The foundation of this story is basic New Mexico politics. An elected official in Rio Arriba County acting badly.

It starts with the conviction last week of Rio Arriba County Sheriff James Lujan for two felony counts for helping friend avoid arrest and pressuring one of his deputies not to tell other deputies about the incident. I won’t go into to any details, but you can look it up elsewhere if you’re interested in “politics as usual” in New Mexico.

But for Lujan, it was his second trial. The first, held in Rio Arriba County in the county seat of Tierra Amarilla, resulted in hung jury. The next trial was moved to Santa Fe, where the conviction was secured.

The decision to move the second trial to Santa Fe was made by District Judge Kathleen McGarry who granted a motion for change of venue. She noted that her decision was based in part on an “utterly inappropriate” outdoor cookout staged by Lujan supporters in the parking lot of the Tierra Amarilla County Courthouse during the trial. Tailgating during the trial as it were.

Those of us who are really old at this point may remember the June 5, 1967, raid on this specific Tierra Amarilla Courthouse that resulted in several days of chaos in northern New Mexico. The circumstances involved individuals who were charged with a takeover of the Echo Amphitheater visitors’ site between Espanola and Tierra Amarilla. They were scheduled for arraignment at the courthouse that day. Their actions were prompted by claims from a fiery Hispanic leader named Reies Lopez Tijerina  that Mexican/Hispanic land grants in northern New Mexico were stolen by the federal government.

The takeover of the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla resulted in the state government moving in with heavily armed vehicles to secure the courthouse.  A good colleague of mine from my journalistic past, Larry Calloway, was held at gunpoint in a telephone booth outside the courthouse that day when the raid took place. He was trying to phone in a story about the arraignments. Those who were charged were never arraigned. It’s a long interesting story that I may write more about in future blogs.

These things seem to only happen in New Mexico, which is why I love this state. But I doubt there were any tailgaters that day in 1967 — only angry and terrified individuals. 

First the details. A man riding a moped in a long, heavy black overcoat was reported to be terrorizing the town of Tucumcari earlier this month by spraying unsuspecting citizens and their vehicles with bear spray.

Police issued a warning to citizens after several reports of attacks by the man on the Moped. On Nov. 12, the bear spray bomber stuck again, this time spritzing a truck being driven downtown by a visitor from the small nearby town of Grady. The truck driver pursued the man, only to be sprayed by the perp when he chased him down a few blocks away . The man with the bear spray then hopped on his Moped and managed to open the passenger door of the truck where he then sprayed a woman inside. She was taken to the hospital for treatment.

Police were alerted and gave chase. The man putting along on his Moped was eventually caught by police, but during the attempted arrest, the officer was slugged as the suspect grabbed the officer’s taser. Fortunately, the disabling device was not turned on and could not be used on the officer. A good Samaritan joined the fray and helped the officer subdue the suspect.

The man has been charged with four felony counts for his assault on the officer.

Which brings me to the following questions:

1. Why would someone be carrying bear spray in Tucumcari, where I suspect the closest bear is several hundred miles away in the Pecos Wilderness.
2. Why would someone choose a Moped as an escape vehicle.
3. And if your heart is intent on living a life of crime by spritzing bear spray on unsuspecting citizens, then why would you not try to be more incognito than toodling around on a wimpy Moped wearing a dark heavy overcoat in a small town? Duh, don’t you think the citizenry would quickly note your presence?

The good news is that, as far as I have been able to determine, there have been no actual bear attacks in Tucumcari recently. 

For the past several weeks, my wife and I have been updating our living room with new upholstery for the couch, new carpeting and  different paint on the walls. As we sorted through hundreds of color chips for paint and many scrapbooks for upholstery and carpet, I became fascinated by the dizzying array of names for the colors you can select.

In the end, we selected a color called “magic dove” for the cushions on our couch, “calm” for the carpet color and “anew gray” for the accent walls. The rest of the walls are what I would call a “slightly off white” color, although I can’t find the official title of the color that we have used for years on most of our interior walls.

