If you haven’t heard of him, Peter Kuper is an illustrator and cartoonist. His biography states that his “illustrations and comics appear regularly in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and MAD, where he illustrates SPY vs. SPY every month”.

Peter Kuper has moved along with his wife and family to Oaxaca, Mexico for a 1 year stay, where a drawn out teacher’s strike has caused mounting conflicts and riots in the colonial city. Here’s a link to some email updates the Kuper has sent out, including what it’s like to live just 10 blocks from where the worst of the riots is. There’s also lots of up-close photos and drawings depicting life in Oaxaca City.

Here’s a current article from “El Universal” in Oaxaca concerning the situation. More can be found on Google news in Spanish.

Update: More information on The Beat.

Travel to Mexico, just don’t go to Banelos, Chiapas where some of the locals take the law in their own hands.

Here’s the story.

On a concrete and mud street of the small town of Banelos, there appeared a pothole due to heavy rains. Family #1 decided to close the street and fill in the hole. Meanwhile Family #2, whose business involves transporting things by truck, wanted to get their truck out of the blocked-off street.

Their arguing culminated in both sides pulling out firearms to resolve the dispute, including an AR-15 rifle, which according to Wikipedia is a “lightweight, air-cooled, magazine-fed, autoloading centerfire rifle”.

When the smoke cleared, 4 were dead and others injured.

I don’t mind keeping politics low-key, when people start getting into a heated discussion, I sometimes just walk away. But hey, I can’t help commenting of the crazy stuff going on in Mexico right now. The one guy, López Obrador, lost the presidential election a while back, but he claims foul and refuses to give up. Right now he’s camped in the main plaza in Mexico City, and plans on setting up a “parallel” or shadow government, while the real president takes office. Pretty strange stuff if you ask me.

Runner-up in the recent Mexican presidential election, Andrés Manuel López Obrador refuses to give up. Here he’s waving from his tent in Mexico City’s Zócalo plaza.

Labor day weekend’s past (for those of you who are in the USA) and if you’re in high school it’s probably about time to get back to classes. My advice: try to have some fun, try to learn something, and take a foreign language.   Anyone else have better advice?

If you’re American, and you want to travel out of the US, you better get going on your passport. Apparently, if you’re outside the US on or after January 8, 2007, you won’t be able to get back in without a valid US passport. I’ve got mine, so I guess it doesn’t matter too much to me. So if you want to go study Spanish in S.A., just be sure to get your passport!