CUANAS

Monday, June 30, 2008

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The

Mystical

History

Tacos

For no good reason, I have become interested in Tacos, and I am going to post random information here at CUANAS. Think of CUANAS as clearinghouse of information about Tacos, as well as anti-Semitism and music videos.

Here's a history of Tacos:

In Mexico, the word taco is a generic term like the English word sandwich. A taco is simply a tortilla wrapped around a filling. Like a sandwich, the filling can be made with almost anything and prepared in many different ways (anything that can be rolled inside a tortilla becomes a taco).

The contents of a taco can vary according to the geographical region you are eating them. The taco can be eaten as an entree or snack. They are made with soft corn or fried corn tortillas folded over.

1520 -Bernal Diaz del Castillo (1496-1584), a Spanish soldier who came with Hernán Cortés to the New World, wrote an intriguing and detailed chronicles called A True History of the Conquest of New Spain. He also chronicled the lavish feasts that were held. From the article by Sophie Avernin called Tackling the taco: A guide to the art of taco eating:

The first “taco bash” in the history of New Spain was documented by none other than Bernal Diaz del Castillo. Hernan Cortes organized this memorable banquet in Coyoacan for his captains, with pigs brought all the way from Cuba.

It would, however, be a mistake to think that Cortes invented the taco, since anthropologists have discovered evidence that inhabitants of the lake region of the Valley of Mexico ate tacos filled with small fish, such as acosiles and charales. The fish were replaced by small live insects and ants in the states of Morelos and Guerrero, while locusts and snails were favorite fillings in Puebla and Oaxaca.

1914 - The first-known English-language taco recipes appeared in California cookbooks beginning in 1914. Bertha Haffner-Ginger, in her cookbook California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book said tacos were:

"made by putting chopped cooked beef and chili sauce in a tortilla made of meal and flour; folded, edges sealed together with egg; fried in deep fat, chile sauce served over it."

1929 - Pauline Wiley-Kleemann in here cookbook Ramona's Spanish-Mexican Cookery, featured six taco and tacquito recipes. These included recipes for Gorditos that came from Santa Nita or Xochimilco, Pork Tacos composed of snout, ears, jowls, kidneys, and liver, Cream Cheese Tacos, Egg Tacos, Mexican Tacos, and Tacquitos

Taqueria or taco trucks are found throught the West and Southwest of the United States. There are two kinds of taco trucks; traveling trucks that cruise around neighborhoods and business areas, and non-cruising trucks parked permanently in lots.

Karen Hursh Graber in her article Wrap It Up: A Guide to Mexican Street Tacos says the following on the different types of tacos in Mexico:

Many foreigners come to Mexico with the idea that they can get tacos any time, but this is not generally true. Looking for tacos around midday, perhaps at the time of the gringo lunch, will not normally be a successful pursuit.

Tacos are either a morning treat or a nighttime snack, pretty much disappearing between the hours of noon and six p.m. This is because the main meal in Mexico is eaten in the afternoon. Not to worry: by about six the smell of meat begins to permeate the air and the taquerías are back in business. . .

From noon until about six there are almost no tacos available; morning vendors are closed until the next day. Right around dusk, however, there is a perceptible change in the atmosphere of the street following the afternoon lull. Permanent puestos, stalls and storefront taquerías begin opening, and ambulatory taco carts roll into place, usually connecting the wires from their naked light bulbs into overhead lines. . .

The most compelling signal of “taco time”, however, is the aroma. Of all the street food in Mexico, the taco is King of the Night, attracting clients with the appetizing scent of grilled, fried or steamed meat.

Since the big meal of the day is eaten in the afternoon, many people opt for a late supper, or cena, and taquerías usually stay open until about midnight, and later in big cities. On weekends, taquerías near discos and clubs stay open until the wee hours of the morning, when they provide welcome sustenance to hungry partygoers.

There are many types of tacos served in Mexico and the United States. The following are the most popular ones served in the United States:

Taco al Pastor - The most popular taco in Mexico. The name means "shepherd's-style taco." Here the main ingredient is spiced pork, which is cut, in slivers, from a loaf of meat standing on a vertical spit in front of an open flame. These tacos are a Mexican adaptation of the spit-grilled meat brought by immigrants from Lebanon.

Breakfast Tacos - Breakfast tacos or burritos are available at many restaurants across the Southwest (especially New Mexico and Texas). It is a fried corn or flour tortilla that is rolled and stuffed with a mixture of seasoned meat, eggs, or cheese, and other ingredients such as onions and salsa. Much like sandwiches, these tacos can be as simple or complex as imagination allows. They are served for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, and they have gone mainstream to meet demands.