For our accent walls, we wanted something that was what I would call a light taupe — I would describe it as “a warm light gray trending toward tan.” I’m not sure the “anew gray” quite got what I wanted, but it’s on the walls now and I don’t think I’m interested in redoing it.

As we looked over the various shades of “taupe.” we found these breathlessly named offerings: “rumor,” “stone lion,” Italian straw,” “fortitude,” “mercurial,” hibernate,” “whirlwind,” “sweater weather” and my favorite, “skipping rocks.” There were literally hundreds more.

I recently read an article about jobs that most people don’t know exist, like creating bar code designs or naming medicines. Here’s another one — somebody, somewhere, has the job of coming up with names for each of the thousands and thousands of color samples for various fabric, paint and carpeting offerings.

So I’ve decided to try my hand in naming some shades of taupe that I did not see on the color chips. Here goes:

“Topiary Taupe” — with a touch of green to mimic those sculptured bushes.

“Tuscan Taupe” — with splotches of marinara red sauce and pesto green sauce.

“Torrential Taupe” —  tending toward a blue with darker gray, as in a rain storm.

“Tawdry Taupe” — a bit more blushing pink cast.

“Whipped Cream Tauping” — an almost white shade that smells like Redi-Whip.

“Trucker’s Taupe” — mixed with a light scent of diesel fumes and a sooty look.

“Temporary Taupe” — the color fades away shortly after you paint it on the wall.

“Iso-taupe” — gives off a faint green glow at night.

And my favorite: “Warm Light Gray Trending Toward Tan.”

While poking around on the web I stumbled across a humorous quote about New Mexico that prompted me to look for other things that have been said about our state by both people who live/grew up here and those who visit or just pass through.

The one that caught my eye was made by Lew Wallace, territorial governor of New Mexico from 1878 to 1881 and author of “Ben Hur.” He said:

“Every calculation based on experience elsewhere fails in New Mexico.”

You may have heard some of these others before but I think they’re worth repeating and pondering.

“I know aliens from other worlds are required to arrive in New Mexico, but why stay there?” —  the late film critic Roger Ebert.

“I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.” — author D.H. Lawrence.

“This remote New Mexico town (Roswell) had hit the jackpot. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t a shred of credible evidence to support the claim that a flying saucer crashed here. It didn’t matter that there were no credible witnesses to alien bodies.” — the late news anchor Peter Jennings.

“If mob law is going to rule, better dismiss, judge, sheriff, etc., and let’s all take chances alike. I expect to be lynched in going to Lincoln [New Mexico.] Advise persons never to engage in killing.” — legendary outlaw Billy the Kid.

“When Brian (Urlacher, former NFL star from Lovington) told me he grew up in New Mexico, I told him I thought it is cool that people from other countries play football. He corrected me on my geography and agreed to sit down with me anyway.” — formerly NFL quarterback and TV commentator Terry Bradshaw.

“What most people don’t understand is that UFOs are on a cosmic tourist route. That’s why they’re always seen in Arizona, Scotland, and New Mexico. Another thing to consider is that all three of those destinations are good places to play golf. So there’s possibly some connection between aliens and golf.” — rock star Alice Cooper.

“I lived in New Mexico until I was 17, and honestly I’ve been homesick ever since I left.” — author Liza Campbell.

“Well, New Mexico ain’t bad. People there, they treat you kind” — a line from the song “White Freightliner Blues” by Lyle Lovett.

“Poor New Mexico. So close to Texas, so far from Heaven.” — author Manuel Armijo.

And the best one of all, from the man who probably has the most memorable quotes, Mark Twain:

“Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.”

Many of my readers know I’m a fly fishing fan, although I don’t get out as much as I used to. I’ve been particularly interested in the recovery of the once endangered and now threatened Gila trout.

