You have to feel sorry for alligators who have to live in New Mexico. They really couldn’t make it through our cold winters if it wasn’t for artificially heated water for them to swim in.

Take, for example, Wally, the Clovis Zoo’s long-time resident American Alligator. Last month, Wally’s heated pool became a little too chilly when the heating element for his pond inside his pen malfunctioned and a winter storm was on the way to the Clovis area.

The Clovis Fire Department was summoned to help rescue the chilly Wally.  At first, they tried to lure him out of his pen by offering him whole defrosted chickens and dead rabbits — his usual mealtime snack.  But as Zoo Director Lisa Fox noted, Wally was too cold and “had no interest in food.”

The next plan was to use brute strength to move the several hundred pound reptile. Fox gingerly placed a lasso around his head and then summoned the firemen to tug the critter to a warmer location in a nearby heated shed.  

“This was our only alternative,” Fox said. “to get our hands on him and do it.”

While Wally is enjoying his warmer temporary headquarters, a new heating unit has been placed on order so he can eventually enjoy his old digs again.

And hopefully, his appetite for raw chicken and dead rabbits has returned.

A story out of northern New Mexico last week reported that a man had absconded with a $150 bottle of French Champagne that he had snatched from the back of a golf cart at an upscale resort near Santa Fe. The bottle of “Beau Joie curvee Champagne” was en route to a guest at the resort when it was lifted from the unattended golf cart.

Pollice said they had a security camera video of a man pulling up behind the cart in his Acura, jumping out of his vehicle and then snatching the bottle and driving away quickly.

Police also said the video showed the vehicle’s license plate, which they traced to a home near Santa Fe. When they went to the home, neither the vehicle nor the suspect was around. The Champagne also was not to be seen, leaving authorities to believe it had already been consumed.

A website touting the brand of Champagne claims it is “derived from the finest grapes of Epernay, France.” As you may be able to tell from the semi-fuzzy photo above, each bottle is wrapped in a “copper suit of armor inspired by the armor worn by knights” to keep the contents chiilled longer.

Each bottle offers, as the website breathlessly claims, “supreme quality with impeccable, cutting edge design.”

I don’t think I’ve ever had a drink of anything that expensive. The closest I’ve come was bottle of wine that my wife and I shared at a dinner in the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville a few years ago. Since it was a special occasion, I thought we could splurge on some nice wine. I found a bottle that I thought was about $25 — I know, what a big spender. But what I failed to notice was that the $25 was for a single glass. A full bottle was more than $90. When we got the final tab, I realized the error of my all too cursory reading of the menu. I gulped, paid the tab, and wished I had enjoyed the wine a bit more when I was sloshing it down.

I’m always on the look for good inexpensive red wines, and there are some out there. But I’m not enough of an oenophile to do that much research.

I do confess that I’ve had a few bottles of Trader Joe’s “Two Buck Chuck” (With inflation, it’s more like “Three buck fifty-nine Chuck” these days.) It’s similar to the perceived bargain of Buckhorn Beer, which when I was in college you could buy for ninety-nine cents a six pack and hope it didn’t make you go blind.

The sign above at a Trader Joe’s claims Charles Shaw wine is “World Famous for Quality at an Incredible Price.”

I’ve had many conversations with people about Two Buck Chuck. The consistent comment they all have is, “It’s not that bad.”

I hope the guy in Santa Fe who swiped the $150 bottle of Champagne had many more positive things to say about the copper clad bottle of hooch that tempted him to risk jail time.

”

My wife and I first visited Slot Canyon north of Radium Springs more than two years ago. I talked about it in a Dec. 14, 2020 blog, saying I felt like I was on the set of an Indiana Jones movie when we trekked through the steep-walled canyon carved out by years of rushing flood waters.

We’ve been back several times, mostly for entertainment of visiting grandchildren. Our most recent visit was last week, with our daughter and grandchildren Hannah and Hayes.

