The Cardboard Cut-Outs Of Bisbee Arizona.

This is Bisbee. Bisbee is a small town in southern Arizona not far from the Mexican border. It is a unique town in many ways that grew up when minerals and copper was discovered and mined by 'those virile men the copper miners.' It lies scattered amongst some hills in a haphazard way as though dropped from an airplane. One didn't expect those early miners to be town planners so consequently the streets don't follow any pattern and there are a lot of steps going up to wooden houses perched on the denuded hillsides.

I came over the hills from Tombstone and encountered Bisbee down to my left on the way to Naco the crossing point to Mexico and pulled in and parked up near the Copper Queen.  As I said it is a unique town and one of the unique aspects is that it is populated by cardboard cut-outs standing outside shops along main Street. 

These two dimensional local celebrities have all played some part in the evolution of this town. I saw the occasional three dimensional human inside one of the shops but they were generally hidden behind a counter amongst second hand clothes, shoes and hats and books and crockery and china and antiques and designer furniture. I also saw a cardboard cut-out of a grinning Roy Rogers holding up a second hand store.

 

The mellow voiced smiling Rex Allen looking dapper with his quiff and bow tie and his tight slacks. But his six guns seem to me to be pointing backwards.


More after the jump

Clouds by Dave Robb. Opening Night at La Luna.

For a High Def version go here, slip on some headphones and whack the volume up.

Dirty Rats and Other Mean Mother@*//?"!+>ing House Pests

It doesn't take long for a house left for any length of time empty in the tropics to be taken over by dirty rats and other mean spirited pests of the insect world. After a three month absence I come back to termites destroying the woodwork in the library and eating the innards of a dozen books including my cheap detective trash, a classic copy of Moby Dick (Jesus leave that book alone. It's like swimming through mud having to squint through the tiny writing, delicately turn the thin pages and wade through pages of footnotes.) I don't care that Norman Mailer's 1300 page tome A Time Of Our Time was chomped and his unwieldy, inexplicable Ancient Evenings as I was about to pay the library up the road to take it off my hands. I have a half eaten A Prison Notebook by the Italian communist Gramsci which again I do not mind too much as it was turning me slowly into an old style Bolshevik and raving lunatic. But I am really pissed off about The Conquest Of Mexico and History Of London, both enormous door-stoppers that I leave lying around to make myself look studious. Eaten except for the covers that disintegrated in my hands. I found termites making mud passageways across 3 meters of wooden beams 5 meters up that need a scary ladder climb and toxic fumed termite stuff to rectify, more termites making holes in the drawer that contain kitchen utensils and sharp knives which all fell onto my bare toes when I opened it to get a teaspoon and an army of termites invading the plaster board under the mezzanine which as a result calls for major renovation. They came in through the electricity ducts and out the sockets. Believe me that calls for intelligence, communication, forward planning and organization. How can you beat that. It's like trying to make a stand when the Chinese throw their army in a suicide rush at your trench and you are armed with a Steed sword stick in one hand and a copy of last years M! magazine in the other.

I found following my nose a dead rat dried out and stinking surrounded by maggots under a cushion on the day bed and one more festering under the Cuban Royal palm flattened as if the air has been sucked out of it. The store cupboard now looking as though an indoor hurricane had torn the place apart as a result of the pre-deceased rat eating its way through and scattering the remains of two packs of kitchen aluminium foil, a few rolls of cling wrap, a plastic container of antiseptic powder and another of antibiotic powder and various medical supplies and tablets, a gnawed rat-sized hole in a portable hard plastic 20 liter travel ice box through which it entered in one end and came out the other (having fun it seems), the ice box guaranteed by the manufacturers to survive a fall down a 600 foot mountain drop but not the yellow teeth of a pissed off rat, the destruction of a cardboard box containing a dozen bottles of wine which fell over and rolled about the floor, and the eating and spitting out of two boxes that contained fine Scotch Whisky and thank Christ it ate through a box of rat poison. The stuff that fortuitously led to its eventual demise - a sweet pink coloured rat poison that is tasty to a rat but contains an awful toxic substance that slowly dehydrates the creature from the inside out causing what i would presume to be terrible pain and a slow agonizing death that ends in the creature thrashing around then dropping dead under a cushion as i said on our wrought iron day bed. A bed that I spend every waking hour doing nothing but staring into space. We don't keep food lying about so Christ knows what it was up to. Chewing anything it can get it's teeth into and scattering the debri around smacks of a mean spirited rodent with a grudge. Maybe it remembered me when I chased one like it around the garden with a broom and only winged it as it scarpered up the Jasmine.

