Nepenthe

De La Hispaniola : ... en 1834 se produjo la toma de la ciudad de Scinde en la India, el último baluarte de la defensa hindú ante la conquista inglesa. Este hecho fue anunciado en Inglaterra por sir Charles Napier con un calambur de gran elegancia. Napier había sido acusado en la Cámara de los Comunes de diversos errores en la dirección de la guerra. Por eso, cuando finalmente consiguió tomar Scinde, Napier envió un mensaje tan lacónico que constaba de una sola palabra: "Peccavi!". Tras unos momentos de perplejidad general, los parlamentarios ingleses consiguieron descifrarlo. En latín peccavi significa "he pecado", lo que en inglés se formula "I have sinned", una frase casi homófona de "I have Scinde" (Ya tengo Scinde). La diferencia fonética es tan leve que todos comprendieron de repente que la ciudad de Scinde había caído en poder de aquel sutil general que se disculpaba así de sus posibles errores: ofreciéndoles la vic...

De Mar sin Orilla , de Andrés Trapiello, las diez palabras más bellas: "1. Sí . La palabra más bella. 2. Ultramarinos . Mi abuelo abrió después de la guerra un comercio de coloniales y ultramarinos en León, que pasó a mi padre, a imitación del abarrote que un pariente emigrado había abierto en México, durante la dictadura de Porfirio Díaz. De niño no alcancé nunca a saber qué significaba exactamente, pero me gustaba por lo que prometía de exótico y lejano. Para mí siempre orá unida a un chocolate de la marca El Indio, cuyas tabletas tenían un envoltorio de papel basto en el que aparecía estampada la cara de un indio motilón, naturalmente de color chocolate, empenachado de plumas sobre un fondo amarillo lleno de modernistas letras rojas. Si pienso en un azul ultramar imagino un azul, otra palabra mágica, más lejano que ninguno, un azul dios, un azul indiano, un azul niño, perdido, muerto muy lejos de su casa. 3. Rosa . Siempre distinta, eterna, 'pura contradicción, volu...

hiru hana o oikakete yuku arashi kana Va persiguiendo pétalos de cerezo la tempestad. TEIKA

blowkay [bloh'-kay] adj. of an attitude, typically exhibited by the electorate, that elected officials who have sexual relations outside of marriage while in office are less deserving of impeachment than officials whose decisions lead to the loss of human life. Folks say the new senator from Rhode Island is a skirt chaser, but as long as he doesn't send thousands of Americans off to die in a war on false pretenses he's blowkay with me. -RYAN BOUDINOT Zzzunday [zuhn'-day] n.national holiday occurring once every 28 years, when a Leap Year coincides with a Sunday. Zzzunday is celebrated with 24 hours of uninterrupted sleep, in recognition of an entire generation accumulated sleep deficit. Secondary holidays have grown to immediately precede Zzzunday, including Sleepless Friday, and a Hibernation Saturday of block parties, children sleepovers, and retail promotional sales of bed linens, mattresses, and pillows. Traditionally, insomniacs mark Zzzunday by going out ...

From second-rate horror films to episodes of Scooby-Doo, ominous paintings whose staring eyes follow a character around the room , no matter where they go, have been used to spooky effect. But now a team of scientists believe they have solved the mystery of how they do it. A group working on how our brains interpret images found that as long as a character in a painting is looking straight ahead, our brains will perceive they are staring at us, no matter the angle from which we view the painting. A striking example is The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals, the 17th century Dutch painter. The explanation lies in how we interpret three-dimensional objects portrayed on a flat surface. Real three-dimensional objects look different depending on the angle because of the changing way light falls across them. But on the flat canvas, shading and light are fixed and the image looks the same from every angle. James Todd of Ohio State University and co-author of the study said: " If a perso...

