Really. This is getting silly. A further read of the story which prompted my blog a couple of weeks ago revealed that a woman from Colorado passing through New Mexico was busted for smuggling an even bigger stash of Mexican bologna.

This time, agents found 188 pounds of the meat stashed away in various places in her car, including under the back seat and “commingled with luggage.”

Two thoughts here. The weight of the bologna was equal to at least one other passenger in her car. And if the bologna was “commingled” in the luggage, what would her laundry have smelled like if she hadn’t been caught.

My son had some interesting observation about the bologna smuggling explosion.

“This makes me VERY interested in procuring some Mexican bologna,” he commented. “Maybe after eating we’ll understand why they’re willing to take such risks to smuggle it here.”

And then he questioned “does the illegal smuggling have to do with the notorious Oscar Meyer cartel having the Border Patrol agents in their pockets to keep other product out of their territory?”

Profound thoughts, indeed.

So in the interest of science, I’m going to try to track down some of the bologna in one of the local carnicerias in Las Cruces. In doing initial research, I was surprised to find at least half a dozen such outlets of Mexican meat in our city. 

I’m wondering if you have to say some kind of code to get access to the room where they keep the illegal Mexican bologna — kind of like a 1930s speakeasy.

I just hope the USDA meat cops don’t raid the place while I’m, there. 

Maybe we should start being concerned about this trend. 

In December, I wrote a blog about a man who was caught illegally transporting Mexican bologna into the United States at El Paso. The bologna had been stuffed inside a spare tire in the New Mexico man’s pickup truck. Spare tires are common places used to hide illegal drugs being transported into the U.S.  But bologna? Really?

Well, it’s happened again. This time an Albuquerque man was attempting to bring in a large quantity of Mexican bologna when he was caught in January in the nefarious deed at a border patrol stop near El Paso. This time, the bologna was stashed under a pile of potato or corn chip bags. Maybe the perpetrator thought the border patrol agents would believe he was just planning a really big picnic and would let him go.

Customs officials said that the person was carrying 55 pounds of bologna and told the authorities he could sell the stuff in New Mexico for at least twice what he had paid for it across the border. 

And later in the month, authorities arrested a woman coming from Mexico with another stash of bologna contraband under the backseat, under car covers and “intermingled with luggage” in her vehicle.

If you had hopes of tasting some of the bologna to find out why it’s so special, you’ll have to go across the border to try it out. Customs officials said after the contraband bologna was confiscated it was “destroyed using a USDA approved incinerator.”

So if you’re driving around southern New Mexico and smell what what you might think is a really big picnic going on — where grilled bologna is the meat of choice — you’re probably just somewhere near the “USDA approved incinerator.”

 

A story in last week’s Albuquerque Journal gave me a double take.

It was reported that a bull moose had somehow wandered into the town of Shiprock, NM, and was considered to be a potential threat to the local human population.

Okay, take a deep breath. A moose in Shiprock?

Now I don’t want to say anything bad about Shiprock. In fact, one of my best memories of New Mexico was based on a sign I saw on the road from Farmington to Shiprock in which a roadside stand which advertised the opportunity to buy Avon beauty products and live goats at the same location. Really. I wish I had snapped a picture of that sign. Shiprock is in the heart of Tony Hillerman country, with a beauty that has to be seen, absorbed and appreciated beyond somewhere with lush green landscapes. 

Anyway, I never thought of this high desert community on the Navajo Nation as being a place where anyone would find a bull moose wandering around.

The police report speculated that the animal had managed to wander down the Animas River from Colorado and had become accustomed to humans who may have been offering it food or treats. They warned everyone to stay away from it.

 

To begin with, as much as I have wandered around southwestern Colorado over the years, it never even occurred to me that there might have been moose where I was driving or hiking. Perhaps several hundred years ago, moose were there, and maybe even in northern Ned Mexico.  What I found was this from a Colorado wildlife website:

Click to access MooseReintroductionFactSheet.pdf

Although seen in the northern Colorado as late as 1850,  they drifted north at some point and were no longer considered to be a native species. However, they were reintroduced to the northern part of the state in the 1978 and were brought into southwestern Colorado in the early 1990s. 

