As if life weren't baffling enough at sea level, news came last week that, for the first time, astrophysicists had photographed a black hole, several billion times the size of our sun and located 55 million light-years away from the earth. A light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles.Here's looking at you, black hole.Then, about a …
Tag: gays
Waking up to Donald Trump
These days perusing the headlines first thing in the morning often is like taking that first sip of coffee and discovering someone has laced it with Tabasco sauce. You gag. You spit. You say "What the hell?" or worse.Wednesday and Thursday were Tabasco days. Via one of his early morning tweets, which have come to …
A memorable gay day in Mexico City
If we may wade into stereotypes for a second, the organization of Saturday's Gay Pride parade in Mexico City was typically gay—that is to say, rather chaotic—and its punctuality typically Mexican—it started a couple of hours late. Next to the big-city Gay Pride parades in the U.S. that over the years have acquired glitz and …
Sidelined during Holy Week
Except perhaps for the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Roman Catholic Church's grip on Mexico and particularly San Miguel de Allende, is never firmer than during Holy Week.It actually begins a week before Palm Sunday, when hundreds of chanting pilgrims come to San Miguel carrying a statue of a flagellated Jesus—ghoulishly bloody …
Home for the last time
The heat, exhausting, and magnified by constant rain and the lack of even a wisp of a breeze, made our third and last day in Santa Clara a long one. Sweat stuck to our skins, and in turn, our clothes to the sweat.For me it'd been an emotional visit and for Stew a revealing one. He'd …
Murders, he wrote
During the past five weeks two Americans, or maybe three, were found murdered in San Miguel, adding to the smog of bad news and publicity already enveloping the town. In an American or Canadian city of comparable size, two or three homicides coming so close together would have raised public questions or perhaps just one: …
El Rancho Santa Clara 