After we first visited Slot Canyon, we told others about it and also discovered that many other people had learned about the unique geological feature and visited it as well. It’s become quite popular around here as a place to hike.

A scene filmed there showed up on a recent advertisement for New Mexico State University. When we were visiting last week, a bride to be and her groom were having professional pictures taken of them in their wedding attire in the canyon. We also noticed that a large boulder had dropped into the middle part of the canyon, making it tricky to maneuver around. My hunch is that it was dislodged from above during a heavy rainfall last summer — however, it could have been pushed into the canyon by vandals.

I hope Slot Canyon’s popularity doesn’t become its downfall. We were disappointed to find a discarded half-eaten apple and a banana peel on floor of the canyon. There were several water bottles and other trash scattered along the route. There was unbagged dog poop along the trail. And on the unmarked green gate that is the beginning of the trail to the canyon, someone had written graffiti on one of the supporting posts.

The canyon is located on federal land, but there has been no visible attempt to protect or promote it. It’s such a small geological area and the canyon is so narrow that it really can’t accommodate huge numbers of visitors.

I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that most people realize what a treasure it is and do their part to protect it.

I’m sure you’re getting tired of this from me by now. Four posts this year about smuggling bologna into the United States from Mexico.

Well, it seems other edible items have been on the list of things you shouldn’t smuggle into New Mexico.

Yep, chile.

When looking for articles about German submarines coming up the Rio Grande to blast El Paso (more on this important topic in a later post), I stumbled upon an article in a 1902 edition of the El Paso Herald reporting the arrest of a man for smuggling chile into the United States from Mexico. 

There were few details about the incident, except to say he was trying to bring in 390 pounds of the stuff across the border from Mexico.  That would have been pretty hard to “smuggle” in those days, I think.

So smuggling Mexican bologna into the United States, which I have been reporting in multiple posts, maybe doesn’t seem like such a big deal. The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol said in a recent newspaper article that smuggling bologna into the United States “wasn’t funny” and could harm American agriculture. My personal observation is that bringing chile in from Mexico (which happens all the time these days) probably poses a greater agricultural risk.

But I’m moving beyond that to a story in the same 1902 newspaper that appeared right above the tale of the smuggled chile.

The headline for that story was:

“Young Man Marries Girl He Wronged”

The story in the El Paso Herald said a man was arrested and jailed on a charge of “seduction” of a young woman. However, the man who had “wronged” the young woman agreed that if he could get out of jail, he would marry her, if she would have him. She agreed and the judge who jailed the man promptly performed the marriage ceremony after he was released.

According to the Herald article, the groom was so pleased about his fortuitous outcome that he purchased a wedding cake, tobacco and “other things” to share with his former cellmates at the jail. 

There was no mention whether the bride attended the jailhouse celebration. 

Las Cruces High School battled Albuquerque’s Volcano Vista High School last Saturday in the quest for New Mexico’s 5A high school basketball championship.

Unfortunately for us southern New Mexico residents, the Bulldawgs lost an overtime contest 66-55 in what was described as a thriller of a game between the state’s only two undefeated top basketball teams.

What was interesting to me was a story in the Albuquerque Journal prior to the game that said one of Las Cruces’ early opponents tried to prepare for their game by using a long broomstick.

The Las Cruces team featured Senior player Isaiah Carr, who stretched the measuring tape to seven feet.

In the semi-final game, the Bulldawgs defeated another Albuquerque team, the Atrisco Heritage Academy, which used the unusual method to prepare how to defend the seven-foot Carr on the court.

As the Journal noted:

“Lacking a better option, Atrisco Heritage Coach Steve Heredia said the Jaguars used a broomstick in practice to try and simulate Carr’s height.”

It didn’t work for Atrisco Heritage, but Volcano Vista apparently figured out how to take him out of the game when it counted.