As a member of the Gila-Rio Grande Chapter of Trout Unlimited, I was asked by the organization to write an Op-Ed earlier this month on the recent introduction of legislation to declare large parts of the Gila watershed — both Gila and San Francisco Rivers — as part of the national Wild and Scenic Rivers system. The legislation was sponsored by New Mexico’s two U.S. Senators, Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Lujan.

I’ve attached a link to the article, which appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of the Las Cruces Sun-News. Having written many articles over the years in my previous life as a journalist about efforts to save the Gila trout, I was particularly pleased to have this opportunity to continue to write on the subject. I hope the link works.

https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/opinion/2021/11/14/support-wild-and-scenic-designation-southwest-rivers/8596249002/

My  regular readers might remember a blog I wrote earlier this year about quirky headlines that were not fully vetted before they appeared in print.

I found one in last week’s Albuquerque Journal worth adding to that list. It read:

“Pension board to probe member”

This was disturbing on many levels, but certainly memorable.

I thought of adding more comments but decided against it in the interest of good taste.

In the meantime, I’m wondering if the headline writer has had to undergo remedial training. Stay tuned, and I’m sure I will find more of these types of headlines to share with you in the future.

Police in Clovis were summoned to a local Catholic church in 2006 to investigate a burglary. Near the church, they came across an inebriated man wandering in the street.

When they questioned him, he admitted he had broken into the church with a hammer and drank a large quantity of communion wine. Police also found about $100 in cash on him.

After that, his further recollection of events became a bit fuzzy. 

Police checked out the church, where they found the empty communion wine bottle and the church offertory box smashed by a hammer  — apparently the source of the cash.  Then they found the hammer apparently used in the crime near the offertory box.

At that point, one of the officers noticed a round indentation on the man’s forehead. The indentation was a perfect match of the business end of the hammer found in the church.

 

That discovery and the empty wine bottle seemed to go a long way to explain the perp’s lack of recall of events. However, it was never determined at which point the self-inflicted bash to the head was administered. And no one could explain the most important question — WHY?

The year 1999, where many were fearing the arrival of an apocalyptic Y2K, seems to have somehow adversely affected critters in New Mexico. Consider these incidents:

A female wolf who was introduced during a Defenders of Wildlife news conference in Albuquerque, did not seem to generate much goodwill during her stage time. The wolf managed to appear aloof during the entire press conference, sniffing boots and jumping up on the speaker’s table, then promptly piddling on the plush carpeting at the Hyatt Regency hotel.

In Carlsbad, a 250-pound bear jumped over a fence at the city zoo and led police on an elusive chase for hours. As a police cruiser was patrolling the street for the bear, officers did a double take when they noticed the animal trotting alongside their vehicle. The bruin quickly scrambled up a nearby tree and was tranquilized and returned to its home.

In a case of confused identity, a bighorn sheep roaming around a pasture near Cimarron became amorously interested in the horses in the pasture. So lusty in his pursuit of the horses, the sheep drove two of them into a fence, whereupon he was captured and relocated to the Manzano Mountains. Game and Fish officials were hopeful he would find a more compatible partner and kindle a romance in that area.

In Taos, a one-ton Angus-Limousin bull escaped from a nearby ranch and began terrorizing the downtown.  He managed to dent a police car, knocked over a cowboy, frightened some tourists, wandered into a hardware store and dented yet another vehicle before he could be zapped with a tranquilizer gun. The first shot didn’t calm down the animal, so a second dose had to be administered before he was loaded into a horse trailer and unceremoniously hauled back to his home.

And finally, a story of invaders. People apparently tired of their pet goldfish dumped them into Quemado lake in western New Mexico. Apparently grasping the fact that their life was no longer limited by an eight-inch glass bowl, the goldfish managed to grow and reproduce with reckless abandon, threatening the trout population in the lake. Game and Fish Department officials instituted a program to eradicate the thousands of fish and return it to a mostly trout environment.

As one fisheries expert explained it, “Goldfish are like the people who like to hang out in smoky bars and get really friendly and multiply. Trout are the guys who like to go outside and have a beer by themselves.”

