By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
BROWNSVILLE, Texas | The Rio Grande Valley's unofficial taco test is not at all scientific, but local Pachucos and their parole officers swear they can tell which tacos local women eat just by looking at their ass. Could that ever be true? That would be one wild survey for local bloggers, if only they ever left the beaten paths that so strap them.
We say the gal in the far left in denim photo above is strictly, like always, "Barbacoa tacos." Second from the left is healthy chicken, one tortilla only. Next to her and second from right, well, that one is all-lengua, with some pico de gallo. The linebacker at far right has to be greasy beef all the way.
This, of course, goes to the tastes and wants of ever-starved local Hispanic chicks. White Babes like footlong hot dogs for the most part and area Filipinas are always scrounging for "dogmeat tacos," which, of course, are hard to find in the RGV, at least on menus.
We're hip to the region's culinary trips, yes. Do we care? No, not in the least.
Everybody in the cheap-life Valley eats too damned much. This is a part of the country where the Big Ass resides unapologetically. Tacos de trompo, mi amor? Pos, si. Dale gas, cabrona. Tragatelos y despues hablamos. Like at divorce time.
We'll do fajita tacos in prime-time eateries from time to time, but never, ever, the two-tortilla kind.
That maize diet is a killer around here. One-tortilla tacos are bad enough, especially if you dare to eat them weekly. But we know some locals eat them daily. And, no, seafood tacos are not any better. Fish tacos are two words that should never be uttered together.
As for the big asses in women around here, well, it does help the all-around sale of blue jeans, but most beds are not made for the larger glutes. I've never been with a fat woman and I likely never will be, my tastes in Babes being so selective.
Next to horrible overbites, the large ass doesn't quite sell in the appearance-happy USA.
And from what we've seen in this bloated fish of a border town, things seem to be in Frito-pie order...
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We say he felt ashamed to know the guy. Is that why
Elderly-About-Town Blogger Jerry McHale dropped fellow under-achieving, white-boy blogger
Jimmy "Little Hands" Barton? It's been two weeks since
El Jerry posted any of
Dairy Neck Barton's bad-grammar stories on his blog.
The breakup was bound to happen, we said weeks ago, after both of them failed mas-que-pinche-miserably on that nutty Texas Southmost College welding nothingness they threw at the city. Both El Jerry and Jimmy Boy typed like crazed WATERGATE WANNABES while hoping their stories featuring a pair of disgruntled welding program students and a misguided administrator would, well, do something.
The blogging they offered turned out to be rising marsh gas of the sort you see in polluted resacas here.
We thought about contacting El Jerry to ask the pertinent question, but decided El Jerry had seen in Barton what we always saw in him - inferior news reporting, pathetic writing, a lard-ass guy forever chasing a relay of barking dogs down the street.
Oh, well. Butterball Jimmy Boy is back in Brownsville after losing his sense of smell in
pig-shitting Iowa. As he has told his dwindling readership (another blogger told us
Barton's blog is dead last in readership), his current wife split for
Nevada after she put his boring ass on a plane to the
Mexican border.
Methinks there is something more to this weird separation.
Unfortunately, eternally-insecure Barton will never admit Sweet Ana, his chubby, ever-smirking Filipina sweetheart, may be in the mood for a change of evening scenery. You think, Brownsville?
Inquiring idle minds want to know, but not us. As most know, we don't cater to people dressed as prairie chickens carrying pro-immigration signs. Theirs, to us, is like a dream without an obvious explanation.
We don't give a shit about less-than-pretty Third World romance.
As for the Welding Recital disaster, we're told El Jerry and Loose-kneed Barty had a testy telephone conversation to discuss the sorry ending of their silly, kinda blown out-of-proportion reporting on Texas Southmost College this past Summer.
"I can't hear you," McHale said into the cellphone.
"Is this better?" came back from Barton.
He froze in anticipation of an angered El Jerry's next words: "Are you going to do something about it?"
"Yes, I am.
Well, Maria, neither of the two untrained stooge-newsmen wrote another word about TSC...
POSTSCRIPT:...Slothy, failed lifer Barton has shelved his weekly feature "STORMY MONDAY," the one he breathlessly introduced with gallons of spewed saliva and tuba-only symphony of fat jelly-belly laughter. Uh, it simply vanished, as most everything to do with this unaccomplished Dairy Neck Dude. Oh, he replaced it yesterday with two incoherent, 20-inch turds on Satan and Santa. He's heady.
Yeah, punk-savvy in the same manner of that high school drop-out Leon Spinks.
Spinks made it to the 10th grade - Did Jimmy Boy get that far?
He'll never say...
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He keeps disdaining the freakin' fake cowboy look favored by his opponents in that too-quiet Cameron County Sheriff's race. Ronnie Saenz (shown in photo above) is going with the conservative suit & tie look. Go to hell, he seems to be saying to candidates Jesus Rosas Jr and actual sitting Sheriff Eric Garza, both dime store, hat-adorned cowboys.
Mustachioed Saenz may be onto something, as he could be thinking Rosas is merely a silly & stupid Garza wannabe and Garza merely a laughable Wyatt Earp shadow.
Is there a public debate in this race?
We're not endorsing Ronnie, but he is standing apart from the other two Mexicans seeking the post.
Rosas, it says here, would only show his stuttering, mumbling diction and Eric Garza his staccato tone of unsure whimsy. Ronnie Saenz would be a literal Rhodes Scholar next to those two!
His only apparent bummer is that he for some damned weird is advertising his rookie campaign via Elderly-About-Town Blogger Jerry McHale's star-crossed blog. El Jerry hasn't actually helped very many local pols across the finish line.
It says here that Ronnie Saenz should save those $40 and use the cash to get a professional trim on that ranging, worm-like mustache. It's beginning to look very much like Tiny Tim's armpit hair.
