Monthly Archives: March 2012

biology, comic, Darwin Eats Cake, evolution, music, Ronin Institute, science

Clarification re: "Hot like Mexico"

2 Comments

So, I just got back from the Colorado School of Mines (And boy are my picks tired!!!), where I was speaking about the Ronin Institute. One of many wonderful things about the trip was the opportunity to meet Alejandro Weinstein, who has been featured twice on Guillaume’s Mailbag over at Darwin Eats Cake. Following a conversation with him, I wanted to clarify something regarding the following strip:

Best URL for sharing: http://www.darwineatscake.com/?id=43
Permanent image URL for hotlinking or embedding: http://www.darwineatscake.com/img/comic/43.jpg

Alejandro apparently took the third frame of the comic to mean that Guillaume thought that he was from Mexico. I asked Guillaume about this, and he said no, that with a name like “Alejandro Weinstein,” he had assumed that Alejandro was from Argentina. It turns out that Alejandro actually hails from Chile, which is sort of the Argentina of the west coast of South America, so, he wasn’t too far off, really.

Guillaume went on to explain that, actually, “hot like Mexico” and “cool the bad” are references to the lyrics of the Lady Gaga song “Alejandro.” Guillaume had assumed that this was common knowledge, at least until I pointed out to him that the set of people with a high degree of fluency in Lady Gaga lyrics probably shares little overlap with the set of people who read Darwin Eats Cake.
Anyway, Guillaume felt bad about the misunderstanding, and asked me to address it here.
On a related note, Guillaume’s Mailbag is still accepting submissions. Send in any biological trait of any species, and Guillaume will provide an adaptationist explanation for its evolutionary origin. You can reach him at guillaume@darwineatscake.com.