Is that a Garden in your Roof? Got a green thumb? Gardens are for amateurs; consider applying your talents with plants to your roof. A movement with, uh, roots in Germany is picking up steam in the United States that aims to ameliorate ecological problems from storm water runoff to urban greenhouse warming. A "green roof" or "ecoroof" replaces traditional roofing with a lightweight, living system of soil, compost and vegetation. It's not about looking pretty (although it does) but rather creating a thin, green skin atop your building that gives a little something back to the world—and your pocket book. Apart from local environmental benefits, preliminary evidence suggests green roofs reduce roof maintenance costs and energy use by insulating buildings from extreme temperatures. More from Newsweek about the American case, we have this as well, up North, in foreign families' homes no doubt, and in a rather modest scale, but I can't find info on it :-(...

An Interview with Julio Cortázar Courtesy of The Center For Book Culture and excerpted from the book Cortázar por Cortázar. There's a Spanish version available here ;-)

O Lápis Azul :-/ Jessamyn West is a 36-year-old librarian living in central Vermont. But she's not your stereotypical bespectacled research maven toiling behind a reference desk and offering expert advice on microfiche. She's a " radical librarian " who has embraced the hacker credo that " information wants to be free ." As a result, West and many of her colleagues are on the front lines in battling the USA Patriot Act , which a harried Congress passed a month after 9/11 even though most representatives hadn't even read the 300-page bill. It gave the government sweeping powers to pursue the " war on terror " but at a price: the loss of certain types of privacy we have long taken for granted. What got many librarians' dander up was Section 215 of the law, which stipulates that government prosecutors and FBI agents can seek permission from a secret court created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to access personal records -...

3 Ways to Scan a Library Books today are written on laptops, typeset on PCs, and pumped out on digital presses. But ironically, the most efficient way to create an electronic library is to scan the printed page. The technology has come a long way since the days of the Kurzweil machines - hulking, 1-ton scanner/optical character recognition combos that emerged in the early 1980s. Today, the biggest archiving projects use some combination of these three methods. Tear Off the Spines Using a paper guillotine (which looks just like its Bastille cousin), a book's pages are simply lopped off of the binding and sent through a scanner with an automatic page feeder. High-end machines cost $25,000 and churn through 90 black-and-white pages per minute, front and back. Rare books need not apply. Ship It Overseas Workers in India, China, and the Philippines earn about 40 cents an hour to manually turn pages that are zapped by $15,000 overhead scanners. Carnegie Mellon's Million Bo...

We won't hear the last of it or I won't let us see the end of it :- (since they spoilt Bruno Ganz for me, I'll settle for Thomas Kretschmann, poor me (he from The Pianist , anyone? plizzzz] The Wall Street's OpinionJournal calls it A brilliant new film [that] shows the dictator's human side.

You Don't Know Dick (a review)

Sinner Take All From the 1930s until long into the cold-war era, Graham Greene mapped a unique landscape of pain, human frailty, political drama, and moral bewilderment. His tortured sinners, doubting Catholics, furtive adulterers, cynical expatriates, burnt-out cases, and violent criminals constitute one of the most memorable, if disturbing, fictional worlds in modern literature. In Greene land, the moral weather is perpetually gray. Fidelity and loyalty are impossible ideals; someone is forever betraying a lover, a friend, a creed, an ideology, a God, a country. Salvation is fleeting, while damnation is a permanent temptation, rarely resisted, if not actively courted. "I am damned already—I may as well go the whole length of my chain," Scobie, the colonial policeman in The Heart of the Matter (1948), concludes hopelessly before he kills himself after he has cheated on his wife and conspired to commit murder. He could be speaking on behalf of half a dozen of Gree...

The Achievement of the Cat In the political history of nations it is no uncommon experience to find States and peoples which but a short time since were in bitter conflict and animosity with each other, settled down comfortably on terms of mutual goodwill and even alliance. The natural history of the social developments of species affords a similar instance in the coming-together of two once warring elements, now represented by civilised man and the domestic cat. The fiercely waged struggle which went on between humans and felines in those far-off days when sabre-toothed tiger and cave lion contended with primeval man, has long ago been decided in favour of the most fitly equipped combatant—the Thing with a Thumb—and the descendants of the dispossessed family are relegated today, for the most part, to the waste lands of jungle and veld, where an existence of self-effacement is the only alternative to extermination. But the felis catus, or whatever species was the ancestor of the mo...