I’ve written several blogs over the past couple of years under the general heading of “burritos behaving badly.” I don’t know why I find burritos to be an amusing topic, but you’ll just have to put up with it as an off-bubble glitch in my personality. This blog focuses on a personal burrito adventure, conducted in the interest of science.

On a recent trip to my local burrito joint on South Main, I glanced at the menu even though I had already ordered a gastronomic bomb that my digestive system could tolerate. And there it was on the menu: “NEW. WOLVERINE. $10.94. Brisket, potato, green chile, bacon, milanesa, cheese.” A burrito for more than $11 (with tax) for Pete’s sake!!! And it’s not even from the trendy Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe or one carefully crafted by culinary masters Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse or Giada De Laurentis.

With a name like “Wolverine,” how could a guy with a reputation for eating disgusting things pass up a taste test? And to be truthful, I was short on blog topics at the time.

“So do many people order these?” I asked the woman behind the counter who was wearing her required “Body by Burrito” T-shirt uniform.

“Well, no, not really,” she said. 

That should have been my first clue to back away from the experiment.

Then I asked her what the ingredient “milenesa” was. She pointed to a metal tub with something reddish colored and lumpy simmering on the grill. She said she didn’t know exactly what it was. I looked it up. Wikipedia identified it as “a South American variation of Italian cotoletta or schnitzel, where generic types of meat” are used to make it. 

“Generic types of meat” should have been another clue.

I watched it being made, and I think she got distracted and forgot the bacon and the green chile. 

Another clue.

I carried it out of the store to my car, impressed by its heft. When I got home, I weighed it on our food scale — 1.097 pounds.

 

Then I ate it for lunch. As I mentioned, I could not detect any bacon or green chile and the “generic types of meat” ingredient did not lend any clue as to what kind of animal had been sacrificed to make it.

You may remember the guy who wrote a book several years ago about eating only McDonald’s food for an entire year in which he gained an enormous amount of weight. Maybe I thought my experiment might result in a book deal. Nope — one burrito was enough. I did, however, feel his pain for the rest of the day and well into the next morning. The burrito seemed to swell up inside me after I ate it. It wasn’t terrible, but its taste wasn’t memorable.

So, as a self-appointed food critic, I can recommend that you stay away from the “Wolverine.” Order my personal favorite, “The Undertaker” which was discovered by my son a few years ago.  (Maybe they could sell the Wolverine at the “Big House” stadium in Ann Arbor every fall when Michigan plays football there.)

Oh, and by the way, if you want a brisket burrito, our other nearby Mexican food outlet famous for its mystery cheese sells one for just $4.50 and can add green chile, potato, bacon and exotic cheese for just a buck more. You can add your own milenesa if you can figure out how to make it.  For starters, there’s a roadkill squirrel on a nearby street in the neighborhood.

In July, a man entered a Walgreen’s in Las Cruces, jumped up on the check out counter, demanded money from the cash register and then reached in his pocket to brandish — well, not a gun or knife but a screwdriver.

The tool-wielding robber told the cashier at the counter that the store owed him money. The cool-headed cashier said he couldn’t open the cash register and suggested the man speak with the store manager.

The manager was summoned and the would-be robber then demanded a pack of cigarettes. Again, the cashier stalled the situation and told the perp that he couldn’t sell him cigarettes unless he showed him a driver’s license proving he was old enough for the purchase.  The manager showed up at that point and said he couldn’t refund what the robber said he was owed.  Apparently, the robber saw through the ruse at this point, grabbed a pack of smokes and bolted for the door without producing his driver’s license or paying for the cigarettes.

He was arrested a short time later, proving once again that smoking is hazardous to your well being.

A recent story made me wonder what kind of basic training applicants for the police department in Portales is required. It must not have included basic chemistry.

Police reported that a guest at a local motel complained that when he turned on a faucet in his bathroom, a shard of methamphetamine shot out of it and struck him in the eye. 

