Universidad Nacional Anónima de Mexico

Yes, I know, I should by a new radio so I don't wake up listening to NPR every weekday morning. It's on my list of Things To Do.

Today, they had a story on the plight of foreign-born children of illegal immigrants trying to go to college in this country. Since they can't apply for financial aid, even middling universities are completely out of reach for most of them. The focussed on one woman in particular with fantastic grades who would be able to write her own ticket if she were a US citizen.

What struck me about the story is that no one even raised the possibility of her returning to Mexico for her education. She's fluent in Spanish--the reporter even pointed out that she'd like to become a Spanish teacher. American-born students with those ambitions often spend at least a semester abroad. Students at UNAM (Latin America's largest unversity) pay a token fee of about $0.02 per semester.

Is she eligible for admission to a Mexican university? Frankly, I don't know. I could understand if the government of Mexico wasn't too happy about using local tax revenues to fund the education of a resident of another country. There are other potential obstacles as well: She'd have to live away from her family (which Hispanic students are often more loath to do than others--particularly in immigrant families where they may play a substantial role in providing support) and a place to live in Mexico City isn't free or necessarily very safe for a teenage woman. If she left the country, she might not be able to get back in. But I wish they'd at least raised the possibility in order to dismiss it.

Was it snobbishness that led to this omission and, if so, whose? The family's? The reporter's? I'm reminded of an online immigration debate between zompist and a nativist many years ago now. The nativist claimed that Latin Americans move here for the amenities of civilised life--like proper infrastructure and higher education. zompist pointed out that he might be surprised to find that there are highways and universities in Latin America as well.

Good housekeeping cont.

I never mentioned that my new passport arrived in the mail last weekend. I wasn't expecting to see it for weeks! Even more surprising, after I had resigned myself to the loss of my old passport containing stamps from all my trips abroad, they sent it back! Ha, ha, monshu and you thought I was going to be rid of another piece of personal detritus! Nope, it goes in my Nostalgia File along with all the ticket stubs, pressed flowers, museum guides, blurry snapshots, and sundry articles from vacations past. I've been meaning to check with Bruce to see if he got his (plus his valuable personal documents), but I keep forgetting. (I'd like to have him over for drinks some time when I'm at monshu's, but it's hard to work up the enthusiasm for having guests over when it entails putting on pants.)

In any case, I'm now officially available for a spontaneous weekender on Airstrip One. Keep me in mind, jetsetters!

It finally occurred to me, when I was trying to figure out why I never received any 1099-DIV forms from my shareholdings, that despite filing a change of address form with the local post office, I haven't seen a single letter that's been forwarded from the previous address. Not a goddamn thing. I'm not surprised--this is how I expect the USPS to work--just disappointed.

At least some of the shareholder services sites are more useful than they were a year ago. The companies are still too wedded to print to let you change your address through them, but tax info is generally available. Of course, the news hasn't gotten to some of them foreign operations that the US dollar is the global currency of record. Consequently, one of them reported dividends for the year in pence with no equivalents. Take a hint from The Economist, lads!

Think I'm persnickity about spelling?

My promise to my readers: I will continue to avoid that "Grab the nearest book to you..." meme, if for no other reason than that determing the nearest book to me when I'm at work is not a trivial task.

Earlier today, the Chef de Reference showed me the list of titles called up by a keyword search on "propoganda" and asked what I could do about them. She's expressed interest in the back office before, so I felt comfortable getting technical. I explained to her that, since the Title field is a descriptive one, I couldn't correct a misspelling in it unless I was absolutely sure that it was an input error. If the spelling on the book was "propoganda", I'd have to retain it and add another, searchable field with the correct spelling. She responded "That's the most anal thing I've ever heard!"

Welcome to the world of bibliographic cataloging!