Nepenthe

O luxo de ter as primeiras páginas em PDF :) Gracias, Alfaguara y Capitan Alatriste

I wish my cats were dead I have three pet cats and I really hate them all. They used to be called Cinders, Smudge and Marmalade although I've recently re-christened them Scratchy, Sneezy and Stinky in honour of the ailments they inflict on my family and me. Stinky is the worst. She had a thyroid problem. This means that her metabolism is in constant overdrive resulting in her depositing at least three squashy mounds of the foulest smelling faeces you could possibly imagine in her litter tray in the basement every day. In a tray in the basement, I hear you say - at least she's dumping in the proper place. Well, that's true. Except when she misses and it runs all down the edge or when the tray is on the full side and she goes on the floor behind the tumble dryer instead and I have to retrieve the soft, mushy, retch-inducing substance using a handful of kitchen towel, crawling into the space on my hands and knees. Then there's Sneezy. He mostly just loafs around the ...

I don't pretend to know the first thing about the books around, God knows I have no time to read them, writing away as I am (not my own book, though :|, so I had nooo idea whatsoever that Elizabeth Kostova's masterpiece is about Vlad the Impaler (and other things?). Bloody hell :[ I must have been catatonic in me casket. Ooohhhh... So life is what happens when you're busy, caught unawares, making plans? Yes, reading books is life to me :) The book is the life... WHY the feminine for the title in Spanish? To distinguish from Catalan? To follow the French? In French it is L'Historienne et Drakula , ( Tome I = more than one book?) so it's bound to sell like hotcakes ( comme des petits pains ) An excerpt:

Sexing up Shakespeare is a handy trick for directors seeking to exploit the Bard's bawdy humour to put bums on seats. Now one woman has gone further with the most intensive search ever for sexual innuendo, toilet humour and smut buried deep in the national poet's oeuvre. 'The plays are absolutely packed with filth,' said academic Héloïse Sénéchal. 'I've found more than a hundred terms for vagina alone.' That the author of As You Like It would, were he alive today, be writing for Viz magazine is implied by Sénéchal's research for the footnotes of a new Royal Shakespeare Company edition of his complete works which promises to be the most candid ever. She claims that previous editions of Shakespeare have been too prudish, and that by using computer techniques she has uncovered unrecognised double entendres. These were aimed at the working classes who crowded into the Globe in London for their fill of bawdy entertainment. Sénéchal has identified seemingly i...

Conspiracy? Nostra culpa ? Many elements below mentioned are a given to me, but the reason why PORTUGAL doesn't feature eludes me totally :( A new European league of IQ scores has ranked the British in eighth place, well above the French, who were 19th. According to Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster, Britons have an average IQ of 100. The French scored 94. But it is not all good news. Top of the table were the Germans, with an IQ of 107. The British were also beaten by the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Italy, Austria and Switzerland. Professor Lynn, who caused controversy last year by claiming that men were more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, said that populations in the colder, more challenging environments of Northern Europe had developed larger brains than those in warmer climates further south. The average brain size in Northern and Central Europe is 1,320cc and in southeast Europe it is 1,312cc. “The early human beings in northerly areas had t...

wonderful minifig creation here, his Brickshelf there's Japan, there's LOTR, there's Steve Zissou... WOW

Again, Dunechaser 's golden hands :) All commies on Flickr

Oh yeah just can't get enuff... All of Dunechaser 's Aztecs on Flickr

By Dunechaser , all Norses on Flickr

By Dunechaser , all Greeks on Flickr

By Dunechaser , whole sequence here in Flicker

E mais um destes dias. Foi extraordinário!