Hey, it's the little things that often make the difference in a Three-Mexicans political race...
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That's Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino in color photo above. Does he look comfy and happy to you, voter? Well, he is.
The Democrat is the best-known politician in the whole county, eclipsing the popularity of Grandma Sofia Benavides, the county commissioner who couldn't buy bad news about her if she had a million pesos to blow on going-nowhere blog publicity.
Trevino is both admired and hated.
He's been mayor of Brownsville and, well, county judge. Who knows what his legacy as a public servant will be, but know this: we couldn't tell you. Eddie's just been there, like the proverbial bump-on-a-log, the very essence of a hard-to-cure, itching boil on a part of the back hard to get to with either hand.
Who are this guy's best friends? Rumors in English and rumores in Spanish chase him across the county damned near daily. Does he have a healthy life beyond presiding over the ever-sedated county commissioner's court?
There is no scandal brewing around him and the local bloggers seem to leave him alone (unlike Sheriff Eric Garza) most of the time. A charmed life? Well, yeah! Eddie Trevino is okay with his standing in politics. He's Da Judge and you're not.
The city's bloggers have apparently bought into Trevino's same-altitude-day-after-day-after-day incumbency, none dragging him across the Word Pusher coals.
To the bloggers, Eddie Trevino is as reliable as Kellogg's Rice Krispies in the morning. And it appears Trevino is buying it himself...
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Once, she was referred to as Helen Of Trey, Trey as in former Mayor
Juan "Trey" Mendez, who supported her rise to city manager and that outsized annual salary that would pay for an entire neighborhood's income over in poor
Las Prietas.
Helen Ramirez, yes.
Well, the promotion from assistant city manager to the top post did not sit well with less-wealthy bloggers, all of whom jumped like trained chimps for days while writing critical stories about her. Not that she cared. The check was going into her bank account and, well, bloggers were to be tolerated like flies are tolerated here.
There's been nothing about Sweet Helen for weeks.
Has she now been accepted, and is everybody okay with her huge, huge salary, said to be about $300,000 annually?
Well, apparently.
We sort of picture her working her butt off daily, heading home with a briefcase full of papers, enjoying a spectacular dinner and then sipping on some fine wine before soaking in the bathtub for hours to ease the aches and pains and aggravations of hanging out at a border town's cheap City Hall. Yeah, soothing music in the background, just a bit of steam in the warm water rising to the tilted window from a growing number of scented bubbles.
Elsewhere in town, the little-shits bloggers worried about their next meal...
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We've known plenty of news writers and a few writers of fiction in our time. Most of them have been genial dudes and women humbly going about their work. One, a friend of mine when I wrote for The New York Post, was the editor and novelist Pete Hamill, a real New Yorker.
Pete could regale you with stories about his craft as a reporter and editor. His book "A Drinking Life" about his days as a writer was a top seller. The memoir was published in 1994. Hamill also edited the English-language Mexico City News in the 1980s. Pete died in 2020 at age 85. A "Quintessential New York Journalist," is how the city's newspapers described him in obituaries.
I mention Hamill here because Brownsville has the Rio Grande Valley's Top Writer Wannabe - unaccomplished blogger Jerry McHale (wearing bowling shirt in photo above).
It's something rare for an accomplished, self-respecting writer to praise his own work, but this guy McHale is about as subtle as an exploding fart at a funeral. At least twice a month or so, McHale types a self-praising post on his blog. And every time, he tells the story about how he started writing at the lowly Brownsville Herald, and about how he caught the writing bug listing - check this out! - sports results agate.
"When you begin a writing career, there are constant challenges," he wrote yesterday, without laughing.
Then he gleefully tells his readers he has written 20 books, only not one has ever made it to a bookstore or even school/college library. McHale's "books" are self-published on Amazon, where such efforts go to die, which is why he never tells you how many he's sold.
We do wonder why he does it. But we too notice no one else ever mentions, much less praises, his blog offerings or his "20 books," a pile one mutual friend once told me is the same story 20 times over, McHale's bent on writing centers on the ragged Mexican border, loose women in menstrual pads, wanton sex, blackout drinking and mangled Spanish sprinkled throughout the text, as if to substantiate his side-door entry into cheap Border Life.
We, the press in the Big Apple, used to gather at a bar in Manhattan called The Lion's Head near Madison Square Garden. Hamill and renowned NY Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin held court for the young scribes pretty much nightly. I remember neither of the two ever throwing out their greatness, as Wannabe McHale does so cavalierly.
Indeed, Hamill and Breslin loved to talk about stories of the day by young reporters at the bar. I recall that clearly, as it sort of worked against their reputations of being hard-edged reporters forever out to sink the mayor or some other errant politician.
Real writers don't talk about their work.
Blogger McHale does it all the time...Big clue there, yes...
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The worst candidate for anything in the Rio Grande Valley now has a photo of himself with
Rick Perry. Big, useless endorsement there,
Greg Kunkle!
The Kunk is a candidate for the
Republican Party's nomination in that
34th Congressional District seat held at present by
Democrat Vicente Gonzalez.
Look at The Kunk's photo, 'cause it won't be long before he drops out of the race.
He's woefully behind Vato-At-Large Mauro Garza who is woefully behind favorite Mayra Flores. We long ago lost fourth candidate Dr. Laura E. Cisneros for a litany of good reasons, like that she has no clue if she advertises on lying local blogs.
The Kunk never had a winning spiel, it says here. Why he's running remains the mystery, only no one cares to find out what that reason may be. Vanity, yes. And dumbness, too. Sprinkled with idleness and lonesome whatevers.
Fear not, 34th, The Kunk is gone...
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Thanksgiving Turkey Taco out...
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