Bali Sea Ferry Rail by Ferrosur

MV Bali Sea

Naval Nostalgia:

The MV Bali Sea was a rare rail ferry that operated between Coatzacoalcos, Mexico and Mobile, Alabama, carrying up to 115 fully loaded railcars across the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of crossing land borders, trains from Mexico’s Ferrosur line were rolled directly onto the ship using a linkspan ramp system supported by two vertical towers. These towers allowed for precise height adjustments to match the ferry deck with the shore tracks, ensuring smooth loading regardless of sea level changes.

Originally launched in 1981 as a heavy-lift ship, she was converted into a rail ferry in 2000 to serve the CG Railway route. The Bali Sea offered a 900-mile maritime shortcut for rail cargo, cutting transit time and avoiding congestion at U.S.–Mexico border crossings. After two decades of service, she was retired in 2021 and replaced by larger, faster ferries, but her role in connecting two nations with seamless train-to-sea transport remains a landmark in intermodal logistics.

Ferry Dock in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico

Ferry Route from Coatzacoalcos, Mexico to Mobile, Alabama

Ferry Dock Mobile Alabama

 

The Gringo Hunters - Netflix Series

The Gringo Hunters - Official Trailer | Netflix
MVSRS

Small group of Mexican police track down American criminals hiding in Tijuana. The head honcho gets killed in the first episode, so we've got a continuing story of figuring out who killed him.

It's not a bad show, but it's not great either. Every episode has a confrontation between the cops and a new batch of bad guys, but the cops are either inept or the writers can't think of a good way to handle the situation with making the cops look incompetent. Very annoying. But we're in Tijuana, so we get to see the city, including the shanty towns, the middle class homes and businesses and the palatial estates of the rich. Very entertaining.

The Gringo Hunters are a real outfit as this ABC News video shows.

Mexican DC-3

Fuerza Aérea Mexicana (Mexican Air Force) Douglas DC-3C

It looks official, but there are no DC-3s listed in the Mexican Air Force's current inventory.

Screw You, Screwworm

Screwworm Fly

The Village Hemorrhoid is talking about the screwworm making inroads into Mexico. Wasn't supposed to get this far north. Something needs to be done. I expect the gummint is doing something. Let's hope it's effective.

Mexico seems to be a bit of a mess. I was thinking we could solve that problem by making them the 52nd state, after we annex Canada. We do that and the USA would cover the entire North American continent. Wait, isn't that common thing in science fiction novels? The Noram Complex? Maybe, I'm pretty sure I remember reading it somewhere, but Google isn't helping.

Of course, since Mexico is such a mess maybe we don't want it as a state, but it might work well as a colony. Of course any number of people would object, but even if we treated Mexico like white men have always treated colonies of colored people, could it be any worse than it is now? Besides, in this 'enlightened' age we might treat them considerably better. I don't see much chance of the USA taking over Mexico in the next ten years or so, but who knows? There could be some major upheaval next week in lower Elbonia that will turn the world on it's head.

Previous post on the subject here.

The Republic of Texas and The Naval Battle of Campeche

The Republic of Texas and The Naval Battle of Campeche
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

I had never heard of the events he talks about, but they touch on things that I have heard about like Sam Houston, Santa Ana and the war with Mexico. It makes me realize how narrow my view of history is. And who knew that Mexico was once at the forefront of battleship technology?

Mexican 2-gun paddlewheel frigate Guadalupe

Sebastopol from the sea - sketched from the deck of H.M.S. Sidon. The men are operating a 68-pounder 88 cwt smoothbore muzzle-loading gun.

Boogie With Stu

Led Zeppelin - Boogie With Stu [HD] [MP4]
UncleCaligula

@verbo108 comments: This is Mexican comedian Resortes dancing with Silvia Pinal. 

Thursday's Widows - Trailer (Official) | Season 1 | Netflix

This was a curious kind of show. We have several married couples, most with kids, living in a gated community somewhere in Mexico. They are rolling in loot, or are they? Seems fortune has frowned on a couple of the husbands and another catches the jealousy disease so things are going downhill fast. We see people doing things, going places, talking to others and most of it is pretty ordinary, but every so often the crazy comes out. After a while you begin to realize these people are not normal. They are out there on the fringe, just barely hanging on.

I want to say that the show focused on the women, but my wife disagrees. Perhaps I feel that way because I was totally familiar with the men's behavior so I pretty much dismissed it. Some of the women's behavior though, from my point of view, just didn't make any sense at all. I guess maybe that's what made it intriguing. 