Apparently, one of the offspring of these critters found its way to to Shiprock sometime late last year or early this year. A website says they can be accustomed to living in a more dry, high desert climate. Welcome to New Mexico, moose. 

A former colleague of mine, who grew up in Wyoming and dealt with moose at her family’s mountain cabin told me that you really don’t want to mess with a moose. Weighing as much as 1500 pounds and being able to run almost 40 miles per hour, they can be pretty dangerous even if they have a mostly docile temperament. 

My wife and I were able to see some at a safe distance when we visited Alaska several years ago and concluded they were impressive and intimidating creatures. 

In our neck of the woods, game officials have introduced native African animals — ibex and oryx — to the Tularosa basin and they have thrived. 

So are we ready for caribou in Cuba or Carlsbad? 

GO PYGMIES!!!

I suspect many of you never saw the story that the New Mexico Tech rugby team finished second in the national finals for small colleges in December.

They finished one place higher than the New Mexico State University rugby team I coached in 1981 to finish third in the final four of collegiate rugby.

Truth be told, we would have finished fourth, except that the University of Michigan  cheated and illegally played graduate school players in the tournament and were disqualified. Still, the fact that we made it to the final four was pretty impressive. I wish I could say that it was because of my coaching that NMSU got as far as it did, but I inherited a bunch of great (but often goofy) young athletes who pretty much did it on their own.

But more about NMSU rugby later.

The NM Tech team lost to Christendom College of Virginia 34-29 in what was said to have been a very close game.

Back in the dark ages when I was playing and coaching rugby, the New Mexico Tech team was also a strange group of guys — engineering nerds is virtual isolation from the world at NM Tech in Socorro. Among them was their leader, Phil Pourier, who we nicknamed “The French Tickler” and who reportedly lived in a cave during his time at Tech. They always hosted a tournament every St. Patrick’s Day, which marked the unofficial beginning of the spring rugby season. 

The team, apparently now known as the Miners, were known as the Pygmies at that time. However their colors are still black and blue, very fitting for the sport.

I was very glad to see that the team still existed and has been flourishing. I’m not even sure what the status of the NMSU team is these days, given that the campus was virtually shut down for so much of the last year. I’ll have to make a trip out to the pitch (which appears to have been temporarily converted into a soccer practice area) this spring to see if the Chiles are rucking and mauling their way down the field at the corner of Williams and Wells on campus. I’ll post an update if I find out more.

In 2006, while excavating an area for the new Sweeney Convention Center in downtown Santa Fe, archaeologists found an unusual mix of items that had been tossed down a communal outhouse.

As expected, there were many bottles of liquor, medicine (probably mostly alcohol) and laxatives (again, probably mostly alcohol) that had been dropped in the latrine. There were no reports of finding old handguns or rifles, although I’ve read those kinds of things show up frequently when archaeologist dig through old outhouses.

What was unusual, however, were the numerous broken off heads of several China dolls. The rest of the dolls’ bodies could not be found in the contents of the toilets. Perhaps some twisted souls were reenacting the fate of Maximilien Robespierre.

Which brings me to Barbie. I think most young girls have at one time or another have given gruesome haircuts to their favorite dolls. Our daughter did that too, but she was particularly brutal to Barbie dolls. 

Parents sometimes think their kids’ toys — Star Wars action figures, baseball cards, Cabbage Patch dolls, etc. — will turn into a valuable investment at some time in the future. Of course, the most valuable toys are those that are still in their original packaging or very lightly used.

Our daughter’s Barbie dolls, however, could never achieve that pristine classification. For some reason, many of their tiny rubbery toes were chewed off during the time she played with them. I’m sure it was just a teething issue, and not something like what was going with those China dolls found in the Santa Fe privy.

