No hablo espanol...pero yo estudio Pop Culture

Well, last night I took a Spanish test. My wife and I are currently trudging through Conversational Spanish I. It has been quite an adventure considering my language skills are lacking plus what other language I have studied (high school German, with only a few shards still floating around in my braincells, but what shards they are!) keeps popping up and wreaking havoc. Fortunately we're auditing, so grades don't really matter. I just feel bad knowing that I'm capable of rendering a beautiful language spoken by millions and millions of people into unintelligible vowels and consonants (or at least I think that's what they sound like), and that's without attempting to roll the r's. Nothing brings out my hickness from Kansas quite like reading a Spanish text easily translatable by a four year old. Fortunately following the test the class went to a Mexican restaurant and drank some Margaritas and listened to the sweet serenade of Mariachi. I really do want to learn to speak Spanish, to move beyond the banality of Me llamo Jeff and actually have a reasonable discussion with another (en español). Hopefully this is the start of something great. In no time I will be translating the lost works of García Lorca or translating the latest García Marquez. Ok, maybe that is a bit of a stretch, but one can dream can't they?

Though Spanish has proved muy difícil we've been fortunate enough to have access to cable this week. Each night on VH-1 they've been showing the World Series of Pop Culture. Apparently several months ago there were trivia tournaments across the country that pitted teams of three against each other in a bracket format. As the title indicates, the focus is on a team's knowledge of all things catchy and kitchy, from film to music to tv and beyond. Some of the teams are really good, such as Almost Perfect Strangers and El Chupacabra, others I wonder how the hell they made it this far (which leads to the inevitable "and why the hell aren't I on there"). Each round consists of six questions. Generally 4 to 5 of the six questions are fairly basic, though that doesn't stop some of them from blowing it on a grand scale. I mean, who doesn't know that Bob Guiney was a contestant on ABC's The Bachelor? Or that one of Meryl Streep's Oscar- nominated roles was for Sophie's Choice? Come on people, if you're gonna win $250,000, while the rest of us watch with bitter resentment, there are at least a few essentials you need to know, or as my Deutch teacher called it, BMK (basic minimal knowledge). Oh well, until then I'll continue to trudge on. Maybe next season.

Bienvenidos,

MM