Belascoarán - Netflix Series

Belascoarán | Tráiler oficial | Netflix
Netflix Latinoamérica

Belascoarán is a short series, three episodes, about an engineer who kicks over the traces and decides to become an independent investigator. It's kind of a goof-ball, comic book style show. Great fun running around Mexico City fighting the forces of evil.

1970s Era Mexican Racing Maverick

While investigating a serial killer, he picks up a stalker / client in the form of a girl who drives a Ford Maverick in stock car races. A Ford Maverick, that's a car I hadn't thought about since forever, and I certainly never thought of them as any kind of hot rod. I always thought of them as dumpy looking economy cars.

Mexican Shelby Ford Maverick

Evidently Mexico appreciated the Maverick a bit more, Carroll Shelby did a version for Mexico.

In the second episode, the bad guys have taken some radioactive steel waste that they were supposed to bury in the desert and are turning it into rebar to be used in building a children's hospital. Didn't find any references to it, and it's kind of weird, but not impossible.

In the third episode, Hector and his girlfriend are supposed to fly to Los Angeles for the weekend. He doesn't go, he has to stay and fight the bad guys. Irene flies to L. A. but comes home a day early and so escapes the crash of Western Airlines Flight 2605.

The show is based on a series of books by Paco Ignacio Taibo II.

Triptych - Netflix Series

Triptych (Triada) | Official Trailer | Netflix (Maite Perroni)
Maite Perroni Nation

Mexico. Synopsis of first two episodes:

We have a set of triplets that were separated at birth and raised independently. The first one, Aleida, grew up in a well-to-do family and became the wife of corporate big shot. She loses her mind and is committed to the loonie bin. When her husband gets her out for her birthday, she gets a hold of a gun and goes to visit her psychiatrist. She shoots several people on her way in and takes the doctor hostage. The cops show up and everybody gets shot.

The second one, Rebecca, grew up in a middle class family and joined the police force where she is now working in forensics so she gets called to the scene where she discovers that the dead woman looks just like her. Not only that, but she isn't quite dead. She rallies enough to call Rebecca by her name.

She asks her mother about this strange occurrence, but her mother denies everything, so Rebecca collects a piece of blood soaked cloth from the crime scene and a cheek swab from herself and sends it off for DNA analysis. When the test comes back with a match, she confronts her mother again and this time the truth comes out - she was adopted illegally and her mother is still afraid of being sent to jail.

Aleida is admitted to the hospital but with three gunshot wounds to the torso, she is not expected to live, and she doesn't. But when Rebecca goes to check on here she finds that the hospital has no record of her. Seems the big shots are trying to cover up the shooting. Back at the cop shop, her boss tells her the investigation has been closed on orders from on high, which irritates Rebecca. It irritates her enough that she breaks into her boss's desk and sees a copy of Aleida's husband's drivers licence.

Rebecca sneaks into Aleida's husband's house and discovers a file with some photographs of herself along with some photos of places in the city. She goes to visit one and is assaulted by a big fat pimp who apparently is somehow feeling wronged. The next place she visits is a strip club where she encounters the third twin up on stage dancing with the pole.

Just to add a little drama, Rebecca is a recovering alcoholic who has been having an affair with her married boss. The last time he broke it off, she torched his car. That was enough to get her into Alcoholics Anonymous where she has been minding her P's & Q's for the last few months. But she and her boss, a dedicated family man, are still enthralled and she cannot repel his advances.

P.S. Next four episodes. This show has gone off the rails. The husband recruits Tamara to pose as his wife and has her publicly sign over her company to him. You'd think her death would automatically cause the company to be transferred to him, and if it didn't, that's what lawyers are for. Trying to stage this transfer with an imposter is something that would only happen in a telenovela. Oh wait, that's where we are.

In any case, suspicions are aroused. Rebecca is going crazy trying to figure out what happened. Her compulsion doesn't make much sense, but compulsions are sometimes like that. In any case she falls off the wagon and when she gets drunk, through some kind of psychic connection, Tamara also gets drunk. Fortuitously this happens when a couple of suspicious investors pay a visit to try and determine if Aleida is really who she says she is. 

Rebecca enlists Aleida's psychiatrist help in investigating her past. The shrink digs up the social worker who handled the adoption. She reveals that there was some kind of genetic experiment going on and the doctor who delivered the babies planned to kill the attending nurses and the mother before shipping the infants off to parts unknown. A nurse and the social worker escape with two of the kids, but the thugs catch and kill the mother, so the doctor only gets one infant.

But now the shrink sends her assistant to kill the social worker. WTF?