So I’m imagining the day when forensic archaeologists dig through the rubble of our house and find either Barbie dolls with their toes chewed off or perhaps the little nubby toes themselves. 

Okay readers, it’s time to ‘fess up about what weird things you did to your dolls, Star Wars figures, stuffed animals or Hot Wheels while growing up. I may put them in a post — without naming you, of course. 

Several things caught my eye today in the newspapers we read daily.

The first was the announcement by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham that. because of increasing teacher shortages in public schools in the state due to COVID, members of the New Mexico National Guard may be deployed to fill in as substitute teachers.

This raises several questions and some observations. First, the governor said that the substitute National Guard teachers did not necessarily have to wear their uniforms, but could do so if they wanted. But, she stipulated, none should be armed.

So what kinds of courses would the guard members teach? Field stripping of class computers? Tactical maneuvers to avoid the cafeteria on bad food days? How to organize student pickup and drop off convoys? PT including a five-mile run instead of PE classes with badminton and medicine ball tossing?

And my wife wonders if students will display much stricter discipline when someone in a military uniform is standing in front of the class, even if they’re reciting lines from Shakespeare.

And how about bugle calls instead of school bells? “Reveille” instead of the first bell to begin classes, “mess call” for lunch in the cafeteria and “assembly” to meet in the school gymnasium to watch a 40-year-old film about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.

And of course “taps” when the school basketball team goes down in defeat.

And on another subject,  University of New Mexico football coach Danny Gonzales, whose Lobos finished the season 3-9 (1-7 in Mountain West Conference play) announced he has recruited a new quarterback through the transfer portal.

Gonzales proudly announced that the recruit, Miles Kendrick, “knows how to win.”

However, it should be noted that Kendrick played at the University of Kansas, which managed only a 2-10 season (1-8 in Big 12 conference play) during 2021. As much as I like the University of Kansas, I don’t think anyone could honestly say that players from a program suffering years of a losing tradition (last winning season in 2008) “know how to win.”

And finally, a truly sad note on human behavior in Hatch. Police said two men got into an argument over who would load a child’s bicycle in the back of a pickup. The disagreement led to one of the individuals pulling out a gun and shooting the other person, who died of the gunshot wound.

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I wanted to share a brief personal update. Our seven-year-old granddaughter in Austin, who contracted COVID early during the outbreak of the virus in 2019, caught it again last week in a breakthrough case. She had been vaccinated after her first bout with COVID, and is not suffering as badly as the first time around, when her temperature spiked to over 103 degrees. But now her little brother, age 3, has caught the virus and is recovering. His symptoms so far have not been too serious.

AND I JUST GOT NEWS THAT OUR SON’S YOUNGEST SON, AND OUR WONDERFUL NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS, HAVE ALSO CONTRACTED COVID, BUT ARE DOING OKAY.

In the last few weeks we have learned of so many friends, neighbors, members of our family,  church and casual acquaintances who have contracted the virus. Most of these are breakthrough cases and the individuals seem to not have severe symptoms, but we really don’t know the long-term effects.

Please get vaccinated if you haven’t already, get the booster if you haven’t already and keep using masks and social distancing when necessary. I’m darn tired of this thing going on as long as it has, and I think we all need to do what we can to stop it.

In 1995, birds were making news in New Mexico.

In the first instance, several emus were released (either accidentally or intentionally) in the Gila National Forest and were spotted multiple times running wild. One observer reported to authorities that he had seen “a really big turkey.” If it had been spotted further east in the Lincoln National Forest, some might have thought it was a mutant “down-winder” turkey that was transmogrified by  fallout from the 1945 atomic bomb test at Trinity Site.

At any rate, authorities became concerned that the birds might be a traffic hazard from people slowing down on highways to gawk at the critters. The newspaper article about the renegade emus never said if they were all eventually tracked down. Maybe they’re still up there, spooking the other native animals in the Gila. But for all my trips to the Gila over the years, I can verify that I have not seen one — yet. 

