my weekend in morelia

Had a lovely weekend, thanks for asking. Friday night I stayed out until 5 a.m. drinking with three friends. Hadn’t done that in a while; it went a long way to undoing the mental aging process launched by spending the last two weeks surrounded by 19-year-olds. I’d forgotten how good a 5 a.m. cheeseburger can taste.
Sunday brought a relaxed trip to Patzcuaro, a lovely small town about an hour’s drive away from Morelia. It was nice to get out of the city and the air pollution for a bit, even if the town’s streets were clogged with vendors selling “local” “crafts” to passing gringos.
In between, on Saturday evening, I went to to Estadio Morelos — home of the local soccer team, Los Monarcas. Team propaganda says the team is named for, well, monarchs — particularly manly kings. But the real reason is that just outside Morelia is Santuario Mariposa Monarca, one of the world’s largest reserves for migratory monarch butterflies. Nearly a billion monarchs flutter down here from the Great Lakes each winter.
It’s a big attraction for the region. But, but it’s not a particularly threatening mascot — which is why the team chooses to be Los Monarcas instead of Las Monarcas and why it sticks to its invented “king” story. Would you be intimidated by a team named The Quite Pretty But Extremely Delicate Butterflies?
(I hear that fans of opposing teams, unfooled, have created some creative anti-Monarcas taunts over the years, many of them turning on the alleged homosexuality of the team’s supporters.)
This year, Los Monarcas are quite good — second in the 18-team Primera Division — and it was quite an exciting game Saturday against Los Tigres of Nuevo Leon, despite bouts of pouring rain.
(May I make an aside for a moment? Someday, when I’m much wiser than today, I will produce a Unified Theory of Life in Underdeveloped Countries. Said theory is still in development, but I believe I am now ready to unveil Benton’s First Corollary:
The amount of economic development in a nation is inversely proportional to the relative prominence of its advertising for building materials.
Theoretical backing: As a nation gains wealth, greater division of labor leads building construction to become an ever more specialized skill. In poorer nations, more people perform their own construction work, which makes the widespread advertising of building materials a potentially fruitful expenditure. In wealthier nations, only a smaller group of architects and crew foremen need to be sold building materials, encouraging their makers to advertise in more directed, specialized forums.
Supporting evidence: I have already commented (fifth photo down) on the strange prominence of roofing materials in the advertising of Zambia, along with the strange prominence of Christian imagery in said advertising. And the biggest advertiser at the Monarcas game, by far, was Tolteca, a firm that makes concrete. The halftime entertainment was — and here I shit you not — a group of middle-aged men dressed in costumes meant to evoke sacks of unpoured concrete.
These men were made to run an obstacle course — including a rubber slide whose transit seemed to evoke the birthing process — and then attempt to kick a soccer ball into a goal. Standing between them and success was an enormous goalie, himself dressed in an enormous concrete-sack costume. He was quite cruel, this monster concrete goalie, gleefully slapping aside the halfhearted kicks of the men, whose kicking movements were likely not used to being restrained by concrete leggings.)
The other halftime entertainments were, in order: A dozen very attractive dancing girls, whose appointed tasks included flirting audaciously with the race of concrete-sack people; a man dressed up as a dancing refrigerator; and a creature who, depending on the angle, was either an alien or an under-ripe tomato come to terrifying life.
In the end, the Colorful But Extremely Sensitive To Cold Temperatures Butterflies edged Los Tigres, 2-1.