Meanwhile, Rebecca's boss's wife has kicked him out of the house and he has moved in with Rebecca. She isn't happy about this, but apparently her sexual desire is overpowering her common sense.

P. P. S. The last two episodes attempt to wrap us this mish-mash of nonsense, but it never does make much sense. Supposedly there was some kind of long term genetic experiment going on, but it was never clear as to just what they were after. Throw in a bunch of half-assed violence and you have to wonder if this is a documentary about a bunch of incompetent fools. I mean, nobody would write such a non-sensical story, would they?

Control-Z - Netflix Series

Control Z | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

It looks to be a terrible show but it has turned out to be pretty good. It's set in a high school and shows about teenagers inevitably seem to show them as idiots. But this is show is pretty well done, it treats them as actual people. They do some stupid stuff, but the show doesn't dwell on it nor does it eat up screen time with drama queen performances. Our lead character is pretty savvy, so that helps. 

It's set at the National High School in Mexico City, so we're looking at upper class kids who live in their smartphones. I don't understand this compulsive need for constant messaging, but then I'm old. Actually, I don't think I would understand it even if I was young. There just never were that many people I wanted to talk to. But I understand that for many people constant contact with others is apparently the only thing holding them up.

Apparently, everyone at the school has a secret, or a secret fear, and some scoundrel has hacked into the school's network via their wifi portal and found them out and is now compelling people to do all kinds of stuff in order to keep their secrets secret. Naturally, our girl has decided to unmask the villain.

Our girl is a cute, smart, strong willed, petite brunette. Reminds me of Jessica Jones and Wednesday Addams, both characters I liked.

Note about the title - there are several key combinations that every computer keyboardist might be familiar with:

• Control-B turns toggles boldface on and off
• Control-C copies highlighted text to the (invisible) clipboard
• Control-V pastes the contents of the clipboard into your document
• Control-Z undoes whatever you just did

Just to be difficult, in a Linux Terminal window, Control-C kills whatever program you are currently running. Copy and Paste are done with a right-click of the mouse. I am sure there are others, but I these are the ones I use. And, oh yes, Control-N opens a new window of the browser. I never use it deliberately, but I sometimes hit it by accident while trying to type Control-B and it always flummoxes me. A new window pops up and I go Whoa! what just happened?

War On Drugs

Mexican cartel and paramilitary group CJNG showing extent of militarisation of their special forces

Bayou Renaissance Man has a post up about the situation in Mexico and along the border. Prompted me to comment and since it's such a great comment (if I do say so myself), I am reproducing it here for your amusement.

The only solution is to legalize all drugs. However, there are a couple of problems that will prevent this happening. Problem #1 is Congress won't do it because of people who think drugs are bad and prohibition is the answer. Problem #2 is Congress won't do it because that would impact the profits of the American drug cartel (you never hear about these guys, gray men in gray suits working out of gray offices). Problem #3 is even if drugs were legalized, all that would happen is control would pass from the cartels to big-pharma, and we know how much they can be trusted to do the right thing. Money pays for propaganda and propaganda rules. Our government is essentially a mafia. They may say things that sound like they are operating on principle, but they are not. They are lying. All the time. They are so immersed is their culture of crime that they are not even aware that they are lying.

Why Is Latin America still Poor

Why Is Latin America still Poor
Casual Scholar

Everybody, including me, complains about Maduro, the President of Venezuela, but I can kind of understand him now. Latin America has been ruled by a tiny minority who own all the land AND who see no reason to change the way their countries are run. It's not enough to just become president, you need to ruin everyone of those mother-fookers. If any on them manage to hang onto their lands, the whole elitist oligarchy will return and things will go back to the way they were. That is fine for the 'nobility' but wretched for everyone else.

You might think that he could at least manage the country's oil business a little better, but I suspect anyone who could compently run the oil business is a member of the 'ruling elite' and so, like in China's cultural revolution, they can't be trusted. But the people who can be trusted, people who are part of the revolution, don't know anything about the oil business because they never got a decent education. You'd think they would put a priority on sorting that out, but I suspect that there is a whole lot of in-fighting going on behind, beside and all around Maduro. Everybody is trying to get their piece of the pie. If the whole pie gets destroyed that's too bad. At least none of those other mother-fookers got any of it. And if you wonder why they are like that, it's because they learned it from the best, the people who were running the country before Maduro came to power.

All this assumes Maduro has good intentions and is sufficiently paranoid. It could be that he is an idiot, but somehow I doubt it. So we have two questions: can he destroy the oiligarchy? and two, will he be able to restart the economy from ground zero once they are well and truly obliterated? Castro pretty much destroyed the local oligarchy in Cuba, but once he had done that, he didn't build anything new.

