My trip to the Northwest was originally planned for July 2020. I bought a Mexico City to Vancouver ticket from Aeromexico in February 2020, which was before the pandemic started. I postponed it a couple of times. Then, Aeromexico told me that I had to make a specific booking by the end of April 2021, So I booked it for September, and for the duration of 40 days, in case a quarantine was required. Three months later, the news came that visitors to Canada who were fully vaccinated would no longer be required to quarantine, so I thought, "good".

A few days prior to the flight, I started making the required preparations. One of them was completing the online ArriveCAN form, and that gave me the first sign of trouble. One of the questions was, what type of vaccination did you receive? One of the entries on the drop-down was Sinovac, which was the vaccination I got. I selected it, and was then informed that Sinovac is not one of the vaccinations approved by the Canadian government.

I got the two Sinovac jabs in March and April. It's important to understand (and the Health Canada employees that I dealt with either didn't understand, or, more likely, didn't care) that I had no choice in this matter. I showed up to receive the vaccinations at a certain time and place, and had to accept whichever vaccination was being dispensed at that time and place. At that time, Mexico was also dispensing the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, which do have Canadian approval, and it was the equivalent of a dice roll that I ended up with the unapproved one. There were two chances in three that I would have gotten an Canadian-approved one.

As I said, the non-approved status of Sinovac was new information, and there was no possibility of getting a different vaccination prior to my flight. Even if I had known a month earlier that Sinovac was not acceptable, I don't know if getting re-vaccinated with a different vaccine would have been a good idea.

On to the plane flight on September 11. It arrived at 9:15 PM. After waiting in line in Customs for an hour, I showed the Customs guy my passport, the official Mexican government-issued vaccination certificate, the result of the PCR test I had taken the previous day (which, of course, was negative), and the ArriveCAN registration number. He told me that I had to see one of the Health Canada employees that was wearing a red vest. She gave me the bad news: I would have to quarantine for 14 days.
The issue was, where? My idea was, I had a reservation at an inexpensive hotel in Kamloops a few days later. So, I phoned this place. (This is a good argument for the indispensability of cell phones.) First, I apologized profusely for calling him at 11 PM. Then I said that there was a change in plans, and could I quarantine there? He said that his policy was a maximum stay of five days. I handed the phone to the woman in the red vest so that they could discuss whether his place was acceptable. The result was, the woman in the red vest insisted that the 14 days had to be spent in one place. She was insisting that I say in Health Canada's facility. So, I said, how much would that cost? The answer was, nothing. (Note that if she had agreed to my Kamloops idea, Canada's taxpayers would not have been paying for my quarantine.)

I recently read Eminent Hipsters, and autobiography by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. I highly recommend it if you are a fan of his music.

Like any music biography, it goes into musical influences. In Fagen's case, there was a major surprise; one of his major influences was the black-and-white TV series Peter Gunn.

"Peter Gunn" aired from 1958 to 1961, and the episodes were a half hour. It was created and partially written by Blake Edwards, who later became famous for the Pink Panther films. It starred Craig Stevens as Peter Gunn, a private detective. The co-star was Lola Albright, who played Edie Hart, a singer in Mother's, a cabaret frequently visited by Gunn. Gunn and Hart had a sexual relationship, unusual for television is those days. Gunn also visited an underground club frequented by beatniks.

Albright was beautiful, and a good actress, but most of all, she was an excellent singer, and that's what takes me to the point of this article. There's music all the way through the series. There would be a band playing whenever Gunn visited Mother's, and Hart often got to do a song. (This was not unusual ca. 1960; for an example, read up on Dorothy Provine.)

All of the original music in the series was composed by Henry Mancini, and performed by the Henry Mancini Orchestra. If you're familiar with Mancini, the first tunes you would probably think of are "The Pink Panther Theme", "Moon River", and "Days of Wine and Roses". Good ones, of course, but Mancini had a jazz background with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, and jazz was a good fit for the film noir atmosphere of "Peter Gunn". One especially remarkable tune that Mancini came up with was the theme music:

ABBA House is a shelter for Central American migrants located in Celaya, in the Mexican State of Guanajuato. It is one of 57 such shelters in Mexico. It has been in existence for five years, and provided food and shelter for 25,000 people during that time.

ABBA House serves both migrants in transit and long-tern residents. Migrants usually stay for three days, then move on to the next shelter. They get a roof over their head, meals, and hot showers. When they leave, they are given a two-day supply of food. At this time, most of the transients are coming from Honduras; the rest come from Guatemala and El Salvador.