Your Linguistic Profile: 55% General American English 25% Yankee 15% Dixie 5% Upper Midwestern 0% Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

And I'm not an MD :( uff

Na Casa Fernando Pessoa

What they say about it: The Fenomenal Rise [then, of course,] Industry Cries Foul

[caraças...] Legendary Star Wars creator George Lucas says the United States is a provincial country with a culture that has invaded the world via Hollywood. Lucas made the comments today as he was honoured with a Global Vision Award by the World Affairs Council in a San Francisco hotel ballroom. "As long as there has been a talking Hollywood, Hollywood has had a huge impact on the rest of the world," Lucas said as he discussed his films and enhancing education with computer technology. "It shows all the morality we espouse in this country, good and bad. The French were the first to start yelling cultural imperialism." Some people in other countries are troubled by what they see as US culture "squashing" local art and cinema, Lucas said. "I hate to say it, but television is one of the most popular exports," Lucas said. People see shows such as Dallas, about a wealthy Texas oil family, and decide they want the grand lifestyles portrayed, ...

Russell : Sorry, let me just... Lydia's becoming more and more demanding and you feel bad because Helen's working night and day to keep the money coming in. But you've asked Helen to come on a research trip to Dorset with you - knowing that she wouldn't be able to - to cover up the fact that you're really taking Lydia. And despite the fact that Lydia gave you an out on the phone - which you didn't take - you're having a moral dilemma. [pause] Russell : Gerry, you are a morality-free zone . From Sliding Doors

Red panda baby :) From Somesai on Flickr

Your Linguistic Profile: 70% General American English 20% Yankee 5% Dixie 0% Midwestern 0% Upper Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Euphemisms and Obfuscations A Dictionary from

The Axis of Evil Cookbook :) is an ebook in PDF, downloadable from the Nth Position magazine

Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, Denzel... The New York of Spike Lee...

For my final London wrap-up, I wanted to ask who publishes more translations--U.S. or U.K. publishers? This is a question I've encountered every time I've been in London, but it's never seemed as evident and interesting as it did this time. Reviewers at the Guardian felt like the U.S. was more receptive to translations, as did those at the BBC. And in Foyle's and the London Review Bookshoppe (both of which, by the way, fucking rock in the bookstore world) everyone I spoke with--from John Creasey at LRB, to Tammy and Kenny and Jo at Foyle's--seem to think more translations are published in the States than here. They have some reason for concern with Harvill merging with Secker, with Christopher MacLehose leaving the Secker Harvill superpower . . . but they still have presses like Serpent's Tail, like Arcadia (though I can't really figure out what they're up to), etc. My initial impression was that in the States, the big presses--Random House, Penguin, FSG...

And Other Tales of Nature's Spendthrifts Fascinating...

O livro descarrega-se em PDF! :) Também há um screensaver maravilhosooooo Há fins de dia que valem a pena, e são sempre graças aos bichinhos, grandes e pequenos. Ai ai **

travels in search of a samurai legend , a book review.

Why Volkswagen had to withdraw this campaign in the States

Luís de Camões, Portugal's greatest poet, is known to English-language readers for The Lusíads (1572), his epic based on Vasco da Gama's pioneering voyage to India. Since Sir Richard Fanshawe's splendid translation of 1655, there have been at least 17 English translations, culminating in the Oxford World's Classics version of 1997. In sharp contrast, Camões' lyrics - his sonnets, elegies, songs, rounds, odes and eclogues - are virtually unknown outside Portugal. They exist in English in a milk-and-water selection by Lord Strangford (1803), in the skilful Seventy Sonnets by JJ Aubertin (1881), and in the explorer Richard Burton's eccentric Lyricks of 1884. Burton made it his ambition to write as Camões would have written had he been born English in 1524 - that is, pre-Shakespeare, pre-Spenser, using a language he has to cobble together from such sources as Wyatt and Surrey. The result is magnificently unreadable. Yet Camões' lyrical poetry has a double fascin...

Max von Sydow, Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding Jr., all wondrous actors that I like... Max von Sydow, for pete's sake!!! But I'm watching now... What Dreams May Come

In the run-up to the World Cup tournament, we're putting together a cultural guide for visitors. Every country has its quirks -- both good and bad -- and we want you to share your observations and questions about Germany and the Germans. So they say...