As a result of the dead rat decomposing on the day bed we had to throw out the mattress, three cushion and a blanket overlay and dig a hole and discard the darkened contaminated soil from under the rat under the palm tree. How the fucking thing got into the house is also a mystery as the only access from the outside is a one centimeter gap under the glass patio doors and a two centimeter plastic pipe for the cable modem wire.

Carpenter bees have also made themselves at home in three beams providing support for the Copa de Oro resulting in one of the now virtually hollow beams to snap in half and drop to the terrace below which could have caused the death of anyone who would have been unlucky to have been lying in the hammock underneath and over the last 4 years we have replaced all 12, bar these last three. Carpenters bees have the uncanny ability to gnaw through iron hard wood excavating intricate tunnels that can, after they have vacated them, become the home of a colony of large nipping black ants that rain down on the head when the time comes to replace the beam as was the case last summer that resulted in my bald pate to be horribly stung a number of times and a fair number falling down my shirt.

However there is one group of insects that endear themselves to me and those are crickets. Those lively little critters that jump up like firecrackers bouncing off your face every time you lift a stone or discarded tile or move a rock and they often bounce into the house and hide behind the sofa and chirrup incessantly when the lights go out. When you been away they multiply in numbers and keep the night alive with tropical noise.

I think I'm gonna go out and buy myself a gun.......A dirty rat gun for the dirty rats.........

and a gun that shoots around corners for the bee in its hole.....

and a space gun for all the other pesky pests that inhabit my domain..........

Our advice to anyone desirous of living in Mazatlán, buy a concrete bunker or a corrugated tin shack.

PS

Last night jet lag kept me staring at the ceiling at 3 am and I heard another rat or large creature shaking the Jasmine and entwined Bougainvillea outside my bedroom as it climbed down from across the roof and empty lot next door to scout around my property. Its scrabbling continued off and on for a while and the patter of rat feet across the window sill outside proved that it had probably gone for a snack of the aforementioned pink rat dehydrator that it finds hard to resist and that I placed conveniently under the window. Later I noticed a dent in the pile of poison pellets so no doubt we will have another dead rodent on our hands in a day or so.

Expat Ghetto

Kenya 1988

Mexican Termites Are Killers - A Cautionary Tale for Those Wishing To retire In Mexico.

We have all heard in the news that colonies, even gangs of Termites are causing terrible damage to property in Mexico and this is making the government worried that expatriates will think twice about settling in this beautiful country. The US government, also caught in the grip of a termite induced property recession are warning citizens to stay away.

Fully armed termites

As a long time semi-resident of Mazatlán we have had first hand experience of being caught in the crossfire of two opposing termite factions - The Subterranean Faction and The Ground faction (commonly known as the SUBFAs and the GROFAs). We had been free of the gangs in the past but in the struggle for territory they have overflowed (some even flying) from next door and have taken up the fight in our garden and even brazenly moving into our home devouring any cellulose they can get their tiny teeth into and that includes books and treasured old magazines and newspapers. Our beams took a hit but we managed to curtail expansion using a powerful formulation from Home Depot. The outdoor faction have indiscriminately taken down any wood they have managed to find in their path and that battle is ongoing using extreme measures and savage weapons of all kinds from chemicals to bludgeoning with sticks.