Residents are refugees who have some sort of disability which requires long-term support. Many of these residents are amputees, the result of freight train accidents. One such amputee is Alan, from the Department of Cortés, Honduras. He has a wife and two daughters. He is 51 years old, and has been at ABBA House for nearly a year. He had a very serious injury due to a fall from a freight train, and his right leg was amputated below the knee. He doesn't remember any of the details of the fall; he was found by the Red Cross, and he was fortunate that they got him to a hospital in time to save his life. This injury was not healing well, and after a number of consultations, the decision was made two months ago to do a second amputation above the knee. Now it is healing very well, and he will be in rehab within the next two months. He speaks English, and is popular among the volunteers. He has a good sense of humour, loves to play cards and do jigsaw puzzles. Because he is the oldest resident, and has been there for a long time, the other residents look up to him. He regrets being unable to help support his younger daughter because of his injury.

The word "mansplain" is one of those English-language fads that I hoped would quickly go away. It's hasn't, and there seem to be some people fueling it. So, I will "lesbi-splain" why this is something that is wrong, and should be opposed.

It recently came up in a Facebook dustup. Someone posted a comment about the debate between Vice-Presidential candidates Sen. Kamala Harris and current VP Mike Pence. It ended with saying that Sen. Harris is "an amazing role-model for all the women who are tired of being talked over, or 'man-splained'."

There's a lot wrong with this. It starts with, I am a big fan of Sen. Harris, and am even a member of the @TheKHive on Twitter. Even if this were not the case, as a male human being, I object to being put in the same category as Mike Pence, for any reason.

Over the past 15 years or so, my taste in reading has gravitated heavily toward biographies, and one significant sub-genre of them has been musicians. I’ve read a lot of good ones, so I’m going to share my observations with you.

I’m putting Life, by Keith Richards, at the top of this list. It covers a huge amount of territory. Like several other books included here, there’s the post-World War II impoverished childhood, the discovery and fascination with 1950’s US blues artists, and the Rolling Stones circus, which includes the self-destruction of Brian Jones and relationships with Anita Pallenberg. Later comes his close brush with imprisonment in Toronto, and a nasty confrontation with Donald Trump. (Yes, you read that right.) After that, there’s a chapter about his own band, the X-Pensive Winos. (If you haven’t listened to Keith’s two solo albums, do so; they are excellent.)

The great thing, though, it it’s primarily about the music. In particular, if you’re a guitarist, you’ll enjoy the part about the 5-string open G tuning that he has used for a very long time. When he started doing his solo albums and touring with the X-Pensive Winos, he worked, at an advanced age, to improve his singing.

Next, a two-volume biography of Elvis, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, by Peter Guralnick. The first one covers up to his departure for Germany in 1958, during his Army service, and the second one covers the rest of his life.

You may ask, “is Elvis’ life story worth reading 1,400 pages?” Well, this about one of the biggest worldwide cultural icons of the 20^th century, and I say “yes”. I certainly didn’t think it was boring. I learned from it that white gospel music, which his mother loved, was a major influence. That he had a three-octave vocal range. That he took his craft very seriously, often working on a song for months to get it to sound the way he wanted. That Tom Parker was a huge negative creative influence. (Forget this “Colonel” crap; he never was a colonel in any army.)

One big surprise for me was, his heavy amphetamine use started in the Army. Had more people known this, his death at the age of 42 would not have been a shock. Indeed, the small circle of people who knew what was going on thought he could have died a couple of years earlier; Parker made an effort to sell his contract.

Radio is important in rural and less affluent areas of Mexico. A lot of people don't have computers, smart phones (a lot of areas don't have 4G coverage), or televisions. Mexico doesn't have any equivalent of CBC or NPR; the closest thing to it are some university stations. Community radio stations are a new idea, and their numbers are increasing.

There's an alternative form of radio that's been around for 40 years. Mexico's National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (Instituto Nacional Indigenista, or INI) created 21 radio stations, which broadcast in 31 indigenous languages. They are mostly AM and daytime-only. Six of them broadcast in Nahuatl, Mexico's most common indigenous language, spoken by 1.7 million people. Three of them broadcast in Yucatec Maya, spoken by 800,000 people.

Purépecha, spoken by 124,000 people, is way down the list. It is spoken in the highlands of the State of Michoacán, an area which includes Pátzcuaro, Uruapan, and Zamora. Their radio voice is XEPUR, "The Voice of the Purépecha", located in Cherán.

I first heard of the Parícutin volcano when I was in elementary school, somewhere around 1960. There was a story about it in one of the weekly news magazines handed out to students. The way the story went was, in 1943, this Mexican farmer went out into his corn field, and smoke started to come out of the ground. The result was a brand new volcano, the only one on this planet that scientists have been able to study starting with the initial eruption.

Like most children my age, I didn't have much of a concept of Mexico, let alone the State of Michoacán. Michoacán is known primarily for the cities of Morelia and Pátzcuaro, monarch butterfly reserves, and narco violence. So, Parícutin wasn't something I was conscious of until I made my first visit to Pátzcuaro and nearby Uruapan in late 2017.

Parícutin last erupted in 1952. It is officially classified as dormant, but contrary to what some local people will tell you, the ground is warm, and steam emissions can be seen.