My Strange New Mexico

The La Quinta Apple Retribution

Posted on Friday, July 4, 2008 at 01:20AM by Mike Smith | Post a Comment | Email | Print

If you take Exit 180 off of Interstate 10 coming from Deming and turn left onto Avenida de Mesilla and then right on Hickory Avenue nestled in between gas stations and a local McDonald’s, you will find a veritable oasis in the desert: The La Quinta Inn de Las Cruces. Unlike their commercials state “La Quinta” does not mean “high-speed internet” but rather “country inn” or “country estate” and just as its name suggests this hotel is decked with beautiful flowers, plants and fruit---be they real or plastic.

The plastic fruit became the center of an altercation that took place at the edenesque La Quinta Inn on June 24, 2008. According to the Las Cruces Sun-News a Sierra County woman’s breast implant was damaged when attacked by the hotel’s plastic fruit, a plastic apple to be exact.

Women and apples have not gotten on well since the beginning of time when Eve plucked the first fruit from a tree in the Garden of Eden. As the story goes Adam and Eve were enjoying a life of ease in the garden when Eve picked the forbidden apple, fed it to Adam and caused sadness and despair to reign down on mankind. Adam and Eve were forced to leave the garden, and Adam forever complained that Eve’s apple-plucking ways turned him from a man-of-leisure into a hardworking farmer.

In Greek culture three women and an apple caused the Trojan War. The gods were partying on Mount Olympus one fine day, enjoying their ambrosia cocktails and engaging in small talk when a golden apple was thrown into the throng. On the apple appeared the words ‘To the Fairest’ and nothing else. The three fair goddesses Aphrodite (love), Hera (hearth & home) and Athena (wisdom & warfare) all argued that the golden apple was theirs. An impartial judge, Paris, was chosen to determine who the fairest goddess was. Paris was swayed by Aphrodite who promised him the love of Helen of Troy for a judgment in her favor. Unfortunately, Helen was already married, so when Paris stole her away an army of Trojans followed with doom and destruction a close second.

In New Mexico, the historic hostility between women and apples has manifested with a new twist. While the Sierra County woman lounged in the pool, allowing the sun’s rays to crest over her freshly-enhanced figure she noticed a group of people throwing plastic fruit they had gotten from inside the La Quina Inn. She warned them, “I don’t care what you do, I just can’t get hit.” But hit her they did --- with a plastic apple nonetheless. No mention was made of plastic grapes or bananas. Injured and now off-center the woman complained to hotel staff and police were called in to investigate the apple attack. When they arrived the woman stated that “her right breast was sinking down and to the left,” but she refused to call an ambulance or seek medical attention.

Stranger still is the fact that the woman could not provide any description or characteristics of her attackers. The trauma of being assaulted in such a vulnerable area combined with the loss of thousands of dollars of surgical body beautification may have caused temporary memory loss or dementia…perhaps. Or perhaps, in New Mexico, the apple itself has gotten vengeance after centuries of abuse by womankind.

—Megan Walker

RosFest 08

Posted on Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 06:55PM by Mike Smith in Daily Strange | Post a Comment | Email | Print

Well, if you were planning on coming to Roswell this summer you might as well unpack your suitcases and put them back in the closet, because the big event is cancelled. That’s right, this summer there will not be over 2,000 Volkswagen Beetles descending upon Roswell.

Wait, what’s that? You thought I was talking about the UFO Festival?  And this was the same opening ploy I used to write about Old Chisum Days just a few Daily Stranges ago?

Well, whatever the case, rest assured the 2008 Roswell UFO Festival, and the International UFO Museum’s Roswalien 2008 UFO Festival are still going strong and kicked off yesterday, July 3^rd, with a special broadcast of the CBS’s “The Early Show” filmed live in Roswell from 4:45 AM to 6:45AM at the Roswell Convention and Visitor’s Center.  This year’s festival will include all the usual extraterrestrial pleasantries and for a full schedule for both the city’s and the International UFO Museum’s schedules check it out here.

People hoping to be a part of the Roswell 2K Beetle Convention, also known as “the biggest gathering of Volkswagen New Beatles in the country” and Roswell’s other big summer convention, are not so lucky on the other hand.  Due to the high gas prices, and the fact that Volkswagen will not officially be sponsoring the event this year, the Roswell 2K Beetle Convention has been cancelled.

For those of you who don’t know why every summer for the past several years thousands of Volkswagen New Beetles descend upon Roswell, a UFO Connection is to blame again.  When the New Beetles were introduced in the late 1990s a TV commercial played suggesting the New Beetles were built from technology recovered from a crashed UFO.

Ironically, witness reports from Roswell in July 1947 had several town residents claiming to have seen the military hauling a mysterious object about the size of a Volkswagen beetle through town under a tarp on its way to the military base.

Roswell hopes that next year the Roswell 2K Beetle Convention will return.

—John LeMay 

To Be Thorough

Posted on Thursday, July 3, 2008 at 03:54AM by Mike Smith in Daily Strange | 1 Comment | Email | Print

It was mid-June, in 2008, in the small southeastern New Mexico mining community of Pinos Altos. Fifty-five-year-old Robert Nawojski stood a few dozen yards from his desert-set mobile home, bathing and shaving on a rocky ledge—getting all cleaned up for his funeral.

