Saturday, May 2, 2009
Gripe A
A OMS diz que a pandemia de gripe A é inevitável - é para que relembremos os primeiros verdadeiros acontecimentos globais...qual crise económica, pensem na Peste.
WHO says the flu pandemy is now unavoidable - a grim reminder of the first true global events...think not of economical crisis, remember the Plague.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Angel
This song reminded me of Tilda Swinton...and the character she played in "Benjamin Botton".
I'm afraid to see more of her work and fall out with her. But she sure looks like a convincent angel...
May Day
May Day occurs on May 1 and refers to several public holidays. In many countries, May Day is synonymous with International Workers' Day, or Labour Day, which celebrates the social and economic achievements of the labour movement. As a day of celebration the holiday has ancient origins, and it can relate to many customs that have survived into modern times.
Traditional May Day celebrations :
May Day is related to the Celtic festival of Beltane and the Germanic festival of Walpurgis Night. May Day falls exactly half of a year from November 1, another cross-quarter day which is also associated with various northern European pagan and neopagan festivals such as Samhain. May Day marks the end of the uncomfortable winter half of the year in the Northern hemisphere, and it has traditionally been an occasion for popular and often raucous celebrations, regardless of the locally prevalent political or religious establishment.
As Europe became Christianized the pagan holidays lost their religious character and either changed into popular secular celebrations, as with May Day, or were replaced by new Christian holidays as with Christmas, Easter, and All Saint's Day. In the twentieth century, many neopagans began reconstructing the old traditions and celebrating May Day as a pagan religious festival again.
(from the Wikipedia)
Curiosidades
Na mesma linha de raciocínio do post anterior : foi alterada a lei de financiamento dos partidos políticos em Portugal e considerou-se útil diminuir o valor mínimo das coimas por crimes ambientais. Decidiu-se também oferecer protecção aos arrependidos nestes crimes...
Desmancha prazeres
O antigo ministro das finanças do governo de José Sócrates, Luís Campos e Cunha, publica uma crónica muito interessante, no Público de hoje, 1º de Maio, pena é que o seu conteúdo, esteja vedado na Internet.
Afinal, o anunciado fim do sigilo bancário, pode em nada contribuir para o combate à corrupção, ou seja existe toda uma experiência de práticas, envolvendo dinheiro vivo, que todos com um pouco de esforço nos podemos lembrar : financiamento de partidos políticos, com entregas de notas envoltas em papel de jornal, todas as receitas provenientes de actividades ilícitas, etc...
Chama ainda a atenção para a deriva totalitária que medidas como a introdução do Chip nas matriculas automóveis, seguramente vão trazer.
Exemplos, bem próximo de nós, como o caso espanhol são citados, com toda a pertinência.
Abençoados os pensadores independentes.
Uma citação :
"Não percebo como o dinheiro em casa tem toda a proteção e o dinheiro no banco fica à mercê de qualquer funcionário."
Um exemplo :
A Espanha quando legislação neste sentido foi introduzida, tornou-se no país desenvolvido, onde mais dinheiro vivo era utilizado.
Felizmente a justiça espanhola tem respondido à altura.
Afinal, o anunciado fim do sigilo bancário, pode em nada contribuir para o combate à corrupção, ou seja existe toda uma experiência de práticas, envolvendo dinheiro vivo, que todos com um pouco de esforço nos podemos lembrar : financiamento de partidos políticos, com entregas de notas envoltas em papel de jornal, todas as receitas provenientes de actividades ilícitas, etc...
Chama ainda a atenção para a deriva totalitária que medidas como a introdução do Chip nas matriculas automóveis, seguramente vão trazer.
Exemplos, bem próximo de nós, como o caso espanhol são citados, com toda a pertinência.
Abençoados os pensadores independentes.
Uma citação :
"Não percebo como o dinheiro em casa tem toda a proteção e o dinheiro no banco fica à mercê de qualquer funcionário."
Um exemplo :
A Espanha quando legislação neste sentido foi introduzida, tornou-se no país desenvolvido, onde mais dinheiro vivo era utilizado.
Felizmente a justiça espanhola tem respondido à altura.
Black magic woman
Sometimes you walk the streets and songs, become living truths right in front of your very eyes*
My man, Stephen Fry
See why here
An excerpt :
"...How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love..."
Sgnra. Berlusconi has another point of view
"What's happening today behind a front of bodily curves and female beauty is grave," she wrote, adding, in case no one got it, that it was wrong to use the women as "pieces of costume jewellery" to attract votes. "Someone wrote that all this is to sustain the enjoyment of the Emperor. I agree with this - what has emerged is shameful trash, all in the name of power. I want to make it clear that I and my children are victims and not accomplices in this situation," she said. "We must endure it and it causes us pain."
Read it all here
So now it looks like, "il cavaliere", must add other credentials to his candidates
Read it all here
So now it looks like, "il cavaliere", must add other credentials to his candidates
Young hearts
Many years ago a guy took me with him to a record shop, he wanted me to help him choose a record - from all the ones he wanted to grab I thought this one was the least bad...it even got some poignancy to it.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Resilient
This is just a picture,
of a small tree, against a stormy sky -
it is not much, but it is a picture I found,
it is one that makes me proud,
like a small tree,
standing.