Jewish comic actor Mel Brooks talks about Hitler as a comical character, the limits of humor and his latest film "The Producers," which hits screens in Germany and other European countries this week. SPIEGEL: Mr. Brooks, almost all the rogues in your film have moustaches. Is that the long shadow of Hitler? Brooks: You must be joking! Rogues on the screen were already wearing moustaches when Hitler was still running around in short trousers. A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. So Hitler's incomplete moustache would never have been enough for that. SPIEGEL: Your new comedy "The Producers" is set at the end of the 1950s on Broadway and concerns a Nazi musical that breaks box office records. It shows a dancing and singing Hitler. Isn't that a bit tasteless? Brooks: Of course. But it's also funny, isn't it? The film revolves around a Broadway producer who, for financia...

Nicholas Donofrio , Big Blue's executive vice president of innovation and technology, made the declaration on Tuesday in an interview with ZDNet Asia. He was in Singapore for the first gathering of the Infocomm International Advisory Panel , organized by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore. "The fact is that innovation was a little different in the 20th century. It's not easy (now) to come up with greater and different things," Donofrio said. "If you're looking for the next big thing, stop looking. There's no such thing as the next big thing," he added. That is not to say that the 21st century does not also require invention, creation and discovery, he said. But these days, people are looking for value that arises from a creation and not just looking at technology for its sake, he explained. When it comes to innovation , there is a need to think collaboratively and in a multifaceted manner, as this determines who wins and who loses...

Hollywood, Interrupted reports that sources inside Paramount and South Park studios say the scheduled repeat of one of my fave South Park episodes, "Trapped in the Closet" - the one that satirizes Scientology and has R. Kelly singing to Tom Cruise to "come out of the closet" - was pulled due to Cruise threatening parent company Viacom. Cruise reportedly threatened to pull advertising for his upcoming film, Mission: Impossible: 3 if the South Park episode was aired. In their long history with Comedy Central, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have never been censored, not even for their infamous "Bloody Mary episode", but Cruise throws his weight around and suddenly the boys have their mouths duct-taped? Following the news that Scientologist Isaac Hayes, who voiced The Chef on the show, quit because he was offended by the Scientology spoof, this story, if it proves to be true, doesn't really serve to make Hollywood Scientologists look like good sports, eh...

Nova editora portuguesa pertencente a um grupo internacional, e sob chefia espanhola. (nahhhh, jura?) Josef Mengele tinha um sonho: o aperfeiçoamento da espécie humana, melhorada através da ciência, como forma de alcançar o domínio supremo de uma raça superior. Para o capitão médico, responsável pelo campo de concentração nazi de Auschwitz de 1943 a 1945, este era, acima de tudo, um acto de dever para ser levado a cabo com total disciplina. Com um simples aceno de mão ou um movimento seco do bastão, Mengele seleccionava os prisioneiros chegados a Auschwitz: os que deviam trabalhar até à morte, os que seriam imediatamente gaseados ou os que serviriam de cobaias para as suas investigações médicas. Sem qualquer compaixão, Mengele efectuava as mais terríveis experiências com seres humanos, transformados em autênticas cobaias. A sua particular obsessão eram os gémeos. Depois de cinco anos de investigação, com acesso exclusivo e irrestrito a mais de cinco mil páginas de escritos íntimos de ...

The only thing most teachers and students of the humanities agree on, it often seems, is that these are troubled times for their field. For a whole variety of reasons—social, intellectual, and technological—the humanities have been losing their confident position at the core of the university’s mission. This represents an important turning-point, not just for education, but for our culture as a whole. Ever since the Renaissance, the humanities have defined what it means to be an educated person. The very word comes from the Latin name of the first modern, secular curriculum, the studia humanitatis , invented in fourteenth-century Italy as a rival to traditional university subjects like theology, medicine, and law. Harvard Magazine

SAINT-GENIS-POUILLY, France -- Late last year, as an international crisis was brewing over Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Muslims raised a furor in this little alpine town over a much older provocateur: Voltaire, the French champion of the 18th-century Enlightenment. A municipal cultural center here on France's border with Switzerland organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire, whose writings helped lay the foundations of modern Europe's commitment to secularism. The play, "Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet," uses the founder of Islam to lampoon all forms of religious frenzy and intolerance. The production quickly stirred up passions that echoed the cartoon uproar. "This play ... constitutes an insult to the entire Muslim community," said a letter to the mayor of Saint-Genis-Pouilly, signed by Said Akhrouf, a French-born cafe owner of Moroccan descent and three other Islamic activists representing Muslim associations. They demanded the perfor...

