We had another barbecue tonight. After much fussing and being anal-retentive, Amy found the perfect charcoal: actual real wood charcoal. The real wood charcoal lights quickly, burns hot AND smells like a campfire. Then I made my first S'more of my entire life. Wheee!



I'm reading Seabiscuit, a book about, naturally, Seabiscuit, a famous American racehorse that was an American icon in the late 20's, early 30's. People played Seabiscuit cardgames, and listened to Seabiscuit's races on the radio, and wore Seabiscuit buttons... anyway. I read the most entertaining anedcote in the book yesterday.

California was really prudish in the 1910's. Gambling, prostitution, even dancing girls, were outlawed, so people that wanted a little action had to go to Tijuana to get their freak on. This is why Tijuana has the reputation that it has today, because it began as the only place thereabouts that could supply a horny American tourist with booze and hookers.

Anyway. There was a famous racetrack in Tijuana built in 1915 or thereabouts. Things must've been seedy at the racetrack, because the track was famous for having an enormous pile of manure behind it. Manure sitting in a pile apparently gets very hot on the inside: the author writes that jockeys who wanted to lose weight would dig holes in the manure and then snuggle into it, so they could sweat off extra pounds.

Ok, so by 1927, after 12 years of horses using the stables, there was an enormous pile of manure behind the stables that had been baked hard into a huge immovable mass. One source said that the manure was larger than the track's grandstand, so it must've been huge.

1927 was the year that a huge flood swept through Tijuana. It started in the mountains and rushed down to the city, and the wall of water smacked into the giant Tijuana Race Track manure pile. It swept the manure along, but it didn't disintegrate it (the manure was baked hard, remember) so what happened was that the manure got pushed through the city, crushing everything in it's path and knocking down buildings, like, and I quote from the book "a Godzilla of shit". The manure ended up in the sea.

You never hear things like that in school, do you? I know it would've perked me up considerable in History class.