This reminds me of a New Mexico politician from the 1950s and early 1960s, Ingram B. Pickett, who served several terms as a State Corporation Commision member. Pickett billed himself as “Seven Foot Pickett,” even though he was a bit shy of that mark. He removed the door of his state government office on the premise that citizens could walk in any time to see him and to prove he was hiding nothing. Once there, they probably cowered at his 6 foot 10 3/4- inch height. His campaign slogan was “Big enough to serve you, Small enough to need you.”

In the early 1960s, he apparently became ill and told some news media outlets he would not run for a fourth term as Corporation Commissioner. However, an article I found in a November 1962 issue of the El Paso Times said he had recanted the story about his illness, was still planning to run for a fourth term in 1966 and was seen “dancing in public” at state oil and gas association convention in Santa Fe.

It’s interesting that another person whose name appears in various search sources was identified as Ingram B. Pickett. He also died in the early 1960s, but his claim to fame was that he was a movie actor. Despite my research, I could not link the two as being the same person. How interesting would that be — like Ronald Reagan becoming president. Our own “Seven Foot Pickett” politician whose career started as an actor.

Any readers who might have some information about this should send me a note.

And in the meantime, if you’ve picked your brackets for the NCAA basketball tournament, you might consider sending your winning team a seven-foot pole as a training device. 

 

I’ve owned and driven BMWs for almost 50 years. I know — expensive to buy, expensive to repair and a bit obnoxious. But great to drive.

I gained a little more respect for the brand when I spotted this on the internet Monday.

It’s a story about two guys in the Ukraine who retrofitted their BMW 6 series convertible (a grand touring car) with a machine gun mounted in the trunk. It’s a similar concept to those Toyota pickups you see in the middle east where terrorists have mounted big machine guns in the bed of an otherwise docile vehicle.

In this case, the machine gun was apparently commandeered from Russians. It reportedly is the same caliber and type used on Russian tanks that are now roaming Ukraine and carrying out Putin’s attacks.

#Ukraine: A open top BMW 6 series with a NSV 12,7×108 heavy machine gun mounted – is not something you see everyday. pic.twitter.com/wWGrg5ddEU

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 14, 2022

It made me feel good to say I own a couple of BMWs. They’re doing their part to stop the Russians in Ukraine. 

Who says the federal government doesn’t have a sense of humor. Well me, for one.

This blaring headline showed up in the Albuquerque Journal last week:

“Officials: ‘Nothing funny” about bologna smuggling.”

The story quoted an official of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol from El Paso as saying that smuggled balogna could bring in diseases from Mexico “which can be detrimental to our nation’s agricultural industry.”

“People will sometimes make light of these seizures but there is nothing funny about these failed smuggling attempts,” the agent said.

As my dwindling but somewhat dedicated pool of readers may recall, I made light of balogna smuggling in three recent posts. I mean really, how can you not chuckle at someone trying to smuggle the dregs of processed meat inside a spare tire, next to someone’s underwear in a suitcase, and stinking up the interior of a car by stashing it under the back seat?

Apparently, others have been making jokes about it too, since I doubt anyone from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol has any idea that my blog exists and read my penetrating investigative journalistic report. Maybe I’ll start searching the web for other funny comments about Mexican bologna.

As you recall, I even gave Mexican bologna that I purchased legally in Las Cruces a taste test. I did not seem to have any vile reaction to it, other than concluding it wasn’t nearly as tasty as the gold standard “Oscar Mayer” American brand.

I guess my thought is that with much more seriously dangerous stuff being brought across the border, shouldn’t agents be focusing on that instead?

And now that gasoline prices have shot up dramatically, people in El Paso are zipping across the border to buy cheaper Mexican gasoline. Is there some inherent danger in Mexican gasoline that that our agents should be investigating? So what’s next, draining fuel tanks of every car that crosses into El Paso from Juarez?

Seriously, I do appreciate the efforts of our Customs and Border Patrol agents to keep our border secure from bad things.

But still, bologna?