The other bird story from 1995 involved a trucker who smacked something large while driving in the vicinity of Espanola. When he spotted what he had hit, he removed a large portion of the grille from his truck and drove immediately to a veterinarian in Espanola. At the vet’s office, a rather dazed but still living owl was extricated from the innards of the front of the truck and released. 

I guess the driver preferred having a goose-like “honk” emanating from his truck instead of a “hoot.” (Okay, that was bad — it’s late in the day)

Speaking of owls, that reminded me of a story about five years ago in which a family of burrowing owls had taken up residence at the Aggie Memorial Stadium on the campus of New Mexico State University. Because the owls were considered threatened or endangered, crews planning to install artificial turf at the football stadium were forced to put the project on hold while the birds could be relocated. 

My wife recently received a summons for jury duty, her third since we’ve lived in Las Cruces. (I’ve only served on one jury panel in my life, while living in Santa Fe more than 40 years ago.)

Despite some occasional grumbling about it, my Nebraska farm girl wife — armed with straightforward and honest Midwestern values — will do her civic duty and faithfully serve on the jury panel to the best of her ability. 

Of course, in this time of COVID, there are extra precautions being taken this time around, including routine temperature scans when she shows up for duty.

While thinking about this, it occurred to me that a high-level scientific research project conducted years ago by my daughter for her 7th grade middle school science fair project could be useful to those seeking to avoid attendance at events they’d rather skip.

My daughter’s project, which by the way won her a spot in the New Mexico Science and Engineering Fair at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, was entitled “Chile Heat.” The research involved whether someone eating very hot green chile would experience a sudden rise in human body temperature.

So armed with a batch of extra hot Bueno green chile, my daughter set off on her experiment. Because the scientific experiment involved human subjects, we were required to have the research supervised by a “doctor.” We kind of fudged on that, asking my friend Joel, who holds a doctorate in economics and was a professor at New Mexico State University, to sign off on the experiment. Well, he does go by “Dr.” and the rules didn’t specify “medical doctor.”

The experiment went like this: I rounded up some colleagues at my work during their morning coffee and asked whether they would be willing to sample a spoonfull of extra hot green chile while recording their body temperature before and after eating the spicy New Mexico staple. My daughter would take and record their body temperature with an oral thermometer before eating the hot chile, then take it again after they had eaten the sample. And sure enough, after eating the hot chile, all of the subjects showed a significant rise in temperature. For one of the participants, the chile was so hot that she launched into a rather violent round of hiccups that lasted for several minutes.

So here’s the bottom line. If your aunt Millie has asked you to come to her house for a Tupperware party, tell her that you want to be extra safe and will check your temperature before attending in case you’ve contracted COVID or some other malady. Then slurp down a large spoonful of extra hot chile, wait a few minutes and take your temperature.

“Aunt Millie,” you say on the phone in your most sincere of voices. “Id love to come to your party but I’m running a fever and think it would be safer for everyone if I just stay home.”

Hopefully, you’ll get off the phone before the hiccups start. 

In 2011, a 78-year-old man in Hobbs was trying to accommodate three young men who came to his his house late one evening asking to use a telephone for an emergency. He went to grab his cordless phone but when he came back, the three forced their way into the home, pushed him to the floor and demanded any cash he had.

Unbeknownst to them, he had grabbed a wicked looking meat cleaver on his way down to the floor and began threatening the intruders with it.

 

Seeing they were no match for the cleaver-wielding man, the would-be robbers quickly fled the scene on foot. 

The moral is that it’s not the size of the man in the fight that counts — it’s just how big his meat axe might be. 

I think I’ve touched on this subject before, but a recent story out of Ohio made me think about it again.

