Nepenthe

Move over, broccoli! These incredible edibles fight cancer and heart disease, fill you up and give you energy. Take this list to the grocery store today. When nutrition experts discuss the stars of the healthy-eating world, the same names always make the A-list. Broccoli? Check. Tomatoes? Natch. Salmon? Sure. These and other well-known "functional foods" certainly rate their celebrity. But — just as in Hollywood — these attention getters aren't the only game in town. For every tub of antioxidant-rich blueberries or bowl of cholesterol-squelching oatmeal, another less fanfared healthy food is in the wings, waiting to shine. In fact, recent research is turning the spotlight on 10 everyday foods that can protect your heart and bones and help fight cancer. Try one (or more) at your next meal. 1) Black Tea Star power: When it's tea time, health-conscious consumers tend to go for green. But black tea (including brands like Celestial Seasonings, Lipton and Tetley) can be as...

A story with a boat The sun lays its pattern over the city. Portuguese people are good level-headed people with sun above. I will not be bothered. Others bother. Spanish people are loud sensation hunters with flapping gestures. The French being sits still in long sentences for a space of time. Then her nerves start to quiver. Who decides what is of weight? I tell them I signal that I am not willing to drive them in my car. British people jabber like monkeys in a cage. I find myself a good shady spot to lie down and rest for a while. If it matters what matters. The Portuguese bus comes when it comes. And if I want to take the Portuguese boat somewhere I can do it when it does. But if I go away I would do so just to come back not to stay. I shut myself out from all that talk of direction and course. We are a couple of taxi drivers driving a gang of sailors down to the harbour. The sailors eagerly wave the flag and strike up a chorus. German people, British and French say they are up to...

Why 120? “Every animal species has an age limit. Jeanne Calment died in 1997 at age 122. If one person can do it, so can others. Moreover, it has been proven in hundreds of simple studies that animals live at least 50 percent longer with marginal adjustments to their living conditions. It’s clear for nearly all species that they’ll live a whole lot longer if they eat 30 percent less food that is of high quality.” But after the age of 80 you will then spend decades suffering from all kinds of geriatric afflictions. “Wrong. It is possible to stay in good shape and feel youthful at the age of 100.” How? “Don’t smoke, not too much stress, don’t eat too much. Aging can mainly be seen as a process whereby our bodies’ cells are damaged by an overabundance of free radicals [molecules created during oxidation]. You have to find ways to protect yourself against free radicals, such as alphalipoic acid that is directly absorbed in the mitochondria—the energy factories in our cells. Other antioxida...

Design by Jane Hamley Wells

Martin Scorsese announced during the Marrakesh International Film Festival that he has quit making blockbuster films so that he can concentrate on documentaries and short films. After he completes post-production on his current film "The Departed" starring Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson, he plans to make "Silence," about Portuguese priests who move to Japan in the 17th century to convert the country to Christianity . From Scorcese and His Films , unofficial website.

Salt The ocean on your table For ages, the best salt in the world has been harvested from the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. A kind of film forms on the surface of the water, the so-called fleur de sel. Each day, this thin layer is manually removed before it sinks to the bottom in a rather time-consuming process. For every 100 square metres (4,300 square yards) of water, only three kilos (six-and-a-half pounds) of salt are produced. When the water evaporates, the salt crystallizes. And so it has been done for thousands of years. Then came refined salt, which reduces most of the minerals found in sea salt to levels that our body can barely absorb. As a result, excess salt remains in our bodies, and then attracts water and settles into our muscles and onto our bones – which can lead to health problems. The solution: back to unrefined salt. That is the specialty of a company run by Rui Neves Dias in Tavira, on the southern coast of Portugal. “It’s actually very simple,” Neves D...

That dream became a reality in January 2003 when Ode began appearing in English. Several tens of thousands of issues of the English version were printed for distribution in Porto Alegre, Brazil at the World Social Forum, the annual meeting of people fighting for human and social values in the process of globalisation. Later that year Ode entered into a joint venture with a Brazilian publisher to disseminate a Portuguese version in Brazil. And talks are ongoing with other countries…

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102) 2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92) 3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77) 4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67) 5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66) 6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54) 7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54) 8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47) 9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46) 10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44) 11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37) 12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37) 13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36) 14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35) 15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33) 16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34% (32) 17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman ...

Yes, I clearly was uncluttering my desk with these due posts, and this is one of my favourites, again from the TLS: Alexander von Humboldt was the last man who knew everything. Traveller, explorer and mountaineer no less than scientist, he combined the ideals of Enlightenment and Romanticism: a genius in thought and deed, as remarkable for his sensibility as for his universality. Not only did he invent or reinvent several new branches of earth and life science (including human and plant geography, climatology and vulcanology, hydrology and geomagnetism) and greatly augment most others, he also transformed the historiography and philosophy of science. We owe to him such familiar scientific notions as the isothermal lines on weather maps, seismic waves, magnetic storms, reverse polarity, the Jurassic era. He investigated the igneous formation of rocks, the decrease in the earth’s magnetism towards the Equator, and the formation of galaxies. Long before they could be realized, he conceive...

