Thank You For Opening Yougetland - It Is Asome!
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Rivas Cultural Services are experts in misspellings, having misspelled 'misspell' in the Foothill School spelling bee two years in a row.
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Rivas Cultural Services are experts in misspellings, having misspelled 'misspell' in the Foothill School spelling bee two years in a row.
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SBHS and UCSB in the house!
Photo by Clare Nisbet, right after Spilly threw us a ball and right before he said, "Mesa For Life!"
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In the Rivas Cultural Services world of unapologetic bilingualism, the answer is never one or the other but always BOTH!
Consider the Downtown Goleta one-stop-shop called Jorgito’s Ropa. Ropa is the Spanish word for clothing, and Jorgito’s is a perfect example of how to use a possessive apostrophe in English. Apostrophes don’t exist in Spanish, except when enthusiastically but incorrectly used by in business names south of the border for no apparent reason, but that isn’t what’s happening here. Jorgito’s Ropa is The Spanish-Speaking Clothing Store Owned By The English-Speaking Guy Named Jorgito!
Talk about efficiency! Not only does the sign say all that in two words, and appear in two languages at once without translating anything, but in addition to selling FUBU gear, this clothing store also deals in moneygrams, cell phones and Regalos para Baby Shower!
Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, “Do one thing and do it well,” has never been so apt: Jorgito’s Ropa’s one thing is to sell everything in two languages!
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Every Spanish-speaker knows that a yarda is the length of measure just shy of one meter, but we here in Aztlán know that yarda is also the Mexican immigrant's preferred term for an American-style yard sale! Now dig the spelling of Dutton Avenue. Dutto, as in, "la yarda está en la Dutto," which is exactly how Dutton might sound from the mouth of a newcomer. And whereas even the most recently arrived paisa knows what Friday and Saturday are, and that one follows the other, not every white-bread American is going to be able to make sense of the equivalent vie-sáb abbreviation. Strangely, this combination of a Spanish regionalism, a misspelling and at least two instances of haphazard capitalization is equally intelligible in either language!
Rivas Cultural Services suspects this sign was made by a Mexican marketing maven who's so new to town that he doesn't even know his address, but who's already keen to sell secondhand items to English-speakers. Talk about echándole ganas! This is exactly the sort of immigrants this country needs!
By the way, if you're not hip to Timbers, it's the biggest club in town and located way out by Winchester Canyon. For a while there was even a shuttle running from Milpas Street.
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Down on Haley, William Hughes leads group core conditioning classes at ungodly hours. A Certified Personal Trainer, Hughes is one member of the team at Prevail Conditioning, a small gym that's friendly enough for 135-pound weaklings like me but fancy enough for elite athletes.
Ordinarily, Rivas Cultural Services would say that going to the gym of a sunny Santa Barbara springtime morn is an absurd way to get exercise, but a confluence of extraordinary circumstances led to my participation in not one but two early-morning workouts last week. Not only did I thoroughly enjoy myself the first time, but I was so sore that I couldn't afford to not go back and work the soreness away.
Hughes has so many fitness apparatuses at his disposal that he can make you feel any amount of burn you desire, on any muscle. Or, if you want them all to burn, he can do that for you, too. All it takes is an hour divided into light warm-up, three different circuits of several exercises done three times each, and an active stretching cool-down. You'll be at work by 8am feeling unstoppable!
If Prevail sounds familiar, it's probably because John Zant mentioned it as the place Josh Johnson is training in his cockamamie but inspired quest to become an NFL kicker. If Johnson sounds familiar, it's because his dad was the late O. Tully Johnson, the ruthless principal of Foothill School in the 1990s.
Local people may know Hughes from his fitness classes at Spectrum, or his gig at UCSB, or his post at Tonic, but beneath his omnipresence he's a former D-III football player and sprinter with a knack for making all sorts of people feel comfortable about being in a gym. Let him help you get after it by emailing will@prevailconditioning.com or calling (805) 294-2661.
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if you're going east on Cathedral Oaks, watch out for people walking upside down. And if you're looking for zero gravity you'd better hurry because I can't see the City allowing this for much longer.
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This sign, hastily taped to a makeshift stand outside downtown Goleta's coolest building says, "WE BUY YOUR GOLD SILVER CONDITION DOESN'T MATTER", in magic marker on hot pink card stock.
Would you sooner walk up and sell your gold to local businesspeople with no budget and no time but who draw their T's look like crosses, or mail it off with MyGoldEnvelope?
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On this day, the Rivas Cultural Services cobalt blue '69 Volkswagen Beetle wasn't even the coolest old bug in its lane!