The story in Ohio involved the issuance of a new license plate. The plate, the first new design to be issued since 2013, was vetted by many different groups over its 15-month development. It sought to depict  the rural and urban aspects of the state,  its history and appeal of its natural beauty. Even the breed of a dog shown on the plate romping with a young boy was hand picked by the governor and his wife. In a move to showcase Ohio’s history, the plate shows Orville and Wilber Wright’s airplane pulling a banner across the top of the plate proclaiming it to be the “Birthplace of Aviation.” The problem is that the Wright Flyer is going the wrong direction.

 

Most modern aircraft have their horizontal stabilizer mounted at the rear of the aircraft. The Wright brothers, having no previous aircraft to model their contraption after, mounted the horizontal stabilizer in front of the plane, ahead of the pilot. If you look at the license plate design above,  keeping in mind the forward horizontal stabilizer in their design, you can see that the actual front of the airplane appears to be pushing the banner.

More than 35,000 of the license plates were produced before some aviation expert noticed the flaw and the direction of the plane was corrected.

Which brings me to the New Mexico flag. No matter how you mount it, you can’t get wrong. Backwards or upside down, it always looks the same. 

In my mind, it’s always been a great design for its sheer simplicity and use of my favorite colors, yellow and red. But I’ve sometimes wondered if someone wanted to fly it upside down to signal a state of distress, how would anyone know?

I always look forward to the Albuquerque Journal’s annual Cowchip awards, published at the end of the year to document many goofy things that have happened in the state during the past 365 days. I’ve often used these stories from years past as fodder for my own blog. And I’ve also written about some of these things before they made the current year’s Cowchip list.

In case you haven’t read it, I’m enclosing a link to the list this year and hope you enjoy it. It just goes to confirm my basic premise of “Why I Love New Mexico” as the foundation for my blog.

https://www.abqjournal.com/2457884/2021-cowchips-from-a-flying-sex-toy-to-a-motel-with-meth-on-tap-mind-where-you-step.html

Another one of my favorite reads at the end of the year is humorist Dave Barry’s Year in Review. It is usually published in the Albuquerque Journal, but I didn’t find it this year. However, I did find it in the Washington Post and am enclosing a link to it. Barry skewers everyone for dumb things that happened during the year — Democrats,  Republicans, government officials, corporations, do-gooders and the like are all treated with equal irreverence. I hope you’ll enjoy it and not be too offended if your political leanings or your pet projects get thrown under the bus. With all the insanity going on in our country right now, sometimes it’s good to just laugh at ourselves.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/12/26/dave-barrys-year-review-2021/

It’s a legendary road house in central New Mexico. Many people who have traveled on I-25 between Albuquerque and Las Cruces have stopped there for lunch.  Lots of folks from  southeastern New Mexico who take U.S, 380 to get to Albuquerque have stopped there as well. And people from all other parts of the state have made a special trip to feast on the legendary green chile cheeseburgers at the Owl Bar and Cafe in San Antonio, just south of Socorro.

It’s one of those places where the legend probably far surpasses what you actually eat.

When you go inside the rather obscure and largely unattractive adobe building on a dusty street corner in San Antonio, you are immediately greeted by the smell of greasy hamburgers being cooked on the grill. Once your eyes adjust to what little light there is in the dark interior,  you begin to notice the decorations on the walls — in particular the hundreds of $1, $5, $10 and even $20 bills stapled to the wall with messages written on them.

For more than 19 years. the owners of the Owl Bar and Cafe have collected the money stapled to the walls right before Christmas and given it to charity organizations.

This year,  Janice Argabright, the great granddaughter of the original owner, said they peeled $1,757 in money off the walls. It went to such charities as St. Jude’s Hospital for children, the Shriner’s hospital for children, Carrie Tingley hospital for children in Albuquerque and the New Mexico Boys and Girls Ranch.

In the 19 years they’ve been collecting the money, more than $33,000 has been  donated to charities.

Dollars collected this year came from people from almost all of the 50 united states — as far away as Alaska and Florida and from countries around the world.