Como no podía ser de otra manera, está claro...

E esta? Faça você também Que génio louco é você? Uma criação de O Mundo Insano da Abyssinia (em Português do Brasil :-)

Herr Flick!!! A spectacular exhibition of contemporary art opened in Berlin yesterday, amid a picket by Jewish protesters, with its billionaire owner accused of exploiting art to redeem his family's Nazi past. Christian Friedrich Flick , who inherited part of his grandfather's fortune, originally built on wartime slave labour in explosives factories, told journalists yesterday: " I neither want to whitewash the family name, nor can art or the collecting of art compensate for my grandfather's war crimes - but please at least view these works of art separate from politics or my family's history ." Jewish protesters say the vast collection is founded on " blood money ". The quality of the art is not in question: the opening exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, a converted railway station seen as a key to regenerating a still rundown corner of the city, is only a fraction of the collection which will fill the gallery for the next seven years. The...

Guide us to the Straight Way / The Way of those on whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not (the way) of those who have earned Your Anger ( such as the Jews ), nor of those who went astray ( such as the Christians ) [Yellow lines coloured by me to stress what Saudi have added to their wahhabi version of Islam sacred text Qur'ân. This is why I'm always against relinquishing the power to teachers o translators] THE UNITED STATES took the bold step last week of formally designating Saudi Arabia a "country of particular concern" for its lack of religious freedom. In the words of the State Department's 2004 report on religious freedom worldwide, "basic religious freedoms are denied to all [Saudi citizens] but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam . . . commonly called Wahhabi." This incontrovertible statement of fact is a breakthrough in the diplomatic dance of many veils. It casts in a new and somewhat hopeful light certain forms...

Gulag Art Nikolai Getman , who produced a unique record of life in Stalin's forced-labor camps, died last month at his home in Orel, Russia. Born in 1917, he was by profession a painter, though his studies at the Kharkov Art College were cut short when he was drafted into the Red Army. After serving in World War II, he was arrested in 1946 and spent nearly eight years in the Gulag, much of it in one of the worst zones--Kolyma. Following his release in 1953, he was eventually reintegrated into Soviet artistic circles, becoming a member of the Artists' Union. But alongside his official duties he secretly painted--and much later succeeded in sending to the West--a number of paintings, mainly oil on canvas, based on his deep-set, unforgettable camp memories. His collection is now housed by the Jamestown Foundation in Washington ( www.jamestown.org ). There is, of course, an enormous amount of first-hand testimony, of fiction, even of poetry, deriving from the Gulag experi...

En un momento la cantidad del depósito superior de la ampolleta se hizo mucho menor de lo que antes era, los granos minúsculos se precipitaban velozmente hacia la abertura, cada uno queriendo salir más deprisa que los compañeros, el tiempo es igualito que las personas, hay ocasiones en que le cuesta arrastrar las piernas, pero otras veces corre como un gamo y salta como un cabrito, lo que, si nos fijamos bien, no es decir mucho, ya que la onza, o guepardo, es el más veloz de los animales y a nadie se le ha pasado jamás por la cabeza decir de otra persona Corre y salta como una onza, tal vez porque la primera comparación venga de los tiempos prestigiosos de la baja edad media, cuando los caballeros iban de montería y todavía no habían visto correr a un guepardo ni tenían noticia de su existencia. Los lenguajes son conservadores, van siempre con los archivos a cuestas y detestan las actualizaciones. José Saramago. Ensayo sobre la lucidez.

