The recent passing of Hugh Hefner, the Playboy magazine founder perpetually draped with blonde, big-busted women, puts the Guadalajara Reporter in a mind to acknowledge his passing vis-a-vis a story told to us by lakeside’s own Rosemary Grayson about how she became Miss October 1964 – and the magazine’s first British playmate.

“It must be depressing to be American. You feel so helpless,” a British friend said when asked what he made of the atrocity in Las Vegas.

Twenty years ago, when Carlos Martinez – the director of Insight Academy in Ajijic – was teaching philosophy and physics at various universities in Mexico, he saw how a number of students were ill prepared for university level classes.

After Tuesday’s earthquake in Mexico’s capital, everyone is naturally wondering if such damage and loss of life are avoidable.

Cortlandt Jones considers himself lucky, seeing that his entire dance career was based on work that he never had to audition for.

In Guadalajara’s Centro Historico -  parts of which after sundown are semi-abandoned moonscapes of dark, silent streets swirling with dust and lined with terribly neglected but graceful colonial architecture - a few old hunks of coal refuse to die out, warming the bones and spirits of the loyal drinkers clustered around them.