The New York Times has a report today indicating that Mexico has a lot more in common with the United States than is generally recognized.

With Mexico’s midterm elections two weeks away, the most spirited campaigning has been for a candidate with no name, no face and no particular policy positions. Call him Nulo.

Nulo — Spanish for null and void — is drawing support from disgruntled Mexicans who say the country’s politicians are focused more on their own power games than on the people they are supposed to serve. So, instead of urging voters to throw their weight behind any of the real candidates vying to be elected mayors, governors or members of Congress on July 5, Nulo’s backers are calling on Mexicans to nullify their ballots — and vote for no one at all.

“There have been campaigns like this in the past, but it’s never caught fire,” said Daniel Lund, president of the MUND Group, a Mexico City polling firm. “Now, it’s catching fire.”

Support for the Voto Nulo campaign has spread on the Internet, where supporters extol the virtues of sending Mexican political parties a stark message: Voting for nothing is better than backing the politicians currently running the country.

At least they have to take California!

The same Swedish Absolut vodka brand, which has notoriously previously targeted the Gay Community with special advertising and sponsorships, is now running in magazines and billboards in Mexico an advertising campaign imagining the reversal of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase.

Absolut’s map even takes a particularly partisan Mexican position on the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase.

Did Absolut’s advertising agency think that news of this particular campaign would not reach Americans, particularly Americans residing in Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and the non-Bay-area, non-Hollywood, non-Marin-to-Humboldt portions of California?

Via Gateway Pundit.

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a story on Jonathan Amith, an American anthropologist who is recording, and attempting to preserve, Nahuatl, the language of the pre-Colombian Aztec Empire.

Word by word, Mr. Amith is creating an extensive archive of Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs at the time of the 16th century Spanish conquest and now the first language of 1.5 million Mexican Indians. He records fables and personal histories, collects plants and insects, and keeps up a nonstop patter with locals, searching for information to add to a Web site he is building that is part dictionary, part encyclopedia and part storybook.

His goal is both daring and quixotic: to preserve Nahuatl so that native speakers don’t discard their language as they turn to Spanish, which they need to compete in contemporary Mexico…

..Nahuatl strings together prefixes, word roots and suffixes, sometimes into very long words. One 18-syllable Nahuatl word used in towns near Cuernavaca is translated “you honorable people might have come along banging your noses so as to make them bleed, but in fact you didn’t,” according to SIL International, a religiously oriented linguistics group that is translating the Old Testament into Nahuatl. Others are simpler: the Nahuatl words chicolatl and tomatl gave English “chocolate” and “tomato.”

Mr. Amith recruited computational linguists to devise software to separate Nahuatl words into their component parts, which is vital for looking them up on his Web site.

How to Use the Nahuatl Dictionary

The web-site is password protected. The Journal supplies: USERNAME: oapan — PASSWORD: nahuatl