Fish Tacos - Ensenada, Mexico claims to be the birth place of the fish taco, and they are advertised at restaurants throughout the city where many claim that their taco is the original. The best place to sample them is at any of the small food stands that line the streets around the Mercado Negro, Ensenada’s incredible fish market. The fish tacos served are simply small pieces of batter-coated, fried fish in a hot corn or wheat tortilla.

People in the coastal areas of Mexico have been eating fish tacos for a long time. The history of fish tacos could seemly go back thousands of years to when indigenous North American peoples first wrapped the plentiful offshore catch into stone-ground-corn tortillas. The people of Ensenada say their port town is the fish taco's true home, dating at least from the opening of the Ensenada mercado, in 1958.

The people of San Diego, California, have been hooked on fish tacos since 1983. In fact, fish tacos are the fast-food signature dish of San Diego: they're cheap to buy and fast to make. Fish tacos were popularized in the United States by Ralph Rubio, who first tasted them while on spring break in Baja, Mexico.

According to the story he tells, there was one Baja vendor he especially liked, a man named Carlos, who ran a hole-in-the-wall taco stand with a 10-foot counter and a few stools. Carlos fried fish to order and put it on a warm tortilla. Customers added their own condiments.

Rubio tried to persuade Carlos to move to San Diego, but Carlos was happy where he was and would not budge. He did agree, however, to share his recipe, which Rubio scrawled on a piece of paper pulled from his wallet. Several years later, Rubio opened his own restuarnat in San Diego, called Rubio's - Home of the Fish Taco. Today, fish tacos are legendary and are sole throughout San Diego and the Southwest.

Okey-doke.

Here's some information on tacos from Wikipedia:

A taco is a traditional Mexican dish composed of a rolled, folded, pliable maize tortilla filled with an edible substance.

According to the Real Academia Española, the word taco originally means "plug" and refers to rolled paper or cloth patches for musket balls.[1]

It can also be argued that the word taco originates from Nahuatl, a native Mexican language, from the word itacatl, which means large tortilla filled with beans and salt.[2] The word taco is used differently outside of Mexico; the RAE lists 27 possible meanings for the word.

A taco is normally served flat on a tortilla that has been warmed up on a comal; since the tortilla is still soft, it can be folded over or pinched together into a U-shape for convenient consumption. In the variant known as the taco dorado (fried taco), flauta (flute in English, because of the shape), or taquito, the tortilla is filled with pre-cooked shredded chicken, beef or barbacoa, rolled into an elongated cylinder and deep-fried until crisp.

They are sometimes cooked in a microwave oven or broiled.

De Cabeza or head tacos, in which there is a flat punctured metal plate from which steam comes out for the cooking of the following parts from the head of the cow: starting with plain Cabeza which is a serving of the muscles on the cow's head, cow's brains or Sesos, cow's tongue or Lengua, cow's cheeks or Cachete, cow's lips or Trompa, and cow's eye or Ojo; for these tacos the tortillas are warmed on the same steaming plate for a different consistency. These are served in pairs, and also include salsa, onion and cilantro. Guacamole is not standard but is optional.

Here's an artist who does Fine Art Taco Photography:

View the entire taco gallery here.

If you enjoy these photographs, you can Buy Prints online.

My niche marketing plan:

Traveling Taco-Art Exhibit: I will be sending my Taco Art around the world. If you would like to display my art in your venue (museum, college, company, etc), please email me with a few details about your organization. Ideally, you'd display the art for a few weeks to a month, and then send it to the next venue on the list. All I ask for is a few photos of the public enjoying my art.

Email me if you're interested.

What's new:

4/3/08 - A fantastic email I received today:

I just found your site and was moved by your Tacography. I left, however, wanting more. I imagine seeing your artform expanded to thoughtful mimcry of all other sorts of imagery that is used for art. I'm thinking of landscapes including tacos (perhaps grazing sheep replaced with tacos). I imagine sports photography that replaces the players or perhaps their tools with Tacos. An abstract piece made from the components of tacos comes to mind.

Political imagery where unfilled taco shells replace the starving people in various countries; or broken and burned tacos depicting wartime events.

Tacos on a gondola ride in venice. A dilbert style comic strip where the characters are tacos and mexican food.

A taco catalog with the shells acting as models, showcasing the new line of designer toppings and additives.

