A Resignação?
POBRE PAÍS
o nosso.
Há uns anos, nos momentos mais complicados de dissolução da URSS, nada funcionava na Rússia. Todos os dias de manhã, no Hotel Ukraina, o pequeno almoço era uma saga. Chegava o samovar com o chá e não havia chávenas lavadas. Chegavam as chávenas, não havia colheres. Chegavam as colheres e não havia chá outra vez. Os estrangeiros recém-chegados protestavam em vão. Os russos e os velhos habitantes do Hotel Ukraina, que já conheciam todas as rotinas, iam buscar chávenas à cozinha, acumulavam duas ou três chávenas em cima da mesa para armazenar o precioso chá, etc. Um amigo meu disse-me: “vais ver, ao quinto dia já estamos como eles, a ir buscar chá à cozinha, muito caladinhos”. Ao terceiro dia já íamos buscar chá à cozinha.
[roubado ao Abrupto ]
Mensagens
The Queen has returned:
Boudicca (also known as Boadicea and Boudica) is back... on a movie (but of course):
There are some lines of William Cowper inscribed on the plinth of the bronze statue of Boadicea near Westminster Bridge in central London: "Regions Caesar never knew/Thy posterity shall sway." The words have never been truer. Hollywood has four films in development about the British warrior queen. One of them, Warrior, is being produced by Mel Gibson, partly with money from the proceeds of his film The Passion of The Christ (a rare example of fundamentalist Christian money backing a project with a pagan heroine). Along with a DreamWorks project called Queen Fury, Paramount's Warrior Queen and another called My Country, the race is on to get what Variety magazine called "Braveheart with a bra" to the screen first.
What Hollywood will make of the life and times of the flame-haired, 1,950-year-old rebuffer of Romans is anyone's guess. A Celt...
Here's to one of the saddest and darkest Studio Ghibli movies: The Grave of the Fireflies
(got this one meselfa on DVD):
"War does not only involve soldiers. During WWII, Seita and Setsuko flee from their homes one night when the air raid alarm sounds. With the fall of the fire bombs, they become orphans and homeless. This film, based the semi-autobiography by Akiyuki Nosaka, relates the tragedies of war as Seita and Setsuko struggle to survive with only each other to hold onto."
The name Laputa comes from the name of the floating castle in the sky in Jonathan Swift's classic novel Gulliver's Travels . Miyazaki apparently liked the name and the idea so he borrowed both. However, Swift, being a satirist, had used the Spanish slang word for "whore" ( "la puta" ) as the name of the original castle in the sky. (The people in Swift's Laputa were absent-minded technologists who oppressed the lands below them by cutting off the sunlight to them. In that sense Swift's choice of the name does not make any sense, and I have not been able to find anything which explains why he chose that particular name.)
It is not clear whether Miyazaki understood the origin of this word or not when he chose it. However, Isao Takahata, Miyazaki's mentor and the producer of Laputa, did know and said so in an interview in Animeland #6 July/August 1992. Apparently neither of them realized how obscene the word is in contemporary...
" Better to be deprived of food for three days, then tea for one. " (Ancient Chinese Proverb)
Ah, the benefits of green tea:
* A cup of green tea enhances health
* Green tea prevents cancer
* Green tea restricts the increase of blood cholesterol
* Green tea controls high blood pressure
* Green tea lowers the blood sugar level
* Green tea suppresses aging
* Green tea refreshes the body
* Green tea deters food poisoning
* Green tea stops cavities
* Green tea fights virus
* Green tea acts as a functional food
(this one I have...)
"What makes green tea so special?
The secret of green tea lies in the fact it is rich in catechin polyphenols, particularly epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). EGCG is a powerful anti-oxidant: besides inhibiting the growth of cancer cells, it kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. It has also been effective in lowering LDL cholesterol levels, and inhibiting the abno...
