As seen on FIFA.com

I happened to be in Mexico City the weekend of the re-opening of the Azteca Stadium prior to the World Cup 2026, for the México vs Portugal friendly. I happened to be sitting very close to Gianni Infantino. So of course I got close to him to snap a photo.

A week later, my buddy Chore sent me this screenshot:

While I am no longer featured in FIFA’s front page, the note persists. Unfortunately they cut off the top of my head.

This is the photo we snapped from a slightly different angle.

FIFA Club World Cup

My team Monterrey qualified for the FIFA Club World Cup happening as we speak in the US, and it’s the first one with the 32 team format. It all lined up so that we could watch three matches all at the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena, CA with some of the world’s top clubs.

Four Kirsch boys made it: Moi, Ilán, Ari, and myself. Here’s proof:

PSG vs Botafogo
Made the big screen at the stadium

Yes, we also did a bunch of Los Angeles things. But those are not for this post.

Jurassic Beyajad

This post will be mostly relevant to people I grew up with.

Jurassic Beyajad logo, from a screencap.

Back home, at the youth movement, we used to have a yearly movie festival. Me being me, would pour disporportionate amounts of effort into it and make sure the end result is as good as can be given the budgetary and technical limitations at the time.

One of my most famous films was “Jurassic Beyajad”, a parody of Jurassic Park. I thought all copies (well, the only copy) had been destroyed during the infamous “accidentally taped a telenovela over it” by Aby M. Recently a copy resurfaced. It appears I made one for my aunt Jave and she had Ari M. (coincidentally, Ari’s brother) digitize it along other home movies. And the quality is pretty good!

It was shot on our Sony Video 8 Handycam and edited on the floor of the playroom at my parents where a lot of the taping coincidentally also happend. I would hook up several VCRs, cameras, TVs, stereos, Discmans; and edit by carefully pressing Record / Play simultaneously on several devices.

Computer graphics/animations were done on Macromind Director and recorded straight from the screen of a PowerBook at the lowest brightness setting in a dark room, since recording CRT monitors would flicker due to the mismatch in refresh rates. I don’t remember who owned the PowerBook but I certainly didn’t have one at the time.

Watching this brought back a lot of memories. I shot and edited the damn thing so I remember the specific words and intonations, bloopers, etc. Lots of inside jokes in there, and many didn’t age well. But that’s art.

Here it is, enjoy!

And now let’s see if we can find a copy of “Yom Haatzmaut”, in which I have an alien aircraft blow up the club.

Poppy seed strudel from Tel-Aviv

In a move that shall go down in history as one of the top boss moves ever by an uncle, David went to Israel, made his way to King George street in Tel-Aviv, entered the famous Weiss Bakery, and brought one of their legendary poppy seed (mohn) strudels for me.

The wax paper that carefully protected the merchandise.

The strudel was carefully packed in his luggage and flown to Mexico where it sat in a freezer until my latest visit, at which point I carefully packed it in my luggage and brought it to Austin, TX.

After the long and tortous travel, I was able to finally bask myself in all its black glory with its extreme filling to bread ratio.

Yes, it was all worth it. No, I should not do a drug test right now.

Thank you so much, Davico! You made me very happy.

No ugly people were harmed making this blog.