New Mexico and Texas have suffered years of hostile legal wranglings about water rights involving the Pecos and Rio Grande rivers. Virtually all of the Pecos River water originates in New Mexico and a good splash of the Rio Grande comes from New Mexico watersheds. It’s our (New Mexico’s) water, damn it. Texas thinks it’s theirs.

I was involved in one of these of the legal procedures in the 1980s. I helped put together a public relations/media campaign by New Mexicans to try to stop a rude attempt by El Paso to drill wells Dona Ana County to pump water to our neighbor to the south. The attempt ended up in federal courts and I think it finally died there without any Texas wells being drilled in New Mexico.

While snooping around the Internet on a site of old newspaper stories about this subject, I discovered this incredible gem of a letter to the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican in 1902. It was written by a resident of Taos, who was railing against a piece of proposed Congressional legislation called the “Stephens Bill”

Based on the letter, I am assuming the legislation was proposed by a group of businessmen from El Paso who were opposing construction of a dam on the Rio Grande near present day Truth or Consequences (at that time called Hot Springs). Instead, they apparently wanted to build one at El Paso. I’ve been searching historical sites for anything about “The “Stephens Bill” or a proposed dam and reservoir at El Paso, but I’ve come up blank so far. I’ll continue to dig into it.

The gist of the legislation, it appears, was to block the construction of the dam because the El Paso business leaders feared it would reduce the amount of water flowing down the Rio Grande to El Paso. Their concern appeared to be once the river’s flow was reduced, the Rio Grande would no longer be navigable for ships connecting El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico. I mean really — large ships moving along the waterway pictured below?

What was hypocritical, however, was the assertion in the letter that the El Paso businessmen supported construction of just such a dam on the Rio Grande near their city. They contended that it would NOT reduce the flow of water in the river on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The letter went on to note that attempts to navigate boats down the Rio Grande had been unsuccessful, with one attempt ending in the death of an adventurer and another with the boat running aground on a sandbar somewhere southeast of El Paso. 

The letter called the proposal a “boodling scheme, first last and all time,” and noted the “inconsistency and absurdity of the bill.”

So if you were holding out hopes that Putin’s yacht could be seized and sailed up the Rio Grande to El Paso as a tourist attraction, you’re probably going to be disappointed. Your best bet might be to spot a banged-up L.L. Bean canoe that someone had to portage over a few hundreds of miles of sandbars then finally left in desperation on a sticky mud flat near Fabens. 

And in the meantime, enjoy Elephant Butte while it still has a little water in it. 

–Millard Hunsley, veteran copy desk editor

My wife recently spotted the following puzzling first paragraph of a story in our local newspaper:

“A judge dismissed a motion Friday that would’ve held a man accused of shooting at a woman in jail.”

So was the man shooting at the woman while she was in jail? I don’t think so. I think what the writer intended to say was:

“A judge dismissed a motion Friday to hold a man in jail who had been accused of shooting a woman.”

First of all, the use of “would’ve” should not have made it past the copy editor’s desk. Oh wait — there are no longer any copy desks to catch such crude uses of the English language in a newspaper article.

Secondly, it was a curmudgeonly old copy editor at my first journalistic experience — cub reporter at the Albuquerque Journal — who many years ago came up with that language for my blog headline. His name was Millard Hunsley and he used that sentence to demonstrate why cub reporters like me needed to read over our stories for jumbled sentence structure before turning them over to the copy desk. And trust me, the marks a copy editor would make on what you thought was a perfectly crafted story were like daggers to your heart.

I think I got better at avoiding such gaffes, but I still struggled from time to time when I was a writer at United Press International — a now defunct news or “wire” service. At UPI, we had to write radio copy to be inserted into hourly “splits” where the national news feed would stop and we had the opportunity to insert state and local news. Usually, the “splits” came up all too quickly and we would have to write the story under the gun in real time. The only thing that occasionally saved us was the fact that what we typed out on the teletype was delayed by a few seconds before it appeared on the teletype that our subscribers got.

