Nepenthe

Gake no ue no Ponyo

Anjo Caído É um filme sobre glórias passadas e queda - Randy, como Rourke, foi "grande" nos anos 80 Mickey Rourke não é apenas o actor de "O Wrestler". É o seu tema, o seu objecto, a sua razão de ser. Diz-se muitas vezes que todos os filmes acabam por ser uma espécie de "documentário" sobre os seus actores. É verdade, e quanto mais o tempo passa sobre um filme mais essa verdade é evidente (como dizia alguém, o destino da "ficção" é tornar-se "documento"). Ainda assim, é raro encontrar um filme que, como "O Wrestler", leve essa ideia tão a peito. O seu acto essencial é ser testemunha de uma presença, da presença de um actor, da presença deste actor. Sem Rourke - e sem a história de Rourke, que está, por assim dizer, "incrustada" em cada milímetro do seu corpo e do seu rosto - o filme não faria sentido, ou faria um sentido complet...

Or read her books :) Articles for The NY Times , including those of the previous posts

The contents of the new Tolkien book: Many years ago, J.R.R. Tolkien composed his own version, now published for the first time, of the great legend of Northern antiquity, in two closely related poems to which he gave the titles The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrun . The New Lay of the Völsungs In the Lay of the Völsungs is told the ancestry of the great hero Sigurd, the slayer of Fafnir most celebrated of dragons, whose treasure he took for his own; of his awakening of the Valkyrie Brynhild who slept surrounded by a wall of fire; and of his coming to the court of the great princes who were named the Niflungs (or Nibelungs), with whom he entered into blood-brotherhood. In that court there sprang great love but also great hate, brought about by the power of the enchantress, mother of the Niflungs, skilled in the arts of magic, of shape-changing and potions of forgetfulness. In scenes of dramatic intensity, of confusion of identity, thwarted passion, jealou...

[click the image above to go to a website full of crabs ;)] Horseshoe crabs may look ancient and alien and battery-operated, they may look like Wilma Flintstone’s idea of a Roomba vacuum cleaner, yet to the sixth-grade students from Columbus School in nearby Bridgeport, the most outrageous thing about the bronze-helmeted creatures crawling clumsily along the beach was not their appearance but their size — or rather sizes. One boy pointed to a linked pair of horseshoe crabs, a relatively compact specimen maybe seven inches across clinging to the tail end of a much larger companion. A kid crab hitching a ride on its mother? No, explained Jennifer H. Mattei, head of the biology department at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, who led the expedition. They were both full-grown, a male and a female, and the female was the bruiser out front. Among horseshoe crabs, Dr. Mattei explained, adult females are a good 25 to 30 percent bigger than their mates, a fact that the girls greeted with h...

Magazine sans véritable équivalent dans le monde, Books a pour but d’éclairer l’actualité à travers les livres parus à travers la planète. Le site est d’abord le reflet de cette ambition. Notre rêve est de le voir devenir peu à peu le lieu de rencontre des francophones persuadés que le livre est le meilleur outil pour comprendre le monde et l’homme. Découvrez également en exclusivité sur Booksmag.fr : un nouveau livre chaque jour ( Le Livre du jour ) ; notre veille sur les livres dont on va parler (Booksbuzz) les meilleures ventes du monde entier (carte interactive des bestsellers ) ; des informations sur les faits, les auteurs et les idées qui font l’actualité intellectuelle (Booksactualité) ; notre sélection d’événements culturels (agenda) les blogs d’auteurs du monde entier ( Booksblogs ) ; les biais cachés des articles de Wikipédia, par les meilleurs experts ( Wikigrill ).

Normally when I find out that a feature film is being made from one of my favorite novels, I immediately prepare myself for disappointment. But, when it comes to The Road , I don't know what to tell you -- for once I'm convinced everything is going to work out just fine. Although that's probably the first time that particular sentence was used in conjunction with anything having to do with Cormac McCarthy's novel. BBC4's arts show Today recently profiled the project, and the highlight of the report was the first audio clip of Nick Cave 's original score. It's only a short clip, but from what you can hear it's the perfect musical accompaniment to the tale of a father ( Viggo Mortensen ) and son ( Kodi Smit-McPhee ) traveling through an apocalyptic wasteland. So even though most of us probably never pay that much attention to the orchestral score to most of the films we watch, you can't ignore a bad one. For me, one of the most distracting things abou...

What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the sex and food they want? Policy Review by Hoover Institution

Cito Ferreira Fernandes, jornalista do DN, em crónica publicada na revista de domingo, creio, e deixo aqui outra crónica deliciosa deste senhor: Eu sei, não é caso para pôr a bandeira nacional à janela. Mas é uma pequena boa notícia: a Casa Branca vai mesmo ter uma mascote portuguesa. Mas isso não é mau? Género: "Você é donde? Ah, português! Como o poodle dos Obama…" Justamente, é coisa para assumir: " Poodle , coisa nenhuma: cão-d'água português!" É uma raça com muitos acentos (til, agudo, circunflexo) e há que a proclamar nossa com orgulho. O cão de Malia e Sasha é óptimo - na carruagem de comboio Interail com a rapariga polaca, no jantar com os sogros estrangeiros do filho, no intervalo da assinatura do contrato com o empresário chinês… - para animar a conversa sobre um bom assunto: nós. É verdade, sou português como o cão dos Obama. Um cão nada maricas e nada bruto, trabalhador. Sabe que ele já andava nas caravelas? Não se demore nas caravelas, fisgue- -se ...

