Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Museums and Luchadores

by alec on March 20, 2007

Sunday we had a decidedly unusual day. Fans of Jack Black's goofy comedy Nacho Libre will understand that when we learned that the Lucha Libre were in town, we had to make a trip to see them. However, because the Luchadores didn't get underway until 12:30, we zipped over to Merida's Regional Anthropology and History Museum, where we got a guided tour of this small, but interesting collection.

This figure is a mayan noble wearing a jaguar headress.

This is a terra cotta incense burner.

This is a stone ornament showing a serpent, with mouth open, and man emerging from the serpents mouth.

Now as I said, after the trip to the museum we headed out to Merida's Polyforum Izamna to see the Lucha Libre, Mexico's equivalent of the WWF. Unlike the WWF, the show has a heavy dose of slapstick comedy — raucous, ridiculous, and pure fun. Many of the wrestlers where masks, and flamboyant costumes, which just adds to the fun. The Lucha Libre are very popular in Mexico, and the matches travel from city to city with regularity.

This is the interior of the Polyforum, showing the number of seats and the layout of the show. Imagine every seat in the place filled, which was the situation by the time the main bouts were underway.

The Lucha's are a family event, with whole families including very small children coming out to the show after Sunday mass. The organizers cater to families too, with a wide variety of snack food and noise makers available from the stadium vendors.

There were five bouts on the card, with each becoming more raucous and crazy as the afternoon wore on.

There was plenty of throwing…

… posing …

… flips …

… wedgies …

… audience participation …

… spins …

… lost shorts (a match winning move, it turns out!) …

… lady wrestlers, large and small …

… referee distractions (he's the guy in black!) …

… men in drag …

… referee participation! …

… body slams…

… and a bona fide cage match to finish the whole thing off!

After the match, all 8 boys with us each got a genuine Luchadore mask. Beds and hallways have been used for wrestling matches for the last three days with grea
t regularity.

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A place for VON and a place for ETel

by alec on March 20, 2007

I'll preface this by noting that I am not at the VON show in San Jose this week. Not because I don't think it's a great event, but because Spring VON always coincides with spring break in Canada and I have kids. I'll be there in the fall though.

My great friend (and an advisory board member at iotum) Tom Howe has decided not to head to VON this year. You can read his reasons, but they boil down to being busy, and his feeling that VON is less relevant to him than it used to be. O'Reilly's ETel show is where the action is.

Moshe Maier (an iotum partner!) takes a slightly different tack, encouraging the Pulver team to reenergize their conference with VoIP innovation tracks.

Me, I have a different view. After last year's ETel I had an email exchange with Jeff in which I encouraged him to add an ETel-like track, or perhaps an event, to VON. Jeff gently explained to me that the ETel audience and the VON audience are different. Very true. VON has become a great place to learn about large scale carrier deployments, and to meet carriers. It's not the place where the Linux hackers hang out.

There's a place for VON, and a place for ETel, and they don't necessarily have to be the same show. The center of innovation has shifted to ETel, but the people I want to do business with are at VON.

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From Cancun to Merida

March 20, 2007

Saturday we changed locale from Cancun, to Merida — the capital city of Yucatan State. Getting to Merida is a 3 1/2 hour drive from Cancun on the 180 toll road. Tolls will set you back just over M$300. Halfway to Merida, about 20 km from Valladolid, there is an infrequently visited post-classic Mayan site called Ek Balaam. It's well worth [...]

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