Ask a Real Newspaper: It was only a matter of time before the guero version of Gustavo Arellano's beloved spoof-advice column, Ask A Mexican, came along. So where better than Santa Fe to kick it off?
(Guero, according to Urban Dictionary, is "the Spanish equivalent of 'whitey.'" One definition even cites the City Different: "I saw a bunch of gueros in Santa Fe the other day. They were all talking about art and shit. Pinche gringos.")
So there it was, in Monday's Santa Fe New Mexican, a mere two weeks after Arellano himself was here: the official Ask-A-Gringo advice column.
Pregúntele al Gringo is decidedly more sober and less inflammatory than its well-established Mexican brother, which runs in a host of alt.weeklies around the country.
"There's a difference," Jeff Abbott, who will author the New Mex column, tells SFR. "This one's in a newspaper, so I can't use profanity or anything like that; I kind of do have to be more careful."
Wait, so…alt.weeklies aren't newspapers?
"It's a lot more official when you're inside an actual daily newspaper like the New Mexican," Abbott concludes.
So far, he's gotten one question—the same number we non-newspaper types over at SFR have sent him.
Name Your Price:
$15.47: the average hourly wage for bill collectors in New Mexico.
$154.72: the online sale price for a case of 500 powder-free latex gloves.
$1,547.25: the price of inspecting public records at the New Mexico Environment Department.
When SFR sent a public records request relating to air-quality permits to the New Mexico Environment Department in February, a $1,500 bill wasn't exactly the expected response. But records custodian Judy Fisher tells SFR that her time—58 hours, she estimates, to compile some 3,500 electronic documents—could be billed according to her usual hourly wage, $26.52. Fisher estimates that to print the records, SFR would have to pay something in the neighborhood of $3,000.
"It's a concern that someone requesting what seem like pretty standard documents would be charged $1,500 up front," Sarah Welsh, the executive director of the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, tells SFR.
So far, SFR has worked out ways to see some of the records, but also has objected in writing to the department's response. FOG also is "looking at this," Welsh says. "There are some things with [NMED's departmental] IPRA policy that raise some red flags."