hroughout his career, Philip Roth has imagined alternate fates for characters very much like himself: bright, sensitive boys who grow up to become self-conscious, conflicted men, torn between duty and desire, a longing to belong and a rage to rebel - artists or academics, estranged from their lower-middle-class Jewish roots and beset, at worst, by narcissistic worries, literary disappointments and problems with women. In his provocative but lumpy new novel, "The Plot Against America," Mr. Roth tries to imagine an alternate fate for the United States with the highest possible stakes. What if, he asks, the flying ace Charles A. Lindbergh had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election, and what if Lindbergh (who in real life articulated anti-Semitic sentiments and isolationist politics) had instituted a pro-Nazi agenda? Of course, this brand of historical fiction (or "counterfactual" history) is hardly new. In "It Can't Happen Here," Sinclai...

Fruitful, Consuming Paranoia: A Sci-Fi Master’s Madness It’s difficult to imagine a writer who could have appreciated the adaptation of his works into a series of increasingly bad movies more than Philip K. Dick. The progression from Blade Runner through Total Recall to Paycheck has all the hallmarks of one of his stories—black irony, psychological degradation and the implication of a vast conspiracy organized to deceive and persecute one man. The young Dick would have written it as a dark comedy, the older as a bizarre Christian fable. Dick’s journey from neurotic bohemian to full-blown religious psychotic is as fascinating a tale as anything he ever wrote. And it has fallen into capable hands in Emmanuel Carrère’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead. The title is drawn from one of Dick’s most horrifying novels, Ubik (1969), in which it appears as a message scrawled on a bathroom wall. Mr. Carrère, a French novelist, demonstrated his gift for capturing stranger-than-fiction truth in The ...

You sit next to idiots, loathe office bonhomie and crave escape. You're half- crazy with boredom, pretend to work when you hear footsteps and kill time by taking newspapers into the washrooms. Your career is blocked, your job is at risk and the most ineffective people get promoted to where they can do least harm: management. You recoil at jargon, consider the expression 'business culture' an oxymoron and wish you had the guts to resign. If this is you, help is at hand. 10 commandments for the idle No. 1 You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-check at the end of the month, full stop. No. 2 It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger. No. 3 What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you...

Create your own Picasso (the famous French, err, Catalan, err, Andalussian painter) head : Mr. Picassohead

For us catless cat lovers :

Cando penso que te fuches Negra sombra que me asombras Ó pé dos meus cabezales Tornas facéndome mofa Cando máximo que es ida No mesmo sol te me amostras I eses a estrela que brila I eres o vento que zoa Si cantan, es ti que cantas Si choran, es ti que choras I es o marmurio do río I es a noite i es aurora En todo estás e ti es todo Para min i en min mesma moras Nin me deixarás ti nunca Sombra que sempre me asombras. (Carlos Nuñez y Luz Casal sobre poema de Rosalía de Castro) (De la banda sonora de Mar Adentro )

Es lunes (Segunda aunque primera en l'altre costat de la peninsula, ain't it). A despertar conciencias:

Kiriko Shirobayashi image, from Sublimation series

Jeremy Bernstein is an accomplished physicist and a talented writer. In the afterword to The Life It Brings, his 1987 account of his upbringing and career as a physicist, he commented that once he began to write professionally, his pieces "became a kind of running autobiography." The scientific and literary components of his life have complemented each other, resulting in informative and insightful scientific profiles enriched by autobiographical elements. We learn from the preface to Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma that Bernstein had wanted to write a profile of J. Robert Oppenheimer for The New Yorker in the 1960s but felt unable to do so, being in a sense too close to his subject. Bernstein explains that the space of four decades has now given him the distance he needs. This book, like the profiles he did write for that magazine, is a succinct, revealing and very readable account of a scientist's life and accomplishments; it is not meant, he says, to be a "d...

For the conspiration theorist out there in the bushes (ya know who ya are): "You are unknown to me. Your camera's memory card was in a taxi; I have it now. I am going to post one of your pictures each day. I will also narrate as if I were you. Maybe you will come here and reclaim this piece of your life. " I Found some Of Your Life will post a photo a day and accompanying fictional narrative for the next 227 days using the photos found on a digital media card left in a cab. Is it pure genius or pure evil? Who cares? Just be thankful they're not your photos.