I'm usually disgusted at politics (we have Blog de Esquerda
for the dirty job, don't we) but somehow this seems important:
Durão Barroso seems to be headed as the European Commission
Chief. Here's The Guardian on it, El Mundo , El Mundo on Durão Barroso ,
Publico ...
Unsuprisingly, in their usual masturbation-like attitude to anything that is not star-spangled related, the US press doesn't stir at the nomination. Ah, who cares anyway...
"Será demais pedir a taça?"
Está tudo pronto? Dá-lhe gás!
Três, dois, um, vai arrancar
uma espécie de hino em versão popular
sem essas coisas de mão no peito e ar pesado
Em 2004 o campeonato vai mudar o nosso fado
do coitado, do comido
Porque é que o país se queixa do que podia ter sido?
Mas nunca é. E a culpa nunca é nossa
é do árbitro, é do campo, é de quem nos deu uma coça.
Chega. Queremos mais, é um murro na mesa.
Um grito do Ipiranga em versão portuguesa.
Porque até hoje, quase marcámos, quase ganhámos, quase fizemos…
Mas porquê quase? … Passemos à próxima fase.
(Refrão)
Marca mais!
Corre mais!
Menos ais, menos ais, menos ais!
Quero muito mais!
O conceito é muito simples: não desistir.
Mas será que é chato aquilo que acabamos de pedir?
É chato agora, acreditem no que digo:
nós jogamos em casa e contamos com o Figo,
o Rui Costa, o Deco, o Simão e o Pauleta.
Razões para querermos muito mais que um lugar que não comprometa.
Será de mais pedi...
Everybody's All American:
The American Film Institute presents 100 Songs : America's Greatest Movie Music.
Including As Time Goes By , Hakuna Matata , When You Wish Upon A Star, Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend, I Could Have Danced All Night, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious , Come What May, Lose Yourself (two of three from XXI), and Bond themes.
Movies with more than one song: The Wizard of Oz (1st place), Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, A Star is Born, Funny Girl, West Side Story, Meet Me in St Louis .
Lemme just paste here the criteria:
Feature-Length Fiction Film: The film must be in narrative format, typically more than 60 minutes in length.
American Film: The film must be in the English language with significant creative and/or financial production elements from the United States.
Song: Music and lyrics featured in an American film that set a tone or mood, define character, advance plot and/or express the film's themes in a...
The pictures from Abu Ghraib are fated to join a peculiar class of objects and images for which someone coined the useful term Americana: the quintessential, familiar and recognisable stuff of US identity. Americans have a unique capacity for creating unforgettable visual icons, and here are another set, to join Marilyn, Elvis, the stars and stripes and Edward Hopper 's Nighthawks.
Hopper was the first great painter of Americana, of the idiosyncratic rituals and customs of his country. A white lighthouse in dead sunlight, a forgotten mansion by the railroad tracks, a shirtsleeved figure at a tenement window - his America is shocking, perplexing and surreal.
Hopper's America is a cartoon country, caricatured, exaggerated, impossible, and real. He can paint the most banal moment in a Manhattan lunch room, where a waitress works in numbed solitude while the saddest collection of fruit in the history of art sits unwanted on a side counter, and say as much as TS El...
This beautiful lady has a website , a recently released face powder by Physicians Formula and she'll be driving a Volkswagen in no time (still unavailable :-(
Here's a Telegraph review of the book previously posted about, titled
Marylin unadorned
In his beautiful free translation of Villon's elegiac Ballade des dames du temps jadis , Christopher Logue ends by bringing the medieval poet's catalogue of legendary women up to date. The line, which stretches back to Helen of Troy and Salome, ends, in Logue's version, with Marilyn Monroe , the 20th-century sex symbol who has become as resonant in our cultural memory as her classical and biblical predecessors were in earlier times.
Sarah Churchwell's book on the Marilyn Monroe phenomenon is as concerned with its subject's posthumous image as with the facts of her life. Indeed, one of Churchwell's purposes is to show how few undisputed facts there are about this woman whom everybody t...
