Nepenthe

«An influential European writer and thinker, celebrated in his mature years for works of sophisticated philosophical nuance, turns out to have been an anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler creep in his 20s.» I never read any of his oeuvres, but met him as a luminary in college. Oh well... E. M. Cioran

But they didn't come to Portugal :( A Belgian couple travels the globe photographing World Heritage sites. Take the Tour !

(...) 24 should not be seen as a simple popular depiction of the sort of problematic methods the US resorts to in its "war on terror". Much more is at stake. Recall the lesson of Apocalypse Now. The figure of Kurtz is not a remnant of some barbaric past. He was the perfect soldier but, through his over-identification with the military, he turned into the embodiment of the system's excess and threatened the system itself. The problem for those in power is how to get people do the dirty work without turning them into monsters. This was Heinrich Himmler's dilemma. When confronted with the task of killing the Jews of Europe, the SS chief adopted the attitude of "somebody has to do the dirty job". (...) There was a further "ethical problem" for Himmler: how to make sure that the executioners, while performing these terrible acts, remained human and dignified. His answer was Krishna's message to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita (Himmler always had in his ...

This is one of the oldest wood building in the world - the Golden Hall in Japan, no less. This the Cathedral of Transfiguration, in Karelia, Russia. Review of a book about WOOD in architecture :)

Nancy Botwin : People got stoned for The Passion of the Christ? That's disturbing. Josh Wilson : It's not as disturbing as seeing it not stoned. Religion my ass, it's a straight-up snuff film. Nancy Botwin : You listen, you stay away from my customer base, you don't deal to kids. Josh Wilson : They're too young to bleed, they're too young for weed, no grass on the field no grass will they yield. Nancy Botwin : You're a poet. Josh Wilson : You know it. Showtime website is not available outside of the US - boooooo! IMDb Thanx to Paula :)

The language we speak affects half of what we see, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. Scholars have long debated whether our native language affects how we perceive reality — and whether speakers of different languages might therefore see the world differently. The idea that language affects perception is controversial, and results have conflicted. A paper published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences supports the idea — but with a twist. The paper suggests that language affects perception in the right half of the visual field, but much less, if at all, in the left half. The paper, “Whorf Hypothesis is Supported in the Right Visual Field but not in the Left,” by Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry — is the first to propose that language may shape just half of our visual world. [From the University of Chicago News Office , yeah, Universities have news offices] [More stuff h...

[Some graphic images of LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland — Bloody Sunday, Jan. 30, 1972, at Slate ]

To Die For :-) Voices by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Joanna Lumley, Emily Watson, and Christopher Leeeee!

Breathtaking wallpapers at National Geographic Magazine

THAT EXCEPTIONALLY WISE diplomat Sir Frank Roberts once observed that “Roosevelt and Churchill were susceptible to Stalin because he did not fit the dictator stereotype of the time. He was not a demagogue; he did not strut in flamboyant uniforms. He was soft-spoken, well organised, not without humour, knew his brief — an agreeable façade concealing unknown horrors.” Roosevelt was definitely the more susceptible of the two. Paradoxically, this came from his own vanity. Proud of his famous charm, he was convinced that he alone could win Stalin to a postwar partnership after the wartime alliance. But such a transformation was highly unlikely. Roosevelt overestimated his own abilities and completely underestimated Stalin’s paranoid schizophrenia, xenophobia, ruthlessness and cruelty. Roosevelt’s instinctive generosity and vision in 1941 must be recognised when he decided to throw his country’s industrial might into supporting the Soviet Union immediately after the Nazi invasion. The letter...

Jarhead is a war movie without a war. Set in the scorched, oil-drenched deserts of Iraq during the first Gulf War in 1991, it tells the story of a group of young US marines hanging around endlessly waiting to 'kick some Iraqi butt'. They wank, drink, scuffle, clean out toilets and wank some more for what seems like an eternity. They know a war is taking place, and even overhear it at one stage when US fighter planes zoom overhead, but the closest they get to seeing any action is while watching Apocalypse Now in a cinema screen. It's all very postmodern. If the Gulf War, in French philosopher Jean Baudrillard's words, didn't really take place, then Jarhead is the movie in which we see it not taking place. Jake Gyllenhaal of Donnie Darko (and more recently Brokeback Mountain ) fame plays Anthony Swofford, who wrote the book that the movie is based on. He's a bright guy who reads Camus and is separated from the rest of the square-jawed, foul-mouthed jocks in hi...