This is our house in July 2011 (unfinished but looking OK)....................

and this was our house when we go back from a couple of months away virtually destroyed after the warring termite gangs had been caught up in a territorial dispute.

Two Months Away Termite Damage

And below is a security camera shot of the destruction after only one week of in-fighting.

One Week Away Termite Damage

So be warned any person who is considering moving to Mexico on their retirement. Don't leave for a vacation without employing a fully armed security guard armed to the teeth with a ready-to-use formulation of imidacloprid  to watch over your lovely retirement home. 

postscript:

We have heard tales of whole groups of retirees living in those moving homes thingies leave as one after termites have sunk their teeth into a piece of wood owned by a next door neighbour. So we ask on-the-move retirees not to panic unduly when a solitary termite attacks your neighbour. 

How To Discourage Termites In Your Mexican House - Buy A Kindle.

I love books and have many in my Mazatlán house and would have had more if the termites hadn't eaten dozens in my absence.

Owning a Kindle is going to make Cicero's famous quote redundant so I am going to sell/burn my library and place a Kindle (already ordered) on the bookshelf. A Kindle with a gazillion titles on/in it.

That'll do the trick and impress my guests with the fact I am sooo 'au courant' and a reader of books albeit electronic.*

* It'll also give the fucking termites one less reason to set their unwelcome feet in my house.

ps. This where your books will stored - on Amazon's own cloud.

British Expat Subculture and Why I Dislike It....Or A Cautionary Tale For All Expat Ghetto Dwellers

The British tourist has traditionally been considered rude, mean, poorly behaved and linguistically incompetent. Whereas the stereotype of the holiday in the UK is all red buses, telephone boxes and the London Eye, the stereotype of the UK holidaymaker abroad is a sun-reddened shirtless and overweight man translating from English to the local tongue by shouting instructions and flailing gesturing arms energetically.

Glaringly obvious then that the stereotype of the British expatriate isn’t all that favourable either. Having lived for much of their lives in the constant murkiness of British weather, the stereotypical British expatriate has been attempting to harness the power of the Mediterranean sun to power an existence as British as roast beef and just as bland. They socialise with other expatriates in bars named after famous London landmarks, shop in British supermarkets and speak Spanish less fluently than Christina Aguilera.

Spain is a traditional country for the British retiree to escape to but now that lifestyle is coming to an end by the European downturn.

As many expat retirees rely on a combination of pensions, stock and home equity to fund their retirements, it is no surprise that the crisis has seen many of them in dire straits. Unsold and unsellable Spanish homes mean that although a house may be worth money on paper, there is no  comfort to be had in a stagnant market. Likewise, the share market is slow to recover, and the former quarterly windfalls in the form of dividends have either dried up to a trickle or turned red as the international money-bleed is tipped to continue through 2011 and beyond.

British expats in Spain now live in the same kind of no-man's land that political asylum seekers and recent immigrants face in Britain. The inherently racist attitudes to outsiders in the UK (suspicion at best and outright abuse at worst) is now at work against against British expats. This hostile attitude is, in part, understandable. The vocal minority of British expats who enjoyed all of the comforts of sun and inexpensive living while moaning endlessly about local 'laziness' and the annoyances of Spanish bureaucracy have done little to invoke local sympathy in hard times.

While many expats do try to learn the language and involve themselves in their community, the slightest hint of a British Imperialist attitude is enough to turn an already proud and defensive people against expats. Now, when the ghetto-dwellers need the help and understanding of their community, it is clear that there is no community to turn to.

A stronger push on the part of expats to quietly, and humbly assimilate into Spanish life could provide a framework for future cultural understanding in times of need. The obvious truth is that a petty thief is unlikely to break into the home of a known - and well-liked neighbour - no matter what their country of origin is. Similarly, a known and well-liked neighbour will never die forgotten in a Spanish apartment. The beauty of the Spanish 'nosy neighbour' is that he or she is more likely break down your door than passively wonder where you went.

Expats who refuse to live in the now-silent ghettos know this first-hand.