TLS : Or, to quote Jonathon Green, the man Martin Amis once dubbed “Mr Slang”, it is “the language that says ‘no’. No to piety, to religion, to ideology and all its permutations, to honour, nobility, patriotism and their kindred infantilisms. It is forever Falstaff, never the Prince”. It is all those words we wouldn’t utter in a job interview or in front of a maiden aunt. And it is an endless source of pleasure, which explains why dictionaries of slang are so appealing. In common with music and clothing, slang is subject to the vagaries of fashion. It puzzles us most when old or very recent, and, while antique slang can be satisfactorily covered in a printed volume, fire-new words cannot be. Anyone genuinely interested in getting to grips with the latest usage will today begin his or her search on the internet, and a dictionary of slang, although it may help a reader of Charles Dickens or Georgette Heyer, is a cabinet of curiosities and will tend to double up as a bathroom book or an ...

Stephen Halliwell GREEK LAUGHTER A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity In the third century BC, when Roman ambassadors were negotiating with the Greek city of Tarentum, an ill-judged laugh put paid to any hope of peace. Ancient writers disagree about the exact cause of the mirth, but they agree that Greek laughter was the final straw in driving the Romans to war. One account points the finger at the bad Greek of the leading Roman ambassador, Postumius. It was so ungrammatical and strangely accented that the Tarentines could not conceal their amusement. The historian Dio Cassius, by contrast, laid the blame on the Romans’ national dress. “So far from receiving them decently”, he wrote, “the Tarentines laughed at the Roman toga among other things. It was the city garb, which we use in the Forum. And the envoys had put this on, whether to make a suitably dignified impression or out of fear – thinking that it would make the Tarentines respect them. But in fact g...

There is a lost book by Dickens, one that recorded some of the most remarkable encounters of his life. Within it, he catalogued the stories told him by the women – prostitutes, confidence tricksters, thieves and attempted suicides – whom he interviewed before they were admitted to Urania Cottage, the refuge for fallen women he established in Shepherd’s Bush in the 1840s and effectively directed for a decade or more. The money – substantial sums, for this was “high-end philanthropy” – came from the immensely wealthy Angela Burdett-Coutts, but the initial scheme and much of its everyday direction was Dickens’s alone, his most important and most characteristic charitable venture. Jenny Hartley’s excellent new book tells this extraordinary story with compassion, common sense and a lively awareness of the unruly, self-dramatizing energies (both Dickens’s and the women’s) at play within and beyond the home’s four walls. He was the greatest novelist of the age, Burdett-Coutts its richest he...

To the tune of You're So Vain: A long time ago in a galaxy close, close to us. War! The Windows empire is crumbling under the attacks of the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Tux. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere! OSWars Linux t-shirt

Chocolate & Zucchini gives us "Casser du sucre sur le dos de quelqu'un." It means, literally, "breaking sugar on someone's back," or engaging in malicious gossip about someone. In other words: backbiting , which, come to think of it, is slightly food-related too, in a cannibalistic sort of way. For example : "Dès qu'il sortait, ses collègues se mettaient à casser du sucre sur son dos." ("The minute he was out the door, his coworkers would start breaking sugar on his back.") According to these sources , this idiom appeared in the late 19th century, and may derive from the older expressions "sucrer quelqu'un" , which meant mistreating someone, and " se sucrer de quelqu'un ," which meant taking someone for a fool. Sugar was then a symbol of wealth; why it was linked to such negative notions, however, is unclear. Em português, Cortar na Casaca, Cortar na Pele :)

Gulbenkian exhibit: A evolução de Darwin De 12/02/2009 a 24/05/2009 Das 10h00 às 18h00 Terça a Domingo Galeria de Exposições Temporárias da Sede Em colaboração com o Museu de História Natural de Nova Iorque Entrada: 4€ Blog supporting this exhibit: All about him:

Early this week I was in a supermarket stocking up on light bulbs, which I seldom replace until they all fail and I have to find my way out of my office by feeling the furniture, swearing all the way. But I wouldn't swear if children were present. Perhaps I should. Swear words are only words and a case can be made for children hearing as early as possible the language of the world they will grow up in. I wonder, though, if that case is very good. The young mother who was checking out in the next aisle to mine seemed to have no doubts on the matter. She was no harridan. In fact she looked like a fashion model. But she had a trolley piled high with stuff, her two attendant children were behaving like children, and she told them off in roughly the following terms. "Stop something about or I'll something leave you at home next time." The word "something" was delivered several times with tremendous forc...