Part of the problem is that most of Latin America is very Catholic, and the Catholic church has been very complicit helping the oligarchy maintain their position. They were in the past anyway, I don't know how much support they give them now.

Cry Macho

CRY MACHO – Official Trailer
Warner Bros. Pictures

Clint's getting old. I only watched this movie out of respect. It's slow to the point of tedium. The writing is gastly and the horse scenes were feeble. There are a couple of villains who pop up a couple of times, but they are just annoying, as is the kid. The one bright spot is Marta, the widow who runs the cantina in some tiny little village.

Mexican Demand For California Cannabis "Explodes"

Stolen entire from ZeroHedge News 

by Tyler Durden 

The demand for U.S.-grown marijuana has exploded across Mexico. Wealthy Mexicans want to be smoking the best stuff so they can post it on their Instagram. 

Traditionally, weed has been illegally smuggled into the U.S. through speedboats, planes, drones, tunnels, and even slingshot devices. But the days of drug "mules" crossing the U.S.-Mexico border could be over and soon reversing. 

Cannabis grown in California is some of the best in the world. Mexicans are demanding California grown weed that drug dealers have been forced to source from the States, according to WaPo. They're labeling the weed "IMPORTADO" and charging a hefty markup. 

Marijuana

Just like Cuban cigars in the U.S., people are willing to pay a markup to purchase one because they can brag to their friends or post images on social media. 

Traffickers from California are packing suitcases and stuffing cars with flower and other cannabis products, heading southbound as their contraband instantly doubles or triples in value as it enters Mexico.

"The demand here for American weed has exploded," said a drug dealer in Mexico city, who estimates 60% of the weed he sells comes from California. The dealer spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of arrest because cannabis is illegal in Mexico. "It's aspirational for many of my clients. They want to be seen smoking the best stuff, the stuff rappers brag about smoking."

U.S.-grown marijuana with high amounts of THC can cost upwards of $500 per ounce in Mexico, dealers said. The same ounce may only cost $150 in San Diego.

"Mexicans want to try what they see in music video, in movies, in media, and that's usually American," said another dealer in Mexico City. "We still have this idea that the best products come from the U.S."

At Urban Leaf, a marijuana dispensary in San Ysidro, California., near the Tijuana border, owner Josh Bubeck estimates about half his customers are Mexican nationals. 

"Nobody is going to grow cannabis better than California probably ever," Bubeck said. 

He said the appeal is clear: "You're showing 'This is what I'm about. I'm a bad ass. I got this from America.'"

Who'd a thunk it? Certainly not me. But this is an anomaly. I mean, how many potheads are there in Mexico who can afford to pay exorbitant prices? 

Let's run some numbers. 12% of the US population smokes pot. If that number is the same for Mexico, and there are 130 million people in Mexico, then there are likely 16 million pop smokers in Mexico. If 1% of them are in the bucks and willing to shell out the money for California weed, and they are consuming one ounce a month, then the amount of California weed being sent to Mexico would be about five tons per month. You could make a business out of that, and it looks like some people have.

 

Airplanes North and South

Alaskan Float Plane

My nephew Nick, up in Alaska, had an accident with a jetski a couple of weeks ago and busted his foot pretty good. He's recovering but will be hobbling for a couple of months. And we get a photo of a neighbor's float plane.

Ultralight Aircraft on the beach in La Paz Mexico back in March

Via IAman

Pic of the Day

Santa Rosalio

Weather in La Paz was heating up, so Iaman is heading north. The buildings in the distance might be ITESME, the Instituto Tecnológico Nacional de México Campus Mulegé.

Mexican Breakfast

Iaman is playing the high roller in La Paz.

Baja Pelican Cafe, La Paz Mexico

Breakfast $5.00 cafe $1.25 tipped $3.75 people make very little here.

Can you hear me now?

How a Cartel Built Their Own Cell Phone Network
Half as Interesting

Mexico is an interesting place. The drug cartels rival the government in power and in some places have taken over the government's functions. Drug dealer's communication skills have improved dramatically from the cross keypad codes used on payphones in Baltimore in The Wire.

The Totally Awesome Zetas have appeared here before.

Clam Man

When You Come To San Felipe, Visit Clam Man

I know you liked the Porkchop Man.
Not sure if they are related but here is Clam Man.
He too would call out loudly...something about Clams. - IAman

Sailing

Sailing in La Paz

IAman wants to go sailing and La Paz might be the perfect spot.