Why Have A Gay Pride Parade?
by David Nava
"When do we get our parade?"
The question was asked more in fun than with envy, more in joking than with malice, but it struck a chord with me. I had casually mentioned to a couple of my straight friends that the Gay Pride Parade was coming up and I was looking forward to it.
"What about Straight Pride Day?" the female of the couple asked with a grin.
"Everyday is Straight Pride Day," I answered, also grinning. "This culture celebrates it with gay abandon." She laughed.
"When do we get our parade?" demanded her male counterpart.
"Turn the television on." I said. "There's your parade." We all laughed and went about our business but the brief exchange kept coming back to me through the week. The more I thought about it the more serious it became.
Why have a Gay Pride Parade? It's a question many straight people might be asking in the next few weeks...
The Toxic impatience with democracy in Latin America:
"Latin America is paying the price for centuries of inequality and injustice, and the United States really doesn't have a clue about what is happening in the region," said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"These are very, very fragile regimes," he added. "Increasingly, there's frustration and resentment. The rate of voting is going down. Blank ballots are increasing. The average Latin American would prefer a very strong government that produces a physical security and economic security, and no government has been able to do that."
These at-risk governments stretch thousands of miles from the Caribbean and Central America through the spine of the Andes to the continent's southern cone, and increasingly the problems associated with weak governments are spilling beyond Latin America and affecting United States interests in the region."...
God's Number Is Up
In his 1916 poem "A Coat," William Butler Yeats rhymed:
"I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat."
Read "religion" for "song," and "science" for "coat," and we have a close approximation of the deepest flaw in the science and religion movement, as revealed in Yeats's denouement:
"But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked."
Naked faith is what religious enterprise was always about, until science became the preeminent system of natural verisimilitude, tempting the faithful to employ its wares in the practice of preternatural belief. Although most efforts in this genre offer little more than scientistic cant and religious blather, a few require a response from the magisterium of science, if for n...
Super Rich Can Afford Their Own Language
With the rich not only getting more numerous but richer by the year, a new language of wealth-speak has been created by bankers who are desperate to get a slice of their lucrative business.
Readers of the Eighth Annual World Wealth Report, published this week by investment bank Merrill Lynch & Co. (MER.N) and consulting firm Capgemini, get full exposure to this euphemistic new-age language.
The word millionaire shows up only twice in the report --in the footnotes. Instead, individuals with more than $1 million in financial assets, excluding their main home, are called HNWIs, or high net worth individuals by the authors, using a term coined by the banking industry.
Ultra-HNWIs are the super rich, defined as a small but rapidly growing group of 70,000 individuals with more than $30 million in assets. It was Merrill who pegged the ultra threshold at $30 million, a few years ago.
The report estimates there were 7.7 million m...
Slate vs Michael Moore (cover story)
Excerpt:
[To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.]
Since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of some 600 books, scores of which claim to be biographies, and all of which promise to uncover the ‘real Marilyn'. But the biographies can't agree on many of the most sensational details of the life of the twentieth century's most famous woman. Rather than offering another 'definitive life', Sarah Churchwell's book looks at the writing of Marilyn Monroe's many life stories, comparing the competing versions of some of the key moments in her life including: her father's identity, her mother's mental problems, her alleged childhood molestation, her teenage marriage, stories of prostitution and the casting couch, abortions, narcissism, her own psychological problems, her marriages to two other legends, her difficulties on the set and with directors, her affairs with one or both of the Kennedy brothers, and of course the highly charged debates about her death.
Churchwell looks at how these stories...
