrina. It means “godmother”, a feminine twist on padrino, which means “godfather” literally and in the movie mafia sense.

But it doesn’t apply to women, as such. It refers to people who draw a government salary but “moonlight” as criminals. This is very pervasive. Most “hit men” in Mexico are state or Federal police. The narcotics business is run out of the government, which is the protector, investor, and main dividend-casher. So the cop-as-thug is a fixture on the politics/crime landscape: enforcement by madrinas