Punk or Rave tacos with food coloring on their shells and spiked lettuce and cheese. You could drive traffic to your site by using taco's to depict scenes that are current news topics, or mock the latest "marketing genius" by replacing their subjects with tacos. --Tahnka
2/13/08 - The UC Santa Barbara Graduate Lounge is now displaying Taco Art:

I have no doubt it is spurring all sorts of academic discussions.

10/25/07 - An email I received from Perry:

I told my girlfriend about your taco art. She's a curatorial intern at the ------ Museum of Art. You'd think she'd recognize fine art when she saw it, and she does like tacos, but she didn't seem to take it seriously enough.

That's probably because I brought it up when she was talking about 'serious' art exhibits with her parents.

Not that she has any power there or anything, being an intern and all, but still, it'd have been nice to try and get you in at the -MA.

Thanks very much for trying. Maybe in time she will come to appreciate Taco Art.

9/29/07 - Lots of things have been happening in the world of Fine Art Taco Photography. Many prints have been sold, and have received a few leads for my traveling taco-art exhibit. I've been getting a lot of emails. In the near future, I'll put together a FAQ.

CollegeHumor linked this site in their Hotlinks - "Weird stuff we found on the Web" section. That's pretty cool.

9/19/07 - Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day. This site was down for a few hours. What happened was the other site hosted on my server (venganza.org) was clogged with traffic because of TLAP day, and the server died. Everything's back up now.

9/15/07 - I received some emails asking for larger prints. I'm having a 20"x30" print made today and we'll see if it looks ok.

9/14/07 - New York Magazine has written about my project on their Grub Street blog..

Etc.

More to come.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Too Young to Die

Orange County punk band, Agent Orange.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Wild Is The Wind

David Bowie

Black River

Amos Lee

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Hocus Pocus by Focus

What the hell was wrong with these guys?

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Joshua Redman With
The Great Brad Mehldau On Piano
And Brian Blade On Drums

Joshua Redman - Straight Ahead

The Jihad Against Christians In The Sudan

The media refers to it as the "Darfur Crisis." That's a lame name for a genocide which has, in effect, been going on for 24 years, resulting in the murder of well over 2 million Christians and Animists.

The Sudanese Genocide is an Islamic Jihad against Infidels. It is the systematic murder, by Muslims, of those who will not bow to Allah.

An Excerpt
From
Letters
To A
Young Poet

By Rainer Maria Rilke (Thanks to Reliapundit)

"For the Sake of a Single Poem"

"... Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences.

For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning.

You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that.

You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again.

But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises.

And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.

For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

Monday, May 05, 2008

Mildred Loving,

Matriarch

Interracial

Marriage,

Dies

From the Associated Press:

RICHMOND, Va. - Mildred Loving, a black woman whose challenge to Virginia's ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down such laws nationwide, has died, her daughter said Monday.

Peggy Fortune said Loving, 68, died Friday at her home in rural Milford. She did not disclose the cause of death.

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble — and believed in love," Fortune told The Associated Press.

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

"There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause," the court ruled in a unanimous decision.

Her husband died in 1975.

Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.

"It wasn't my doing," Loving said. "It was God's work."

Go read the whole thing.

The Islamic

Golden

Rule

The Muslims Make the Rules

Islam twists everything up into surreal webs of logic from which no man can escape with his soul.

Observe, the Islamic Golden Rule:

In his Last Sermon, the Prophet Muhammad admonished believers:

"Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you." (Pastorius note: This is not moral thinking. Instead, it is just practical advice based upon the idea of reciprocity.)

Jeffrey Wattles holds that the ethic of reciprocity appears in the
following statements attributed to Muhammad:

[20] “Woe to those . . . who, when they have to receive by measure from
men, exact full measure, but when they have to give by measure or weight to men,
give less than due”

[21] The Qur'an commends "those who show their affection to such as came to
them for refuge and entertain no desire in their hearts for things given to the
(latter), but give them preference over themselves"

[22] “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he
wishes for himself.”

[23] "Seek for mankind that of which you are desirous for yourself, that
you may be a believer; treat well as a neighbor the one who lives near you, that
you may be a Muslim [one who submits to God]."

[24] “That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind.”

[24] "The most righteous of men is the one who is glad that men should have
what is pleasing to himself, and who dislikes for them what is for him
disagreeable."

In other words, make a rule, for all mankind, of whatever you desire for yourself. Does that sound familiar? It ought to, as it is the basic idea of leftism as well.

The Islamic Golden Rule is not anything like the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule, which calls for us to treat each other as we would want to be treated.

Instead, the Islamic Golden Rule is a formula for totalitarianism.

Islam is not a religion exhorting its followers on to be better people. It is, instead, a totalitarian ideology, pure and simple.