Shortly thereafter, a mountain lion attacked him. The big cat evidently pounced on the man after he had walked below the ledge; it grabbed Nawojski in its teeth, dragged him a short ways, tore away and ate parts of his body, and then buried much of what remained.

New Mexicans—upon reading of this story in the Albuquerque Journal, the Silver City Sun-News, and other papers, following the June 20 discovery of Nawojski’s body—were understandably alarmed, despite such attacks being extremely uncommon, despite no human having been killed by a New Mexico mountain lion since January of 1974.

This seemed to be the sort of thing that could happen to absolutely anyone, and so to many people it seemed especially frightening. Everyone has to bathe, after all, and the next victim might be anyone.

If only someone, somewhere—most New Mexicans no doubt thought—if only someone would invent some sort of enclosed area—some sort of walled-off space containing something kind of like a rocky ledge but more concave—some sort of interior “bathing area” or “room with a bath in it”—some sort of special little containment facility that would make it so we didn’t have to wash outside with the wild pumas. If only... Oh, just leave me here with my dreams. My impossible, stupid dreams.

Opting against innovation, the authorities instead decided to track down and kill the mountain lion that had killed Nawojski. They did—and in a June 25 press release, the Department of Game and Fish announced it had captured and killed the animal, a 125-pound adult male—a lion already wounded by a game officer who had seen and shot at it around Nawojski’s home shortly after the discovery of the body.

That should, one might be tempted to think, be the end of the story. A mountain lion killed a man, and then men killed the mountain lion. No victim remained to be avenged, and no killer remained at large.  Fin.

But then came today’s paper—the July 2, 2008 Albuquerque Journal—and its initially baffling headline, “Second Cougar Caught, Killed After Man’s Death.”

“We knew from tracks that we had two lions in the area, and we wanted to be thorough,” state Game & Fish officer Leon Redman said in a news release. The second cougar was a healthy 80-to-90-pound female.

The snaring operation that followed the fatal attack on [Nawojski] also caught some unintended victims. A javelina, a horse that threw its rider and a bear also were caught in the snares. The bear, which was feeding on the ensnared javelina when it also became entangled, was seriously hurt and had to be killed.

...The horse that was ensnared, and the woman who was thrown from that horse, suffered minor injuries, the state news release said.

In a related story, police shot and killed a suspected murderer in Albuquerque today, and then, to make certain that no other potential murderers remained in the area, rounded up and executed everyone within an eight-block radius.

—Mike Smith 

Evil Geniuses Outside of Socorro?

Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 12:02AM by Mike Smith in Daily Strange | 2 Comments | 1 Reference | Email | Print

On April 14th 2008 a team of European scientists gathered on top of South Baldy Peak near Socorro to engage in an experiment fit for only comic-book villains. Their plan? Firing a one trillion watt laser into a storm cloud in an attempt to control lightning itself.

Insert mad cackle here?

Currently scientists trigger lightning strikes by firing a rocket attached to a long wire into a storm-cloud, a la Benjamin Franklin and his kite, but this only works about half the time. Using lasers will make the process quicker, more cost-effective, and considerably more awesome.

The pulse lasers work by forming large numbers of plasma filaments, the same technology used in novelty plasma lamps, to can conduct electricity towards the ground and cause lightning to strike.

No actual ground to air lightning was produced because the filaments died away too quickly but the experiment was deemed a success in spite of this because an increase in electrical activity was measured where the laser was aimed.

The team believes that they will succeed in the future and are planning on increasing the laser's power by a factor of ten and using more sophisticated pulse sequences in their next test.

One thing still left up in the air is whether this technology, once perfected, will be used towards the good of mankind or to enslave us all. I, for one, am leaning towards the former.

Blazing Meteors

Posted on Friday, June 27, 2008 at 11:31PM by Mike Smith | 3 Comments | Email | Print

Could something from Outer Space be setting land aglow in New Mexico?

From Saturday, June 13^th to Wednesday June 17^th, the Dripping Springs Fire lit up the night sky near Las Cruces with a crescent shaped glow across the Organ Mountains.

Because it cost over $500,000 in people and equipment to get the blaze under control, naming a cause and therefore a culprit for the damage has been a priority.

While no one is yet officially to blame or harass, a recent theory has surfaced. As recorded in the Las Cruces Sun-News, a White Sands Missile Range employee named J.O. Johnson witnessed a meteor strike late Friday night while driving on the highest point of Highway 70 east of the city. With the sweeping view from San Augustin Pass in his windshield, Johnson says he saw a “very brilliant, large white object with green tints” come down at a sharp angle “and appeared to strike near [the] Dripping Springs and Soledad Canyon area.”

“All I thought was ‘that’s neat.’ Then [Saturday] afternoon, when they started talking about a fire out there, it led me to question whether the heat caused a yucca to smolder and start the fire. I just thought it was a rare coincidence to see something like that fall and have a fire.”

The blame can’t be laid on lightning or controlled burns. They were both on vacation when the fire happened. And surprisingly nobody has come forward to take responsibility for the carnage, ruin and losses. Unless a more conclusive answer is found, perhaps the $500,000 bill will have to be sent the mysterious meteor’s parents, possibly still in orbit far, far away.

—Megan Walker