And how's my humor blog looking?
- Everything There Is To Say About Holding Bottles, last week's bit of long-form nonsense.
- Gasoline Alley is trying to make a fool of me as my What's Going On In essay from last Sunday got redone in three panels by the strip itself.
- Statistics Saturday: The World’s Top Canadas which is inspired by our trip, actually, and gift shops where a bunch of Canada-themed key holders looked to
bunny_hugger as if they were trophies for being Canada. - What's Going On In Mark Trail? Did Mark Trail leave JJ Looper for dead or what? April – June 2019 and see how seamlessly I worked in the one panel where Mark Trail has shown coatis rummaging around to my plot recaps there.
- Statistics June: What, If Anything, People Wanted To Read That I Wrote in the monthly essay that's surprisingly popular given that it doesn't try to be funny and it's informative only about itself.
- Popeye's Island Adventures is really calling my bluff here and my whole review-a-thing-on-Tuesdays gimmick threatens to collapse.
- In Which Maybe I’ve Overcome Words Entirely since spellcheck seems to have decided to mess with me instead of working.
- The Quick Start Setup Guide To Your New Laptop Computer Purchase Experience, this week's bit of nonsense.
Now let's get back to the Cuicuilco Pyramid. And particularly the small, three-room museum explaining the place.
This is what I was up against in puttering around the museum. I absolutely don't blame them not translating every piece of Museum Spanish into English, and I did feel like I was able to at least follow the important points here: that during the last Ice Age, there were still raccoons (mapache). Also megafauna.
Artifacts of the times. I did think I was doing all right reading the plaques, thanks partly from context and partly from a Spanish Dictionary I had on my iPod, although somehow I was defeated by the description of the materials and couldn't work out ``asta de cérvido'', thinking it was a bone rather than, you know, deer antlers. I can get ``asta'' not being in the little not-online dictionary, but ``cérvido'' is a mystery.
And again I understand the overall gist of this, but I've been culturally trained to think ``El Hombre Chimalhuacán'' is a really cool hero.
So, now, the pyramid here was built of volcanic rocks. And its period of use seems to have come to an end with a volcanic eruption. So here's a vast picture --- it's about six feet tall and maybe thirty feet long --- depicting what the end of that might have looked like and it's a powerful thought.
Less powerful thoughts: human artefacts of the area. I believe each shelf represents a different social era as the archeologists have worked it out.
Pots from different eras --- you can see some labelled, like, Cuicuilco IV or Cuicuilco II --- although I couldn't understand the signs explaining what archeologists see as significant differences and I don't understand the field well enough to work it out for myself.
And a map of the vicinity of Mexico City (center), and the wildlife that could be expected by the people who settled the area. Of course my eye was drawn to the cacomixtle and the conjeo.
And hey, see? They mention how settlers could expect to see coatis (tejón; yes, the word normally translates to badgers, but it's also used in Mexican Spanish for coatis, and note that it's listed immediately after raccoons).
And a broader map showing where the pyramid is in relation to the lake which used to be Mexico City.
Stepping back outside to see the pyramid again.
Family taking a bit of a break in the afternoon sun.
Archery! A handful of people were using empty space to practice this Saturday afternoon.
Trivia: Abbott Kinney was a tobacco mogul whose factory in New York City's Chelsea district hand-rolled eighteen million cigarettes per week until 1892, when a fire started by a suspended gasolier destroyed the building and its entire stock. Kinney moved to Southern California afterwards. Source: Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, Simon Winchester.
Currently Reading: DC Comics Before Superman: Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's Pulp Comics, Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson.
PS: How June 2019 Treated My Mathematics Blog, a scathing indictment of a blog I forgot to do anything with last month.