The teletypes were clunky mechanical devices that punched coded holes in yellow three-quarter-inch paper tape that was then fed through a device that read all the holes and printed the words out on paper a few seconds later. In the jargon of the wire service, we used to say we would “punch up” a story when we wrote it.

So when writing in real time during a split, you would occasionally back yourself into a corner on sentence structure. The only thing that would save you was to halt the tape reader in mid-sentence, then manually type in a series of Xs to try to convince any reader that there had been some kind of mechanical or network malfunction that triggered the stoppage.

Then you could trash the error-ridden tape, and start a new sentence to replace the one you screwed up. This time, however, you would take a little more time to think things through for proper sentence structure and make sure you had finished writing the story before sending it through the tape reader.

I know, it’s all pretty esoteric and boring to most people. But the point is that we could sure use some good copy editors these days.

I even saw the improper use of the word “it’s” on one of the crawlers along the bottom of an ABC news feed the other day. The word should have been “its” but I suspect no one but a few of us old English loving curmudgeons would have noticed.

Think before you write — not just about content, but about proper use of the King’s English.

Police in Clovis arrested two men recently for attempting to sell a stolen set of aluminum bleachers at a metal recycling facility.

After receiving a report of missing bleachers at a city park and a tip from the metal recycling company, police concluded that the two men had swiped the bleachers in an attempt to raise some quick cash.

When the two suspects were confronted about the matter, they claimed that they had found the almost new bleachers next to a trash dumpster. They said they assumed that they were being thrown away and considered them to be available for the taking.

So using that logic, these guys may assume that when you park your car near a dumpster, they consider it to be abandoned and will sell it to Buster’s Barely Banged-Up Car Lot. Well, not until they get out of jail.

On my way to the Las Cruces city dump, I found this unusual recycled school bus parked along the route.

 

It may be hard to see in this photo, but much of the bus has been “re-engineered” with sheets of plywood that blocked out some windows and were attached on top to support what looked like solar panels.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the bus was the sign toward the front of the vehicle (hard to read in this photo) that says “Expect Success.” The sign was from the “Gilbert Public Schools” (Arizona, I think) proclaiming “120 years of quality education.”

I think if was in charge of that school district, I would made certain that someone removed that sign before selling it to an unknown buyer. It’s similar to the Houston , TX, plumber’s truck that ended up in the hands of militants in the Mideast a couple of years ago with a machine gun mounted in the bed. No one had bothered removing the company’s logo and phone number from the vehicle before it was shipped overseas and sold to the insurrectionists in Afghanistan. 

I wonder if the Houston company is getting long distance calls to unclog someone’s toilet in Kabul. 

We’ve finished watching the 2022 Olympics with less enthusiasm than we have watched the event in past years.  There just wasn’t an “it” factor in the games, with lots of irritating distractions on so many levels.

One thought that occurred to me as I watched what seemed to be an overload of TV coverage of curling was this: With women’s curling, where team members are constantly sweeping a floor, isn’t that reinforcing a negative stereotype that women are just constantly relegated to sweeping up — mostly the messes that men make? Maybe instead of brooms, women could be allowed use some kind of high powered air gun to help “curl” the stones on their way down the ice floor.

Another thought I had was that curling really doesn’t seem to have much in common with folks like me in the desert. Maybe we could invent a game where we “curl” tumbleweeds down a dry stretch of the Rio Grande. 

The one event at the Olympics I always like to watch is the downhill alpine event. As a skier, it’s the one event I wish I had the courage to do. There is something about making sweeping turns at high speed on a ski slope that is invigorating. If only someone could guarantee that I would never fall and get injured, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

I was fortunate enough to be a ski racer on a very modest level in the old UNM Corporate Cup program. The Corporate Cup was a citizens ski race program which held several races each year at resorts around the state. It provided financial support to the UNM ski team, which regrettably was cancelled about three years ago.

