Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

These are pictures from the three-hour bus ride ($14 I think) to Cabo San Lucas, where many people are flying into for BMEfest and then taking that same ride. The scenery is fairly nondescript because it's pretty much a desert “dead-zone” where there are no cell phone points or even radio stations. There are power lines though — the power for the region is all generated here in La Paz and then transmitted the rest of the way via high power lines.

Most of the drive looks like this — cacti as far as the eye can see, desert shrubs, and rows of mountains in the background.

Small farms (I think that's what they are) or ranch homes dot the highway. Some are deserted but most appear to have people living there.

This photo makes it look a lot more lush than it is. It's mostly dry desert, although there are oasis-like pockets full of green growth and palm trees.

This is coming into the city of Todos Santos I think. The highway is dotted with small shrines for people killed in accidents. This one isn't, but many of them are constructed with the parts of the car that killed them.

As I understand it, the highway shrines are not only symbols of the devotion of the family to their lost loved one — they're also a warning to other travelers, saying “be careful; the peligrosa signs are no joke!” It's a little disconcerting seeing a mangled bumper or the hood of a car with a rumpled, roughly body-shaped indentation wired to a fence pole with a cross sitting in front of it. It's sort of like those mangled MADD-sponsored drunk driving wrecks you see in America and Canada with a little less indignation and a little more Catholicism in the mix.

A small number of the farms are irrigated and stand out from the rest.	Cows behind a fence? How strange! You'll see cows, goats, and donkeys wandering around as if they've escaped, but they're not wild. They're all branded and owned, and the fellows you see here may well be on your dinner plate one day.	This is part of the main beach in Cabo San Lucas.	More of the beach in Cabo. This is one of the rocky parts of course; most of it is sand beach, but this is more fun to explore because it's more alive — fist size crabs are scampering all over these rocks.
If you've ever seen a tourist promo-photo of Cabo San Lucas, this arch (in the far background) is the one you'll probably see. At low tide you can walk to it, and at high tide you can sail around it.	It's cruise ship central. Every day we saw three or four big cruise ships come into the main bay, hang out for a while, and leave. They seem to put off a lot of smoke.	This satellite base-station was in one of the small towns between Cabo and La Paz. I'm assuming it supplies Internet and/or telephone service to the neighboring community. Or the guy's the biggest geek on the Baja.	Sunset on the drive home.

Cabo has a very different crowd of people than La Paz. It's very English-speaking and American tourist-oriented, so you'll see US flags hanging everywhere, and there's much more of an “ugly American” vibe to the visitors. La Paz tends to draw more of the people who want to experience Mexico (versus just somewhere warm) and stay a little longer… There's the occasional ass that'll walk into a restaurant and loudly demand, “doesn't anyone here speak American?“ but it's the exception. Most visitors here enjoy being in Mexico, and do their best to respect local customs and even stumble through a little Spanish when ordering their meals and so on.

You always meet interesting people here. On the bus ride sitting across from us was a guy from Guadalajara who was very excited to meet Canadians, because it's one of his dream destinations. I don't really think about it because these days I'm the ethnic minority, but Mexico is very mono-ethnic (culturally and racially)… At least in this region, other than tourists, it's pretty much an exclusively Hispanic population — no Asian population, no black population, no mix of European cultures (unlike cosmopolitan regions of the Hispanic world such as Buenos Aires). Anyway, of all the things he wanted to experience about Canada it was the embrace of multiculturalism and getting to live in a real world community, and I have to agree with him that's one of its perks.

There was also a narc cop, from Arizona, on the bus. He was complaining about how kids in the small college town he'd been assigned to didn't understand that when he was arresting them for pot, he was just trying to help them. He didn't want them to spend their lives in prison, but as he put it, “people have to be free to make their own decisions; they just have to learn for themselves what happens if you do drugs” — yeah, because throwing people in prison really teaches them about freedom.

He was sitting next to a retired social worker with equally idiotic views who did quite a bit of complaining about her vertigo problems. The narc had just gotten back from Iraq, not as a soldier, but as a missionary — like many other white guys down here, he's a Mormon trying to convince people to dump the Pope in exchange for Joe Smith. At the end of their conversation, her held her hands, looked deep into her eyes, and said very seriously,

“Other than your vertigo, is there anything else I can pray for?”

So the notorious Brent Moffatt is back in the news with his most ill-advised stunt yet, getting a forehead tattoo of the GoldenPalace logo (mockup above). You can click above for their press release on the subject. As much as Brent deserves nothing but malice from me for the stunts he's pulled in trying to hurt BME and its members, I really hope this is a hoax and he doesn't go through with this. Since I know he reads this blog, I'll address this directly to him: Brent, don't do this. You will regret it. I know you desperately want attention and recognition, but this one is going to hurt you in the long run.

Along those lines, I saw the funniest headline and article I've ever seen about him… I assume it's an old parody, but it's got enough tidbits that whoever wrote it obviously knows him. Excerpt:

LOCAL MORON ACHIEVES RECORD, FAILS AT LIFE.

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - With speed-metal music on his headphones and a picture of his favorite food, carrot cake, beside him, a 34-year-old Canadian pinned down the world record for body piercing on Wednesday.

"I'm pretty happy. I would've liked to do 1,000, but now that I'm done, I realize 700 is a helluva lot. And right now it looks like I've been in a car accident ... There's quite a lot of blood. Careful, I smell hepatitis!"

The previous world record-holder had 200 piercings, and was the subject of a popular song by the Tragically Hip, entitled "38 years old: never kissed a girl." The song went on to reach #11 on the Canadian Billboard Top Ten.

"I'm more nervous about the (television) cameras than the friggin' piercing," he said to a crowd of reporters.

"This is too weird: I'm not used to all this attention."

When pressed, Moffatt said he meant to say that he is "not used to all this positive attention." Negative attention, however, is something he is painfully all-too-familiar with.

"People crossing the street to avoid walking past you, nobody wanting to sit beside you on the bus, the stares when you go to the local convenience store to buy some milk and apply for work. Teenagers throwing things at you, like snowballs and bottles. Stuff like that, I'm used to by now."

Once done, he left the needles in for more than five minutes. Taking them out, he said, hurt far more than putting them in. Moffatt compared the pain to "getting your junk slammed in the trunk of a car repeatedly," something he wouldn't rule out for his next attempt at breaking a record.

Moffatt said he planned to celebrate his achievement with a long bath, a cigar and some panhandling. But would he do it again? "Sure, I'd do it again. After I forget about the pain."

But seriously Brent, don't tattoo your face with the GoldenPalace logo. I say this out of genuine concern for you, not to try and steal your desperate grab at fame. You will regret it. I suppose with the $10,100 auction having closed it may be too late to back out now, but if you can get out, get out. And GoldenPalace, you should be ashamed of yourselves, taking advantage of and abusing an unstable and troubled individual like this. I know I shouldn't care about these people, but I just hate to see something as special as facial tattoing being used like this.

I make the same warning to all who are selling their foreheads or other blatantly public skin to advertisers. It's a deal with the devil that will not serve your lives positively in the long run. Even if you think you can just “tattoo over it” or get it removed in the future, the damage runs deeper than that, both in terms of physical scarring and spiritual scarring, and you will never truly recover and it will live with you until the end of your days.