Things I should have blogged about sooner…

Some of you might recall hearing about a series of immigration rallies that took place across the US on May Day (May 1st). The rallies were in part to call on the federal government to enact comprehensive immigration reform and in part to protest Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law (SB 1070). I could probably rant for several entire posts about that racist piece of work, but I’ll restrain. If you haven’t heard of it, basically it attempts to legalize racial profiling by allowing cops to pull people over for “looking illegal”. So, as an immigrant, along with other prominent immigrants to the US including Steve Nash (of Los Spurs) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (“I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me,”{please read that quote with a Terminator accent}) I felt I needed to do something to in protest. Hence the immigration rally.

Honestly I had no idea what to expect. I’ve tried to go to other protests before, only to find just one or two people waving signs. Plus, I hadn’t heard much advertising about the rally, so I wasn’t all that hopeful, but we made our signs and headed over. When we saw two helicopters hovering over the area, we figured it was a good sign, but I was still impressed when I saw the crowds. Media estimates put about 7000 – 10 000 people at the rally, quite a big event (although we were dwarfed by Dallas which had around 20 000 turn out). We parked a few blocks away and ran over to join the march. Emerging as we did from a crowd of grumpy looking white people at the sidelines, we received a few apprehensive looks from the mostly Hispanic marchers, but once we pulled out our signs, they welcomed us quite warmly. One older lady even complimented my horrible mangling of the slogans we were chanting: “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!” (A community united will never be defeated!)

We had a great time and marched a good distance and fortunately, only saw a few teabaggers. One idiot had his rallies confused and was holding a “No socialism” sign (not sure what immigration reform has to do with socialism) and another ‘bagger had one proclaiming the sacred border/language/culture of the US. Psst, dumbass, Texas used to be part of Mexico. As the saying goes, they didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. My least favourite sign read “Immigration is ruining this country. Look what it did to the White House” which was all kinds of stupid and offensive. It was heartening, however, to note that there were only 20-50 teabaggers (of the ones I saw most were old and all were white) along the entire route, and set against at least 7000 marchers, I think makes us look pretty good.

In other news, thanks for the advice in the comments from the last post. The websites had good tips, Sara’s was the most appealing and Greg’s was, well, the most practical. To get rid of the fruit flies, we used a mixture of red wine vinegar and dish soap in a glass. We left it out on the counter overnight and the next morning, there were about 30 dead flies in the bottom of the glass. I guess the smell of the vinegar was irresistible and the soap broke the surface tension so the flies would sink and drown. We left a couple of glasses out for a couple of days and killed off almost all of the flies. My only worry is that we created a new race of flies that don’t like vinegar by killing off all the ones that do. Natural selection and all that. Or would it be artificial selection? Anyway, we’re still trying to find a way to deal with the millipedes. Normally I really don’t mind them; they’re some of the least threatening of bugs. However, we found one in bed the other night, and that is crossing a line.

Oh, and we have some sort of heron hanging around our apartment pool. This is one of those things that would be more interesting if I was still overseas. It would be an ostrich or a monkey or maybe a crocodile.