Go see, I'm sure it has much to say to any Latin-based movie-goer, so Happy Internationalisation :) My Literature and Film professor on the movie: Portugal profundo Se exceptuarmos as ficções algo grotescas de António de Macedo, com "Os Abismos da Meia-Noite" (1984) a dar o tom "kitsch" absoluto, não existe grande tradição no cinema português de lidar com o fantástico e o sobrenatural, talvez até porque escasseiem os meios de produção, a impedirem que tais tentativas soem a falso. "Os Canibais" de Manoel de Oliveira arriscava a adaptação do homónimo conto fantástico oitocentista de Álvaro do Carvalhal, mas fazia-o a coberto de um curioso subterfúgio, o de transformar a acção numa ópera moderna, permitindo sublinhar o artifício e elidindo muitas das complexidades que o "género" exigiria. Só por isso, este "Coisa Ruim", estreia na longa-metragem da dupla Tiago Guedes e Frederico Serra, que, com algumas interessantes curtas no activo,...

I want this to come over anywhere nearer Portugal!!! Spain, the UK, Ireland, somewhere near! In the meantime, let's devour the lenghty article :) TLS

The Good, the Bad and the Highly Implausible Worst Science-Inspired Business Plan Most Insidious Breach of Scientific Ethics Outside South Korea Most Irrationally Beautiful Mathematicians Best Alternative for the Wannabe Space Tourist Most Acute Case of Gadget Addiction Most Extraneous Alien City

Macbeth is much too depressing. In my version the gentle, unassuming and monosyllabic thane settles down at Cawdor, where Lady Macbeth develops a profitable line in soap that leaves the hands spotless. Hamlet finds a shrink, marries Ophelia and goes into insurance. In the revised A Farewell to Arms , Catherine has a fat and healthy baby, and she and Henry establish a successful pacifist ski resort in the Alps. My campaign to cheer up literature starts here. Well, everyone else is mucking about with great art

A Farce?

The anti-caricature campaign started by attacking a newspaper. It then focussed on Denmark as a defender of the freedom of the press, and now it has all of Europe in its sights, which it accuses of having a double standard. The European Union allows the Prophet to be denigrated with impunity, but it forbids and condemns other "opinions" like Nazism and denial of the Holocaust. Why are jokes about Muhammad permitted, but not those about the genocide of the Jews? This was the rallying call of fundamentalists before they initiated a competition for Auschwitz cartoons. Fair's fair: either everything should be allowed in the name of the freedom of expression, or we should censor that which shocks both parties. Many people who defend the right to caricature feel trapped. Will they publish drawings about the gas chambers in the name of freedom of expression? Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of ...

It should have been the highlight of his year. It's not everyday that your work is quoted at length in The New Yorker. But something got lost in the translation. The incident began happily enough when Sverre Lyngstad opened the magazine's Dec. 26 issue and found a long article on the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), the Nobel laureate whose reputation was damaged by his late-life support for the Nazis. Lyngstad has worked mightily to raise Hamsun's profile as a father of modernism. Since 1994, he has published a critical study of Hamsun's work and translated nine of his best works into English, including the novels "Hunger," "Pan," "Mysteries" and, most recently, "Victoria" (Penguin Classics, $13, paper). Sure enough, The New Yorker quoted liberally from Lyngstad's translations. But it never credited his work. When Lyngstad contacted the magazine, he was told that editors feared that including his name would "clu...