When the Latin America Relief Fund holds a benefit for ABBA House at the Mask Museum (once or twice a year), you come for the good cause and stay for the sunset.
To me, the second-floor balcony offers one of the prettiest views of San Miguel de Allende. Everything seems in scale — the towering church spires, the luscious blooming flowers, the sweeping mountains on the horizon. And the sunsets.
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I’m done with “push” content from newspapers, substacks, pods and podcasters, bloggers, social media platforms, conspiracy boosters, angry MAGAs, fundraisers, revolutionists, ah-has and ma-ha’s, political shamans, alarmists, talking heads, Chicken Littles, grim reapers, Beltway pundits, scribblers, cartoonists, and diatribe specialists.
Or as another noted crank once put it, I’ve had it up to here with “Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism, Ragism, Tagism, This-ism, that-ism, is-m, is-m, is-m.”
All I am saying is don’t give push a chance.
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Sometimes you are handed a gift, in this case, a funny and talented writer named Papa Joe Grappa. A mutual friend sent me Joe’s Substack column titled “Questions for Jesus When He Comes Back.” It is really funny, as it should be for a guy who was Jay Leno’s head writer for 20 years.
Here’s the thing, as I was reading Joe’s questions, I was hearing Jesus’s answers.
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Well, all those umbrellas did not go to waste. The ones people carried to the Locos parade and the ones sold by vendors under threatening skies.
The rains stayed away and thousands of gaily costumed — and bizarrely, quaintly, curiously, delightfully, enchantingly, dreamily, whimsically, scarily, creepily, amusingly and shockingly costumed — paraders strutted, danced, boogied, jumped and jived their way down the Ancha, en route to the Jardin Allende in the civic square.
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We were in Mexico City, enjoying coffee and a bite to eat at a corner restaurant just a block off the expansive Parque de Mexico, in the popular Hipódromo, Cuauhtémoc, neighborhood.
The young and athletic hostess Ayse Lang, who had seated us at the sidewalk table of Barrio Café, stopped by to see how our late-morning coffee break was going.
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Everybody is experiencing varying degrees of winter, some harsher than others this year. In northern climes there is a touch of schadenfreude in the air as southern spots like New Orleans try to figure out how to move snow off their streets and sidewalks and in Washington DC, the presidential inauguration was moved inside because it was too cold.
Right now I’m sitting in front of a fireplace shivering but in another hour or so I’ll be down to shorts and T-shirt. That’s just the way winter goes in San Miguel de Allende. Temperatures sink and soar on a whim.
In another week we’ll begin the celebration of Candelaria, which sort of pushes Spring to the forefront. The celebration is part religious and part commercial. Candelaria marks Candlemas, the 40th day after the birth of Christ.
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On Tuesday, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched, “the company’s 12th rideshare mission to a sun-synchronous orbit. Onboard are a variety of customer satellites, including 35 satellites integrated by Exolaunch along with 36 SuperDoves and Pelican-2 from Planet Labs PBC.”
On Wednesday, SpaceX launches its “sixth, suborbital flight test of its fully integrated Starship rocket, a combination of the Ship upper stage (S33) and the Super Heavy booster (B14). SpaceX plans to catch the Super Heavy booster using the chopsticks on the launch tower, but will make a final determination on the catch following liftoff and stage separation.”
On Thursday, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket will launch the company’s previously delayed Blue Ring spacecraft, which is capable of both hosting and deploying multiple payloads.
(Source: spaceflightnow.com See update at bottom of this page.)
Also on Tuesday, space and security expert Dr. Nancy K. Hayden discussed the future of outer space and the increasingly heavy and chaotic traffic that is shooting out of planet Earth like hair plugs out of Elon Musk’s head.
Her talk for the i3: ideas that inform and inspire‘s Conversations with Big Thinkers lecture series at La Casona Event Center was first promoted as “Space: Brave New World or Wild Wild West?” Somewhere along the line, out of respect for the growing congestion on the extraterrestrial freeways surrounding Earth, she added a third possibility — “Close Encounters” — to that title.
Continue readingUpdate: Change of venue for San Miguel PEN Presents! Talks and times are the same, only the location has changed: Nectar at Camino Silvestre, Correo #43, Centro.
Talk is not cheap but it sure is plentiful in San Miguel de Allende during the first couple of months of 2025.
Intelligent, knowledgeable and often-times brilliant speakers will be stepping before podiums all over the city to offer enlightenment on topics like explaining the last U.S. election, explaining the current Mexico president, explaining the media, poetry, Artificial Intelligence, outer space, talking about their latest novels, the history of San Miguel, and so much more.
If you are looking for a modern-day Chautauqua Movement, look no further than San Miguel.
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Once more, the Mercado de San Juan de Dios is transformed into a wonderland as the Christmas marketplace is open for business.
Extra booths have been erected around the market and they are filled with ornaments, Nativity figures and accessories, decorations, Baby Jesus figurines of many hues and sizes (and gorgeous gowns of swaddling clothes), garlands, pines, sparklers, elf costumes, devil’s pitchforks, cuetlaxochitls, Santa caps, treats, and holiday fantasies.
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“The Mini – Solve in seconds”
That’s the promise, or more probably, the challenge of the daily five-by-five crossword puzzle on the New York Times games page.
Monday’s second row, down, challenge was “Rockefeller Center statue depicting a Greek Titan.” Five letters.
Obviously not Prometheus – the golden, cast-bronze statue in the lower end of Rockefeller Plaza – since it busts the five-letter wall. But that’s the one everyone knows, even if they have never been to New York, because it is always in the frame with the Rockefeller Christmas tree.
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Musings, Magic, San Miguel and More 