Imagine if your great-great-great-great-grandfather/mother had a blog. How rad would that be? Any time you wanted you could go and check out what they thought about Napolean or Cortes or what their favorite food was or why they got in fights with their neighbor. How crazy that our great-great-great-great-grandchildren will be able to do that with us.

Call me MacGyver. I’ve gotta admit, I was addicted to the show as a kid. Well, I just locked myself out of the house again on my way to get a donut from 7-11, but using some mad skillz (a now broken screen and a broom) I was able to unlock the sliding bolt and avoid waiting outside with absolutely nothing more than 6 pesos for the next four hours.

My lady and I went to Real de Catorce in the neighboring state of San Luis Potosi this weekend with the hovering idea of trying a new type of nopal. That didn’t happen, but we did end up having an amazing weekend. I also realized my gadget dependency on batteries when my iPod gave up after four hours of highway (I forgot the charger) and my digital camera joined the conspiracy just as I was about to snap my first shot of the town. Luckily, girlfriend brought a disposable camera she picked up in Mexico City the week before so we’ll try to get that developed soon and I’ll write more about our trip and the town when we do.

My fellow English teaching, frisbee throwing, weight lifting, guitar strumming, blackberry pickin’, Indio drinking Gringo-Regio, Dr. Cereal just put up some pretty amazing pictures of the city on Flickr. I think it’s time I put the pressure on about starting a blog. As you can tell, he is a better photographer and has a way cooler apartment. But don’t worry. I have a plot to get him drunk enough on Indios to challenge him to a game of frisbee golf where he will bet away his apartment … and of course lose.

I have finally, finally finished my response to HP’s argument against gay marriage. I’ll post it in a couple days … I hope it generates some healthy and respectful conversation.

AfroGEEKS 2005 seems like a more than worthwhile conference. I remember while studying in Barbados, it was obvious that the upper class of the island was using the internet to search out and contact other Blacks throughout the Caribbean as well as Africa, the United States, and Canada. But it was very much limited to the educated, upper-class of the island (sons and daughters of politicians and business owners). I hope someone brings up the element of class division in the online presence of the African diaspora. Mark Dery, it turns out, will also be speaking at the conference. I’m awaiting my issue of CABINET, which I won by default for my Mexico City recommendations. And as a final aside, I’ve become a big fan of the blog Negrophile and have been meaning to comment on the disappearance of Blacks in Argentina and relate it to the similar disappearance of Blacks in the Mexican state of Guerrero.

While Race Matters, so does class, which is why I’m very happy to see the New York Times has the courage to start a new series called Class Matters – Social Class in the United States.

From the very well articulated opening article of the series:

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people’s status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought and less than most people believe. In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers.

Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht.

There is also a forum to discuss the series.

And finally, mad props to Lourdes who emailed me this very graphic representation (Windows Media Video file) of how I got my nickname.