As far as the tasty burgers, original owner Frank Chavez is credited with inventing them in 1945 when he splashed some hot sauce and then some green chile on a slice of cheese atop a hamburger patty. Now, it’s a staple of New Mexico cuisine, with annual contests at the New Mexico State Fair to determine which restaurant has the best one. I don’t think the Owl Bar and Cafe has won that honor recently, but you just can’t beat the atmosphere, the history and the goodwill coming your way when you stop there. And I think the burgers are still pretty tasty.

A Las Cruces man wanted to go to the El Paso airport two weeks ago but became annoyed when he couldn’t find anyone to help him get there.

He came up with a unique solution, which instead of getting him to the airport, got him hauled off to jail initially and then ultimately to a hospital for mental evaluation.

What he did was set his apartment on fire, then called the Fire Department in hopes they would offer him a ride to the airport.

“Yeah, I lit it,” he confessed to the Fire Department officials who questioned him at the scene. “I couldn’t get anyone else to come out here.”

The suspect said he was trying to get back to Chicago after being in Las Cruces only five days. He claimed he was under the influence of drugs at the time of the incident and said he lit the fire with Aqua Velva after shave lotion. I’m suspecting that the pungent fumes from the 60s vintage after shave were enough to induce a drug-like reaction.

Unfortunately, his actions resulted in four other person in the same apartment complex to be forced out of their apartments right before Christmas. I fear that the next time they smell Aqua Velva, they’ll be programmed to quickly run for shelter somewhere safe.

While my wife and I suffered through another painful Nebraska football season, we got caught up in the school’s highly successful women’s volleyball program this year. We watched every game we could get on TV and were rewarded for our faithful support when the Husker women made it to to the national championship match last Saturday against Wisconsin.

That the Husker women lost in a nail-biter of a five-set match to Wisconsin was not important in the long run. Most people probably didn’t even know the tournament and the game were on TV.

But what an uplifting experience. There was no drama over pouting players not getting enough playing time and entering the transfer portal. There were no stories about multi-million dollar coaching steals or buyouts. There were no deceptive comments about vaccination status. There was never a display of bad behavior on the playing field or court.

It was just incredibly good athletic ability on display by a group of young women who truly loved the game and their team.

I think that the athletic prowess of volleyball players far surpasses that of most other sports I’ve witnessed. They fly around the volleyball court in a syncopated precision. They smash the ball into the opponents’ court at up to 60 miles per hour. They dive and tumble on the floor to reach balls in contorted positions that would render me paralyzed. And not only are they amazing athletes, but they have more a sense of team than any other sport I’ve watched.

And at the end of each volley, whether they won it or not, they give each other high fives and were all smiles.

Four of the young Nebraska women really stood out to us. Lauren Stivrens, a senior from the Phoenix area who suffered through back surgery before she could return to the court as an All American this year. Lexi Rodriguez, a freshman All American from Illinois, who is the spark plug of the team’s defense. Did I mention she is just a freshman and is also the shortest person on the team? Nicklin Hames from Tennessee, a gum-chomping platinum blond setter who is amazing at setting up kills for her taller teammates and plays the entire game. And my favorite, Madi Kubik, from Iowa, who smashes the ball in all directions and comes back from every volley with a smile that looks like she is about ready to bust out laughing because she enjoys the game so much.

Two other freshmen, Lindsay Krause and Ally Batenhorst, are already starters and are certain to make the Huskers even more competitive next year. But as my wife pointed out, every player became our favorite at one time or another because they play so well.

Just to see these young women enjoy the game so much is worth the watch.

We’ve had great volleyball teams in our own back yard at New Mexico State University for years, and I feel sad to say I’ve never gone to one of their matches. I have friends who swear it’s the best athletic ticket in town. So we’ll go next year to watch.

But if you get a chance to watch Nebraska women’s volleyball sometime next year, please do so. As I said before, it’s just an uplifting experience.