The Santa Barbara Man About Goleta-mobile was purchased in Lompoc in late '68 by Eugene Zandona of Santa Barbara's lower Eastside. He had to go to Lompoc to get it because they were all out of cobalt blue in Santa Barbara. When old man Gene's bum leg made driving it too difficult, he gave the Vocho to Rivas Cultural Services in 2004, at which time it had 132,000 miles. Der Volks Werks down on East Gutierrez Street does the maintenance.
Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of old VW bugs in Santa Barbara and Goleta?
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If a Mexican tells you that your chava has a sancho, or that you got sancho'd, then your chick is partying with another dude. Ordinarily, this would all be in Spanish. Yet what we have here is a Mexican busboy's t-shirt advertising Sancho Services entirely in English.
It's a Mexican joke in perfect colloquial English that only an English-reading Mexicanist who likes trashy t-shirts will appreciate, let alone buy! Talk about a niche market! Too bad the international craftsman wearing the rare piece declined to have his face appear in the picture. There's a guy who knows what's funny and should charge $30/hour for Spanish lessons.
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And the winning name in the Goleta Smoke Shop Name Contest is... wait for it... Goleta Smokes! In super-neon! With an extra-flappy flag that says Smokes stuck in the ground at the Calle Real edge of the parking lot!
What's next? Goleta Drinks? Goleta Humps? Where are my wildfire victims? Where are my lung cancerous picketers? Is it asking too much for the community anti-respiratorian to show a little tact?
The mere fact that the word Smokes covers so much ground makes it seem unseemly. Even here in little Goleta, Smokes could very well mean anything from big bong blow-outs to proscribed premium puros. Are those really products that the City of Goleta wants to associate with in neon?
The smell of the surfaces of my eyeballs sizzling in the glow made me so nauseous that I couldn't come within 20 feet of the shop, so I snapped this photo for the Rivas Cultural Services file of business names that could be improved and resolved not to return until they at least change the name to Goleta Fuma, which would only bother about half as many people.
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This one's going straight into the handmade Mexican rental announcements file!
When I called the number, I got the default voice-mail greeting in English but left a message in Spanish, asking about renting the room for a cousin I have coming. A woman called me back and got my default voice-mail greeting in Spanish. Then I called her right back and we spoke in Spanish.
The living room at 1130 San Andres is available right now to share with a young woman. The cost is $250 per month. The apartment also has one bedroom shared by two people and another shared by three more, with one bathroom.
Do you wanna learn Spanish? Are you down with cheap rent? If you answered Simón or ¡A huevo! to either of these questions, then ¡Viva México, cabrones!, because Rivas Cultural Services may have found just the thing.
This springtime, immerse yourself in Mexican culture and the Spanish language right here on the American Riviera! Ni modo que sean siete con un baño.
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Before the 11th of September became 9/11/2001, it was el 11 de septiembre de 1973. On this day in Chile, a Nixon-backed military coup put the murderous dictator Pinochet in power in place of the democratically elected government of Allende. The members of Allende's cabinet were rounded up as prisoners of war and confined to a military camp on Dawson Island, at the southernmost tip of South America, where they remained for one year until their release was brokered by the Red Cross, United Nations and Teddy Kennedy.
Dawson Isla 10 is a fictionalized but realistic account of the prisoners' experience, based on the diaries of Sergio Bitar, known at the camp by his assigned prisoner name of Isla 10 (Island Barracks prisoner #10).
As the guy in charge of preparing 40 UCSB students per year to spend a semester or two in Chile, Rivas Cultural Services was very keen to seen this film. Feel free to leave a comment expressing surprise and/or dismay that only one of the 27 students going next fall was in attendance. She was in good company, though, as such local luminaries as Dick & Mickey Flacks and Victor Fuentes were there, as were local celebrities Ed & Toni Holdren.
Perhaps most remarkable about the movie is that it was actually filmed on Dawson Island, in an environment so forbidding that the crew could not have been enjoying conditions much better than those of the prisoners in the film, minus the beatings, forced labor and worse. The first minutes included documentary footage of a humanitarian delegation's visit to the premises, during which a guard stumbles over his words to try and explain the concentration camp vibe of the prisoners' accommodations.
The prisoners' will to get out alive and the personal conflict on the part of some of the guards at the fact that they were imprisoning their fellow countrymen - which even led to incidents of outright compassion - were also extraordinarily well portrayed. There's even some humor, as one would imagine there must always be, even in such dire circumstances. At one point, the lieutenant in command asks one of the more sympathetic soldiers, "¿Usted es tonto, o se hace?"
Go see Dawson Isla 10 tomorrow at 1:15pm at the Metro 4.
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Paul Rivas never wears hats.