Umberto Eco finds scientific method a suitable counterbalance to fundamentalism Many readers probably don't know exactly what black holes are and, frankly, the best I can do is to imagine them like the pike in Yellow Submarine that devours everything around it until it finally swallows itself. But in order to understand the news item from which I am taking my cue, all you need to know about black holes is that they are one of the most controversial and absorbing problems in contemporary astrophysics. Recently I read in the papers that the celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking has made a statement that is sensational, to say the least. He maintains that he made an error in his theory of black holes (published back in the 70s) and proposed the necessary corrections before an audience of fellow scientists. For those involved in the sciences there is nothing exceptional about this, apart from Hawking's exceptional standing, but I feel that the episode should be brought to the ...

Blushing in Literature Bram Stoker's Dracula is a novel that oozes gore: " gouts of fresh blood " on Dracula's lips, " which trickle from the corners of his mouth ", or blood that " wells and spurts up " around the stakes being hammered into the hearts of his undead victims. But for all these messy horrors, there are also moments when the body seems intent on keeping its blood to itself, as when Dr Seward notices " a quick blush " spreading over Mina Harker's face and goes on to explain: " The blush that rose to my own cheeks somehow set us both at ease, for it was a tacit answer to her own ." For Dr Seward, it is as if this silent exchange of blushes proves that both of them remain pure of heart, untainted by the vampire's corrupt appetites. (Dracula's cheeks are described as " ruby-red " only when he is bloated with fresh blood, like an enormous leech.) What he does not explain, though, is why g...

Der Untergang / The Downfall is all over the place. It premiered yesterday in Germany and it's the first German movie ever to depict the Führer, played by Bruno Ganz. The Guardian reviewer called it The Human Hitler , while the Frankfurter Allgemeine claims the movie « blends out the brilliant party leader and statesman and feeds on the legend of the mythical beast» but the screenwriter failed. The movie is based on Joachim Fest's book, Inside Hitler's Bunker , an author who was once a teenage PoW and became Germany's first and finest analyst of the Third Reich. Brief interview on the Independent . The official movie website , most appropriately, is German-only :-[

A Cinematic Screen Saver (para quem pode!) (obrigada ao Marc :-)

Hidden Picasso goes on show A "secret" painting by the young Pablo Picasso was unveiled at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao yesterday after experts found it hidden beneath layers of paint on another of his canvasses. The 104-year-old painting was yesterday hailed as Picasso's first Paris picture, painted during a visit in 1900 when he was 19. The painting, which was reconstructed using x-ray techniques, shows the inside of a turn-of-the-century nightclub, with cancan dancers and a crowd of laughing people, some wearing top hats, watching them. It was painted over by Picasso, who used the canvass for a study of a man, woman and child walking down Rue de Montmartre. Will Shank, former chief curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, obtained a black and white radiograph of the underlying painting, which revealed, among other things, the Spanish master's brushstrokes. "It was not at all unusual for Picasso to reuse his canvasses ... but this was a...

Oxbridge made easier State school pupils are increasingly willing to try for Oxford and Cambridge. A new book shows the way to get in. First some good news. Comprehensive school children are increasingly willing to give Oxbridge a go. Thanks to open days, outreach visits and summer schools, old fears are breaking down and state schools that once would not have dreamed of entering the Oxbridge race are putting candidates forward. George Stephenson High School, in a deprived part of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is one. Last year it used everything it could to prepare four candidates for Oxbridge - and all got offers. "There are plenty of systems you can use now. It's a question of knowing which buttons to push," says the assistant head Helen Jackson. But that also means bad news - and quite a lot of it. First, the growing number of applications - Oxford's were up six per cent last year - is making it ever more competitive. Debby Horsman, the Oxbridge co-ordinator for ...