Roubado ao Gato Fedorento , que está cada vez melhor :-D, a respeito das ofertas da TV Shop e quejandos (já sei, tinha que meter esta palavra a talhe de foice)
«Reconheço que isto pode ser polémico mas, na minha opinião, o produto mais curioso actualmente à venda na televisão é a baixela Titanic . Pergunto-me se não será um bocado incomodativo jantar na baixela Titanic. Tenho a impressão que estaria sempre à espera que, de repente, rebentasse um cano e a sala ficasse completamente inundada. Agora, uma vez que já existem pratos, travessas e copos com nome de drama cinematográfico, bonito mesmo seria a baixela Titanic trazer o faqueiro Psycho . E as primeiras quinze pessoas a encomendarem a valiosa baixela Titanic, com o espectacular faqueiro Psycho incluído, receberiam, totalmente grátis e para repousarem tranquilamente depois de uma faustosa refeição, um conjunto de cama Misery .»
O Senhor dos Anéis , de J. R. R. Tolkien — o romance mais lido em todo o mundo. O Senhor dos Anéis , de Peter Jackson - o filme com maior audiência na história do cinema. Imagine agora que um jornalista português consegue entrevistar o realizador Peter Jackson, todos os principais actores de O Senhor dos Anéis , o compositor da banda sonora e vários membros da equipa técnica. Imagine que ele consegue desvendar os principais segredos por detrás das filmagens — os locais, efeitos especiais, dificuldades de produção, o que todos pensam da obra de Tolkien, e muito mais. Com introdução do próprio Peter Jackson À Conversa com os Senhores dos Anéis é um rigoroso exclusivo para Portugal.
We have had little books in search of cocoa and chocolate, coffee, cinnamon - that's all the Cs, then - as well as nutmeg and assorted other spices. Now is the turn of vanilla. It, like so many others that catch the imagination of the gastronomic traveller, was a New World discovery: ten-a-penny to the Aztecs, Inca and Maya, but gold dust once it reached Europe.
[ read on ]
If we shadows have offended,
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream.
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
«O meu avô salvou 30 mil e agiu por conta própria, contra a lei do Estado Novo, sem ajuda de ninguém e fê-lo em 1940, no início da Guerra», disse à Agência Lusa Álvaro de Sousa Mendes, neto do diplomata e presidente da Fundação Aristides de Sousa Mendes .
Para a investigadora Yehuda Bauer, especialista na história dos refugiados judeus durante a II Guerra Mundial, Aristides de Sousa Mendes protagonizou mesmo a «maior acção de salvamento levada a cabo por uma só pessoa durante o Holocausto».
A acção de Aristides de Sousa Mendes , sublinha também o neto, foi de «total e absoluto desinteresse», tendo havido famílias que lhe ofereceram «fortunas por um visto e de quem o diplomata nunca aceitou um tostão».
Aristides de Sousa Mendes era, em 1940, cônsul de Portugal em Bordéus, no sudoeste de França, onde chegavam diariamente centenas de milhar de refugiados de toda a Europa, onde eram perseguidos pelos exércitos Nazis.
Originário de uma família rica e burguesa de Vi...
Proust and Neuroscience at the table: Marcel Proust lived in his memory. He would close his eyes and disappear. This is understandable: His life was a feeble thing. He rarely left his room. He read train schedules to fall asleep, and he slept a lot. He dutifully informed his mother of his bowel movements and thought he was allergic to the sun. Faced with this claustrophobic reality, wouldn't you live in your memory? But Proust's sense of memory was no idle exercise in nostalgia. He believed that memory was life: We exist only in a remembrance of things past and are made up of those fragile details that somehow defy the corrosive passage of time. Indeed, Proust's fiction, full of languid and precious sentences, was a virtual case study in the idea of memory, its peculiar habits, and particular properties. From his eight self-centered and exquisite novels, three basic truths of remembering emerge: 1. The sense of smell has a unique relationship with memory; 2. Memory is a sim...