Drugs on tap? Well no, actually it was just a piece of salt from a malfunctioning water softener at the hotel. The faulty water softener also managed to send some of the sodium chloride into the ice making machine.

However, when the incident was first reported, police were so convinced that the crystal object was an illegal drug that they shut down the motel, called in a hazmat team and tested the city’s water supply. They feared a large amount of meth had mysteriously made its way into the eastern New Mexico city’s water supply. The suspected injection of the drug and the investigation to protect Portales citizens was proudly featured on the department’s Facebook page.

When the lab analysis of the substance was reported as being common table salt, the police department had no further comment and there was no more reference to the incident by the agency on its Facebook page. Well, except for a post by one follower who opined: “No wonder the water bill was so high.”

I spotted this fireworks combination pack a couple of weeks ago while traveling along I-10 east of Deming at the Bowlin’s Akela Flats store. The store has all kinds of interesting and unusual (some might say tacky) kitsch for sale, none of which I wanted except possibly for this. It’s the largest fireworks combo pack I’ve ever seen. 

For only $799, you can have the Godfather package of fireworks. Among the individual pyrotechnic marvels are “Frat Party,” “La Famiglia,” Dragon’s Breath,” “Shark Bite,” “Spider Web,” “The Freak” and “God Bless America.” 

I don’t think I can legally shoot any of these off in my neighborhood, but if you think you can get away with it where you live, let me know and I might split the cost with you. 

You may have been following recent news stories about the arrest of two Americans for espionage in a scheme to pass nuclear submarine secrets to the Russians. The plan might have worked except that the “Russian agents” turned out to be American counter-intelligence officers. 

I found this interesting because the oddball method used to transfer the top secrets was not unlike one which played out almost 75 years ago in New Mexico.

In the most recent case, secrets were passed to the faux Russian agents in the form of a memory chip enclosed in a chewing gum wrapper. There was also a report that another set of documents in a memory chip were inserted in a peanut butter sandwich and passed to the agents.

On June 2, 1945, Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist turned Russian spy who had been working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, met with his Russian contact, Harry Gold. The two met at a small bridge over the Santa Fe River where Fuchs passed the first set of atomic bomb secrets to Gold.  The bridge was torn down long ago for construction of the Paseo de Peralta loop around downtown Santa Fe. It was similar in design to the still existing Delgado Street bridge in Santa Fe, shown in the photograph below. (For many years, I was told this was the bridge where the secrets were passed.) Fuchs went on to pass more secrets to Gold, including some regarding development of the hydrogen bomb. Fuchs eventually confessed to espionage in 1950 and was convicted and served nine years in prison before he was released, whereupon he relocated in the German Democratic Republic, then part of the Soviet Union. 

Fuchs’ handler, Gold, also acquired secrets from a machinist on the Manhattan Project, David Greenglass. Greenglass’s sister was Ethel Rosenberg, who along with her husband Julius Rosenberg, were also Soviet Union spies and the first American citizens to be executed for espionage for the passing of atomic bomb secrets to the USSR.

When the Rosenbergs were on trial, it was revealed that a pre-arranged code involving two raggedly cut parts of a Jell-O box was used to verify identities of the agents, Greenglass and Gold. The transfer of the documents occurred in the Albuquerque home of Greenglass. 

So before you try that coconut Bavarian cream Jello-O recipe, make sure there’s nothing “chippy” inside the box. 

Last week, police in Albuquerque were able to recover a stolen vehicle using a “Tile” tracking device attached to the SUV.

Police were notified by the SUV owners that the vehicle had been stolen from their property. Using an app associated with the tracking device, Police were able to begin following the vehicle. When it was finally stopped, police arrested two people and found a stash of illegal drugs and a gun inside it.

The woman suspect in the case told police she had been walking “for a while” in the vicinity of the vehicle. She said she had become “tired” from walking so much and, well, just decided to take it so she didn’t have to walk any more.

Which proves what your mother probably told you about avoiding making important decisions when you are too tired.