. . . .Tolkien’s fantasy epic was written during the same postwar decades as the utopian histories of E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, and it too conjures a myth of struggle and deliverance, revolutionary energy and hope carried by little people against tyrannical might and unharnessed destruction. The Hobbits from the Shire had first appeared in The Hobbit (1937), which was imbued with the Arcadian and English nostalgia that pervaded that era, culminating in Brideshead Revisited (1945). Tolkien himself had been invalided out of the trenches of the First World War; but he lost his family and most of his friends from his university days in that war, and his experience can be descried in the endless combat of The Lord of the Rings . The book became a secular Bible for the hippy generation, and traces of their brand of anarchism – individualist, hedonist, pacific, antinomian – linger in the medieval and Celtic nostalgia that envelops the book’s afterlife as a touchstone of the New A...

Get hold of a video of Marina Goldovskaya's film about the genuine article, The Solovky Power: Evidence and Documents , and sit your friends down for an in-depth look at the real, original, death-through-labor Soviet archetype, where something far worse than the occasional mistreatment of Korans occurred. This distinguished film will enable everyone to get their historical bearings; moreover, it is a standing rebuke to those who would recklessly trivialize a name, and a system, that may have cost 2.7 million lives. By strange good fortune The Solovky Power was recently shown in Los Angeles. At 7:30, on Wednesday April 13, students at the UCLA School of Film and Television, living and working in the shadow of Hollywood, were brought face to face with actual zeks —men and women who had survived ten, twenty, and up to thirty years confinement on the Solovetsky Islands, 150 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle in the White Sea, with the slogan “Freedom Through Work!” over the gat...

How thinking of terrorists as pirates can help win the war on terror Very good article, a bit of piracy history applied to terrorists, those enemies of the human race. From Legal Affairs

Javier Marías on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, from The Threepenny Review

Real Life Saver: The price of a caffe latte—about $3—really can save a life. The LifeStraw, a beefed-up drinking straw designed by the Swiss-based company Vestergaard Frandsen, uses seven types of filters, including mesh, active carbon and iodine, to make 185 gal. of water clean enough to drink. It can prevent waterborne illnesses, such as typhoid and diarrhea, that kill at least 2 million people every year in the developing world. It can also create safe drinking water for victims of hurricanes, earthquakes or other disasters. And finally, it makes a handy accoutrement for the weekend warrior's back-country hike. These ones because they're fofos: From Time magazine

The Translator: An Essay

“German Dolls” takes Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to Berlin. It is a text about memories--false and inaccurate, as memories always are--and how they interfere with the places we inhabit, the places we best know by getting lost in them (in the sense of choosing to vanish into them). Pessoa grew up in Durban and wrote his first poems in English. Apart from two trips from Portugal to South Africa, he rarely traveled, and so far as I know was never in Berlin. But his invention of identities, like different layers of one’s self--the heteronymus--has everything to do with a city, Berlin, that hides its true identity, and its memories, behind names that are recognizable only from the inside. To a stranger, they lead nowhere. I wanted to work on a metamorphosis of the Poet into a dog. Pessoa used more than seventy heteronyms, some of them discovered only recently by scholars studying his handwritten papers. It made sense to me to imagine Pessoa as a Stasi agent, playing a game w...

IN SAMUEL BECKETT'S "Waiting for Godot," two tramps — Vladimir and Estragon — wait to see if Godot will arrive. Today, in evolution's worldwide theater of the worrisome and real, we're all waiting to see if the bird flu virus will get around to attacking us big time. Godot never showed up; H5N1 just might. On the other hand, if the dreaded bird flu pandemic doesn't appear, it may be due to luck, or the quarantine and slaughter of infected animals, or other timely and effective public health measures (of which admittedly there have been precious few thus far), or — oddly enough — sex. There appears to be a curious connection between sex and disease, one that evolutionary biologists have only recently come to appreciate, and that cuts against the grain of conventional wisdom — which equates sex with sexually transmitted diseases. Thus, biologists have long scratched their collective heads about sex, starting with this conundrum: Sex isn't necessary. Lots...

Most of us have, at one time or another, puzzled over such historical-linguistic conundrums as: Why did only Britain, of all the Roman provinces overrun by Germans, end up speaking a Germanic language? Why did the Portuguese language “take” in Brazil, but not in Africa, while Dutch “took” in Africa but not in Indonesia? If the Phoenicians were so important in Mediterranean history, how is it that they left not a single work of literature behind? Since we know of no nation named Aramaia, whence came Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus of Nazareth? What actually happened to Sumerian? Or Mongolian, the language of a vast medieval empire? Plainly, what we have been needing is an account of world history written from the linguistic point of view. Well, here it is. Nicholas Ostler is a professional linguist and currently chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. His loving fascination with languages is plain on every page of Empires of the Word, and in the many careful transcrip...

Apaixonado por Espanha, Orson Welles, um dos maiores e mais inclassificáveis realizadores de todos os tempos, dedicou 14 anos da sua vida a "Dom Quixote", uma obra desmesurada a que o seu génio desmesurado não poderia ficar indiferente. Welles mergulhou na obra de Cervantes através das personagens de Dom Quixote e Sancho Pança em viagem pela Espanha de 1960, dando uma visão única e apaixonante das mais emblemáticas figuras da ficção espanhola. O filme mostra as gentes e costumes do vizinho país, destacando as largadas e as corridas de touros que tanto fascinavam Welles, mas sem deixar de lado tradições populares como as Festas dos Mouros e dos Cristãos ou as procissões religiosas. No King brevemente e da Atalanta Filmes , claro :-)