I always love it when Comic-Con comes to town. I love seeing all the people in their costumes. This year their was a special treat. There was an elaborate promotion for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor where replicas of the terracotta warriors were put in the park were Daniel and I walk Tyler and Charlie. Here are the pictures of us with the statues.
Sometimes the craptacular quality of one's camera provides a really interesting picture. This picture of the statue of Benito Juarez in Pantoja Park here in San Diego, was taken with the camera on my mobile and is largely unaltered. I only wish I had gotten a little bit more sky above his head. Wikipedia's article on Juarez mentions several other statues including on Basin street where he lived when he was working making cigars while he was in exile from Mexico.
Because the park is the remainder of an old Catholic seminary, I always that that the statue was of a priest or a monk. But, in reality Benito Juarez is the Mexican President who defeated the French, other European powers and Mexican conservatives in the conflicts which included the victory over the French at Puebla which is celebrated, mostly in the United States, as Cinco de Mayo.
Another interesting fact, according to Wikipedia is that Benito Mussolini was named after Benito Juarez.
I have always been interested in the Mayan language. One of my dreams is to learn the Mayan language and then to open a school in Mexico where Sonjiala and I would teach Mayan children how to use Mayan hieroglyphs to write modern Maya and Spanish. Mayan hieroglyphs consist of a syllabary where each glyph generally represents a consonant and a vowel. There are other glyphs which represent words or roots of words. The syllabary would have to be extended to be used for modern Maya which has more consonants than classic Maya. More glyphs would also have to be added to represent Spanish consonants. Because a different character would have to be created for each of the four vowels associated with every new vowel at least four new glyphs would have to be designed. I would be loath to attempt to create new glyphs myself out of fear that they would be rejected by the people who speak Maya. Another option to modify existing characters with marks as is done to portray the modern sounds of Japanese in the traditional syllabary. As modern Maya is tonal the glyphs might also be modified to reflect the three tones high, low and neutral.
Anyway I am far away from that project. In the mean time I am going to translate Juan Pio Perez's Diccionaio de la Lengua Maya. I think that this work will be hosted on L'etendard Sanglant. But I will probably post some early drafts here.
Pedicabs are an interesting feature of San Diego. They are all over downtown. The business seems to have increased over the years. It seems to be a hard life. One of the pedicab companies used to be right downtown. They seemed to have a barbecue before the evening shift. The drivers looked as though this was probably the only meal for the day. Though there are a wide variety of drivers a significant number of them seem to be Russians. How they came to be in San Diego I have no idea.
In the past all of the women pedicab drivers dressed conservatively in long trousers, presumably for safety but, now you see them in Daisy Dukes and sports bras. I have no idea of the economics behind the pedicab industry. But some companies such as a VIP Pedicab seem to focus on providing the pedicab service, while others such as YellowPedicabs.com seem to focus on the advertising. I recently read an article that said that public phones in New York City make their profits from advertising on the sides of the phones. I suspect the same may be true of of the pedicabs as well.