In search for the face that launched a thousand ships (yep, still Troy :-)
This is not one of Helen's many depictions, though :-)
The Iliad offers little help for casting directors. The Homeric text seldom describes what Helen looks like. (When it does, she's "white-armed" and garbed in "shimmering linen.") Instead, the poem attends closely to how men respond to her. When Helen first appears, the Trojan elders murmur: "No wonder the men of Troy and Argives under arms have suffered years of agony all for her, for such a woman. Beauty, terrible beauty! A deathless goddess—so she strikes our eyes!" A Greek man, listening to a bard sing these lines after dinner, was free to lean back and imagine his own version of extraordinary, unsettling beauty. Legend has it that Homer was blind, so sculptures of him tend to have an uncanny expression: It looks as though he, too, is picturing something unfathomable in his mind's eye.
See here a slideshow o...
Ever imagined having your surname erased from all recognition by politics?
For more than 80 years, everyone in Mongolia was on a first-name basis. After seizing power in the early 1920s, the Mongolian Communists destroyed all family names in a campaign to eliminate the clan system, the hereditary aristocracy and the class structure.
Within a few decades, most Mongolians had forgotten their ancestral names. They used only a single given name -- a system that eventually became confusing when 9,000 women ended up with the same name, Altantsetseg, meaning "golden flower."
By the mid-1990s, Mongolia had become a democracy again, and there were growing worries about the lack of surnames. One name might be enough when most people were nomadic herdsman in remote pastures, but now the country was urbanizing. The one-name system was so confusing that some people were marrying without realizing they were relatives.
Serjee Besud, director of Mongolia 's state library...
A Fulbright grant recipient living in Madrid and on behalf of The New Criterion claims that the civilizational importance of the Madrid bombing was lost on Spain. Looking around Europe, terrorists were smart to choose the weakest wildebeest of the herd.
[I'm sure we Portugal are not included in the herd herein][hah!]
[jeez...]
A Jewish Madonna? Is That a Mystery?
So on the one hand, she wears a Jewish star, says she attends synagogue, performs with a version of the prayer accessory known as tefillin and with Hebrew letters flashing across a screen, and has let it be known that she won't have concerts on the Jewish Sabbath; Madison Square Garden will be dark tonight and tomorrow.
But on the other hand, Madonna is not Jewish. And her name is the least of the problem, although she appears to be addressing that issue as well. In an ABC interview that will be broadcast tonight, she says she has taken on the Hebrew name Esther. But Liz Rosenberg, her spokeswoman, denied that she was dropping the name Madonna. "Sometimes people have their secret name, a dream name," said Ms. Rosenberg, adding: "If someone calls her Esther she wouldn't turn around."
[ Read more on the NYT ]
It's Dragon Boat Festival here in Taiwan
The festival commemorates the death of the statesman-poet Chu Yuan of the Warring States Period (about 300 years before the birth of Christ), who, frustrated with his attempts to gain a favorable response from the king for much-needed reforms, threw himself into the Milo River and drowned. His followers jumped into their boats and rushed out to try to save him, and today's Dragon Boat races commemorate this vain attempt.
Another tradition of the season, stemming from this event, is the eating of a delicious rice dumpling called tsung tze. After the poet had thrown himself into the river, the people wanted to preserve his body from being eaten by fish, so they made dumplings of sticky rice which they wrapped in bamboo leaves and threw into the river. Eating tsung tze is a part of the celebrations of every Dragon Boat Festival.
Who didn't know about this? :D
"How would we remember Shakespeare if he had died at 29? His career as a playwright would have lasted only a few years, starting in 1590 with the crude popular success The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (now known as Henry VI, Part II). His last and best play would probably have been Richard II; scholars would study the fantastically violent Titus Andronicus and the intellectual burlesque Love's Labour's Lost. But the creations that make Shakespeare Shakespeare—Romeo and Juliet; Falstaff and Hal; Hamlet, Lear—would be lost forever. Shakespeare would take his place as the second most promising of the Elizabethan dramatists—behind his exact contemporary, the prodigious Christopher Marlowe."
"To put it another way, Marlowe himself seems like a character out of Shakespeare—a real-life Hamlet, or perhaps Iago. Certainly his life, from the little that is known about it, was ...