Ever

Behold The aurora australis (southern lights).

We don't even exist! Or rather, meeeeee! The Web search engine Google continues to expand its power in cyberspace. Everyday people come up with another quirky way to make use of its almighty algorithms. First came the Googlewhack, where people with way too much time on their hands tried to find two different words that would come up with a single search result. But it didn't stop there. Now a German blogger has come up with a world map that shows what traits different nationalities are especially known for. It's called "The Prejudice Map," but it seems more like a catalog of stereotypes and clichés to us. But seeing as how such stereotypes can lead to prejudice, we can probably let that slide. How does it work you ask? Well, its creator has simply put the phrase "Germans are known for *" into Google and the the search engine has done the rest. SPIEGEL ONLINE turned that tactic against Google itself and found out that the Web site is known for its relaxed...

NEXT time you are organising a cheese and wine party, don't waste your money on quality wine. Cheese masks the subtle flavours that mark out a good wine, so your guests won't be able to tell that you are serving them cheap stuff. Bernice Madrigal-Galan and Hildegarde Heymann of the University of California, Davis, presented trained wine tasters with cheap and expensive versions of four different varieties of wine. The tasters evaluated the strength of various flavours and aromas in each wine both alone and when preceded by eight different cheeses. They found that cheese suppressed just about everything, including berry and oak flavours, sourness and astringency. Only butter aroma was enhanced by cheese, and that is probably because cheese itself contains the molecule responsible for a buttery wine aroma, Heymann says. Strong cheeses suppressed flavours more than milder cheeses, but flavours of all wines were suppressed. In other words, there are no magical w...

I didn't, but then again I haven't done my research. Peter H. Fogtdal has written 10 novels in Danish, four of them best sellers. One (Le Front Chantilly, O Paraíso de Hitler ) is translated into French and Portuguese. This is what interests me, that a (small?) Portuguese publishing house brought this to our attention, Mercado de Letras . Since there's not a word translated to English anywhere, here's a synopsis from Webboom: «A "Frente Chantilly" foi o nome dado por Adolf Hitler ao seu protectorado modelo na Dinamarca (...) Conta a história, baseada na realidade, de Andreas Spiess, um oficial austríaco responsável por um quartel alemão na Dinamarca durante a II Guerra Mundial. Um dia, Spiess conhece David Huda, o único judeu da aldeia (o avô materno do autor). Entre o oficial alemão e o judeu lavrador nasce uma amizade que pode ter sérias consequências para ambos. Através de uma lógica de flashbacks, seguimos o jo...

as of January, 23rd 2006, four months after enrolling :-) Now that I have received a postcard from New Zealand, I'm only short of Africa. Telling, innit?

"Do unto others what you would have them do unto you." A lot of people think Jesus said that, because it is so much the sort of thing Jesus liked to say. But it was actually said by Confucius, a Chinese philosopher, five hundred years before there was that greatest and most humane of human beings, named Jesus Christ. The Chinese also gave us, via Marco Polo, pasta and the formula for gunpowder. The Chinese were so dumb they only used gunpowder for fireworks. And everybody was so dumb back then that nobody in either hemisphere even knew that there was another one. We've sure come a long way since then. Sometimes I wish we hadn't. I hate H-bombs and the Jerry Springer Show But back to people like Confucius and Jesus and my son the doctor, Mark, each of whom have said in their own way how we could behave more humanely and maybe make the world a less painful place. One of my favourite humans is Eugene Debs, from Terre Haute in my native state of Indiana. Get a load of thi...

In 1970, an insanely ambitious 31-year-old whose grandiose effort to create a new motion-picture studio in San Francisco was proving difficult, what with all the hippies he had hired stealing his equipment to sell for drugs, got an offer from Paramount Pictures. It was a chance to write and direct the Hollywood version of a book the young filmmaker read and quickly dismissed as "a popular, sensational novel, pretty cheap stuff." The novel was full of gore and sex, which this personally conservative scion of the 1960s found tasteless and offensive — not to mention retrogressive and far too mainstream. Even though he had worked anonymously on a nudie or two in the early 1960s and a few horror movies while he learned his craft, he now fancied himself a revolutionary artist in the manner of the self-conscious geniuses of the European "new wave." But the writer-director was in debt by $300,000 and had no other prospects. He turned to his quiet, intense assistant — a ...