Arrr!

The tech department told me I shouldn't pirate music anymore. I asked, is that why it was crashing? No, they said, but you just shouldn't anyway.

Fine. It's their computer.

But how am I supposed to work?

Last year I taught La tortura, but I couldn't show the video, because frankly, it was distracting to me. This year, I want to teach Ricky Martin's Pégate, a kick-ass song he sang at los Latin Grammys (Pégate starts at the 2:25 mark). It's got the grammar I want: a ton of verbs in different tenses, plus some fun boricua words. But nooooo, iTunes doesn't have it.

So instead I'm teaching the Spanish version of Jaleo, which is another kick-ass party song, this one with a gypsy flavor, even arabic. But the only videos available on Google or YouTube are the Spanglish versions. And just in case you didn't know, Ricky Martin sounds great in Spanish, and his English is just fine, but somewhere in the translation, our boy Ricky turns to cheese. Even in Jaleo, which is a really faithful translation of the original. Maybe it's the way he sings it. Or maybe it's really cheesy in Spanish too, but we have a higher tolerance for cheese in Spanish than we do in English.

Anyway, the Spanglish version is worthless. I wish I could just pirate stuff. Arrrr!

By the way, on the Latin Grammys, all the performances were good. Well, maybe except for that boy/girl band in the middle of the show. Still, the latinos are more polished performers than those American pop stars whose real talent is production, marketing, and dancing in expensive videows. The same goes for the country music acts; country and latino artists are good performers because they spend the year actually performing, rather than, say, walking barefoot into gas station bathrooms.