The Alpha-Bestiary
I is for Ichabod,
The iguana from Ixtapa
Who was overly fond of his cervezas.
He guzzled in Guadalajara,
He drank till dawn in Mazatlan,
Dos Equis, Corona, Agua de Baño,
He drank it all from Juarez to Zihuatanejo.
When rotgut made him loco in Acapulco
He swore he’d be sober from June to October.
He died in July from going dry,
Poor Ichabod the iguana from Ixtapa.
I is for Ichabod,
The iguana from Ixtapa
Who was overly fond of his cervezas.
He guzzled in Guadalajara,
He drank till dawn in Mazatlan,
Dos Equis, Corona, Agua de Baño,
He drank it all from Juarez to Zihuatanejo.
When rotgut made him loco in Acapulco
He swore he’d be sober from June to October.
He died in July from going dry,
Poor Ichabod the iguana from Ixtapa.
Ichabod (Ikhavod, a Hebrew name meaning "Alas! the glory" or perhaps "where is the glory?" or even "inglorious") was a Latin American lizard. "Iguana" is derived from "iwana," the Taíno name for the species. He was from Ixtapa, Guerrero, a resort city on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Along with Cancún, on the Caribbean sea, the town was established in the early 1970s as a new tourist destination. Zihuatanejo (with the added honorific for José Azueta, a martyr to the American invasion of 1914) may have been derived from the Purépecha term for “water of the yellow mountain” or from the Nahuatl "place of women" named after the females who led the sun at dusk to Mictlan, the realm of the dead, to give a dim light to the deceased; the place was also a sanctuary dedicated to the goddess Cihuatéotl, the mother of the human race and the goddess of women who died in childbirth and of warriors who died in battle. Acapulco de Juárez, 240 km (150 mi) to south, is one of Mexico's oldest beach resorts, becoming a popular destination for American movie stars in the 1940s. It takes its name from the Nahuatl terms for "where the reeds were destroyed or washed away" plus the name of the 19th-century president who resisted French conquest, Benito Juárez. Mazatlán (Nahuatl for "place of deer") was established across from the southernmost tip of the Baja California peninsula in 1531. It remained a fishing village until the 1830s, when it developed into Mexico's largest port on the Pacific. Guadalajara, the 2nd-largest city in Mexico, was named after the Spanish hometown Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán, who founded it in 1532 to protect his recently-conquered western lands. (The name is derived from the Andalusian Arabic term for "valley of stones.") A cerveza is a beer; Dos Equis is a lager that was originally brewed at the beginning of the 20th century by a German-born immigrant who called it Siglo XX and labelled it the Roman numeral for 20 ("Dos Equis" is Spanish for "two Xs"); Corona ("crown") is a pale lager established in 1925 and is the best-selling imported beer in the US; Agua de Baño, on the other hand, is an eau de toilette (bath water) aroma.
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