I actually did fairly well in the races. I never fell and consistently won “gold” in my age class. The races were all giant slalom events —  a few gates with enough room in between to get your speed up and your adrenalin rushing. 

But I’m sure it was nothing like the rush of skiing in an Olympic or World Cup downhill where you reach speeds in excess of 90 miles an hour and have nothing but a thin spandex suit and a plastic helmet to protect you. 

 

The circus has come to town in Las Cruces. It is the Do Portugal Circus, which I understand is based in Mexico and travels around to smaller markets in the United States. It will be here for about a week and one-half.

The large purple and white tent started setting up two weeks ago in the parking lot of our local mall — the most exciting thing to happen there in about 10 years. 

There was a really funny comment about this on our neighborhood social media link, which we do not contribute to but occasionally check out for really dumb comments. In this post, we were not disappointed. The person was  convinced the erection of the enormous purple and white tent tent was actually going to be some kind of new fast food outlet. A “Biscuits and Butter” franchise, they speculated. 

We had a couple of friends who tried to attend the circus with their three year old, but had to leave because it was so loud for him.

The circus website, which was pretty thin in information, said there would be fantastic aerial displays and other human performances, but no animal acts.

Which brings me to my topic.

When I was growing up in Ruidoso, we had a visiting circus stop by for a one-night performance. It was a big deal for a small town (maybe 1,500 hardy souls at that time) and everyone was planning to turn out as they set up the tents in what is the Gateway park on the southeast side of the city along Sudderth Drive. 

The big draw for the circus — and I am not making this up — was the chance to view a “blood sweating hippopotamus.” I mean seriously, who could miss a chance to see something this weird. 

The day before the one-day show, I came down with a bad cold or the flu.  It was the middle of the winter, and at that time, temperatures got really cold during January and February. It was clearly not a good time to be out and about with a body temperature of more than 100 degrees. My parents, knowing that I would not want to miss the event of the year in Ruidoso, asked our family doctor if he thought it would be okay if I went to the circus — especially to see the blood seating hippo. Knowing the importance of this kind of thing to a kid and the odds that I would recover (and hopefully not infect too many others) he reluctantly said I could go.

I don’t remember much of the circus acts but I do remember staring at the poor hippopotamus in its red and gold trimmed cage. It was obviously bored and feeling the sting of the cold weather. Its cage smelled like wet straw and hippopotamus poop, although my cold or flu blunted the full olfactory experience. 

I did not see it sweating blood, however. That was a major disappointment.

On researching the internet, I  found  that hippos do in fact look like they are sweating blood. It is kind of a pinkish secretion when they are exposed to very hot temperatures —  which I can confirm were not around in mid-winter Ruidoso. 

According to an obscure Japanese animal researcher named Professor Hashimoto, he and  his colleagues collected samples of a hippo’s sweat and examined it to see what makes it so reddish colored. They found it is made up of two pigments – one red, called “hipposudoric acid”; and the other orange, called “norhipposudoric acid.” With my high fever, I probably had a better chance of sweating blood that day than did the poor hippo.

So there you have it.  And if you really want a hippo for Christmas, don’t expect it to sweat blood, unless maybe you are in Florida or Australia. 

A Santa Fe couple on vacation last month returned to their home to discover a man who had been living in their house while they were gone.

While staying in the home for an unknown number of days, the man helped himself to food in the refrigerator and some beer. He had been sleeping in one of the home’s bedrooms. Police said he had entered the home by breaking a window.

The uninvited visitor was discovered in a back room of the house by the returning couple. Although he did not appear threatening, he was in possession of an assault-style gun.

When confronted about his presence in the home, the man apologized for the break-in and said he was running away from someone in Texas who wanted to kill him.

After gathering up his belongings and heading out of the house, the contrite visitor left $200 to pay for the window he had broken.

Police reported last week that the man had been arrested in the vicinity of the home he had broken into.