Twosday Grab Bag (Updated)

Well, I’ll be damned — it’s Twosday, 2/22/22. Unless, that is, you live by the International Fixed Calendar, in which case Twosday was Saturday.

By any calendar (save the Mayan one, maybe?), there’ll never be anything other than Onesdays and Twosdays. And only once every hundred years. Oh, it’s also Presidents’ Day, but who gives a shit about that any more?

Here’s another date-related gee-whizzer for you.

All this math hurts my head.

Also today: garbage pickup in our neighborhood. We used to put the bins out the evening before, but every few weeks javelinas would tip them over in the middle of the night, spreading garbage all over the street, driveway, and yard. Last year I said enough of that and started getting up before dawn on pickup day to wheel the bins out to the curb. Since then no muss no fuss, at least at our house. I don’t understand why the neighbors haven’t followed my example. Maybe they don’t have dogs to wake them up at oh-dark-thirty.

I’m not quite done with dates, though. In the Hash House Harrier world, odd and even years are kind of a big deal. Every even year, there’s a world hashing event called InterHash (this year taking place in Trinidad). During odd years, national and regional hash events occur around the world: EuroHash, PanAfrica Hash, InterAmericas Hash, Aussie Nash Hash, and so on.

As the last InterAmericas Hash wrapped up in 2019, various clubs presented bids to host the 2021 event. The winner? Medellin, Columbia. Registrations quickly sold out, both the initial batch offered when the winning host was announced and a later batch offered by popular demand.

About a year later, a traveling American hasher dropped into Medellin to visit the organizer, a hasher named Pablo Hashcobar, and discovered that the man had misappropriated almost all the registration money to build himself a house in the mountains some distance from the city. Turns out Pablo wasn’t even much of a hasher, having hashed only a few times before attending InterAm 2019 and putting in the winning 2021 bid. Moreover, he had no help or backing from local hashers, of whom there were only a few in the first place, and had done essentially nothing by way of organizing venues, hotels, transportation, catering, or trails for the event, now only months away, which literally thousands of hashers had already paid to attend.

Meanwhile, Covid. The American hasher enlisted the help of other experienced hashers, some of whom had helped organize previous InterAms, and the rescue committee announced a slip to September 2022, putting InterAm in the same year as the Trinidad InterHash. Meanwhile, Pablo Hashcobar gets himself murdered, leaving the InterAm rescue committee fully in charge.

The latest? Another slip. InterAm 2019 will now take place in September 2023, giving the rescue committee enough time to organize a proper event, with hotels, transportation, catering, and all that stuff, and not least putting InterAm back in an odd year, not in conflict with World InterHash. Whew.

Yes, Covid gets a lot of the blame for the slippages, but the real problem was a conniving grifter in the first place, making promises he never intended to keep. Never speak ill of the dead? Yeah, right.

I just hope, when InterAm 2023 wraps up in Medellin, hashers take a hard look at the people and clubs making bids to host the next event in 2025, and go with experience and track records.

Updates & Corrections (2/23/22): I found some correspondence relating to the events described above. My memory was faulty in some respects.

• His hash name was Pablo Pisscobar, not Hashcobar
• He was an experienced & known hasher, but had never worked any big events before
• 500 regos sold out at InterAm 2019, another 500 sold out later, then another 500 (also sold out)
• Pablo misappropriated $100,000 of $400,000 raised to build the house, which he planned to justify by calling it a “hash house” where visiting hashers could stay (for a price)
• After Pablo’s murder, the remaining money was tied up in his estate
• One of the rescue committee’s main jobs was to untangle the money situation in order to offer refunds
• The “hash house” remains to be sold

Here’s the latest on Mister B, our senior citizen dachshund. We took him in for blood work yesterday to see if he’s finally recovered from valley fever and can stop taking meds. We had him in a couple of weeks ago, when he was sick. He’s completely recovered from that and has regained the weight he’d lost. We won’t get the blood work results for a few days, so in the meantime he’s still taking his meds. He doesn’t know it yet, but while we were there we scheduled him for a tooth cleaning, poor guy.

The younger dachshunds, Fritzi and Lulu, are doing their best to keep Mr. B young at heart, and all three are getting along well. I know at least some Paul’s Thing readers care about our pups, which is why I post so many updates on how they’re doing.