My roving hands
Elegy XIX:
To His Mistress Going to Bed
"License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,...
To teach thee I am naked first; why than
What needst thou have more covering then a man?"
Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labor, I in labor lie.
The foe oft-times having the foe in sight,
Is tir'd with standing though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven's Zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear,
That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopt there.
Unlace your self, for that harmonious chime,
Tells me from you, that now it is bed time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envie,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off, such beautious state reveals,
As when from flow'ry meads th'hills shadow steals.
Off with that wiry Coronet and show
The hairy diadem which on you doth grow:
Now off with those shoes, and then softly tread
In this, love's hallow'd temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes, heaven's Angels us'd to be
Receiv'd by men: thou Angel bringst with thee?
A heaven like Mahomet's Paradice, and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we eas'ly know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
License my roving hands, and let them go,
Behind, before, above, between, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man man'd,
My mine of precious stones: my emperie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,
As souls unbodied, bodies uncloth'd must be,
To taste whole joyes. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta's balls, cast in mens views,
That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them:
Like pictures or like books gay coverings made
For lay-men, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are mystick books, which only wee
(Whom their imputed grace will dignify)
Must see rever'd. Then since that I may know;
As liberally, as to a midwife show
Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence,
There is no penance due to innocence.
To teach thee I am naked first; why than,
What needst thou have more covering then a man?
John Donne
1699
Happy
I'm an happy man, to have this on my own living room
gracing my yellow-orangy wall that glows at sunset
Berlusconi tales
It looks that after all "Il cavaliere" is on to something...I guess for women voters, he counts only in his own good looks...
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
smart alec
It is also a movie, as seen here, but the most common use is explained below...
Smart alec
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Smart Alec)
Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Smart Alec (disambiguation).
A "smart alec" or "smart aleck" is a person regarded as obnoxiously self-assertive and an impudent person.
[edit] Origin
According to Gerald Leonard Cohen, author of Studies in Slang Part 1 (1985), the phrase "smart alec" arose from the exploits of Alec Hoag. A celebrated pimp, thief, and confidence man operating in New York City in the 1840s, Hoag, along with his wife Melinda and an accomplice known as "French Jack", operated a con called the "panel game", a method by which prostitutes and their pimps robbed customers.
The key to his activities was that they did so in close association with two police officers, who shared the loot and provided protection. Most was done by pickpocketing, with Melinda taking the victim’s pocketbook while the victim was otherwise engaged and surreptitiously handing it to Hoag or French Jack as they walked by. Hoag's downfall came because he got into financial difficulties and tried to cheat his police protectors out of their share of the loot. In one exchange, Hoag lay behind a wall in a churchyard and had Melinda drop the goods over the wall to him so that the constables couldn't see them.
The aforementioned "panel game" was a trick also used by the original Smart Alec, although not exclusively by him. George Wilkes, the assistant editor of the Subterranean, met Hoag while Wilkes was falsely imprisoned in the infamous New York prison called The Tombs. Wilkes described the trick in a diary of 1844, The Mysteries of the Tombs: "Melinda would make her victim lay his clothes, as he took them off, upon a chair at the head of the bed near the secret panel, and then take him to her arms and closely draw the curtains of the bed. As soon as everything was right and the dupe not likely to heed outside noises, the traitress would give a cough, and the faithful Aleck (sic) would slily (sic) enter, rifle the pockets of every farthing or valuable thing, and finally disappear as mysteriously as he entered." The victim was then persuaded to leave in a hurry through a window by Alec banging on the door, pretending to be an aggrieved husband who had suddenly returned from a trip away.
Hoag used this trick to avoid paying off his police protectors, so that when he was caught, the police were in no mood to aid him. He was sentenced to jail, but escaped through the help of his brother, only to be recaptured following extensive police searches, having been recognized by Wilkes.
Professor Cohen suggests that Alex Hoag was given the sobriquet of "smart Alec" by the police for being a resourceful thief who outsmarted himself by trying to avoid paying graft. It's impossible to be certain this is the true story, since the expression doesn't appear in print until 1865, but it does seem extremely plausible.
Several of the more reliable dictionaries agree. The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to mid-1860s slang, while the American Heritage Dictionary (4th ed., 2000) and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (16th ed., 1999) tentatively trace the etymology of the phrase to Hoag.
Ethics vs aesthetics
Or to put it another way :
“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things, that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.” -Italo Calvino
“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things, that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.” -Italo Calvino
Aesthetics vs ethics
Who says aesthetics can't be ethics ? President Silvio Berlusconni for one has the answer...read it here
Monday, April 27, 2009
Light painting
American painter Edward Hopper, composed his scenes very much like a photographer does, organizing the world in a bidimensional universe.
Now a San Francisco art gallery, makes this more clear with this exhibition.
I think that light is what mattered to him and it is the matter of all photographers.
Pearls of wisdom(from unlikely sources...)
"- Some bridges you have to cross, others you have to burn. I'm one you have to burn."
The International
Eerie
eerie
Main Entry:ee·rie
Variant(s):also ee·ry \ˈir-ē\
Function:adjective
Inflected Form(s):ee·ri·er; ee·ri·est
Etymology:Middle English (northern dialect) eri
Date:14th century
1chiefly Scottish : affected with fright : scared
2: so mysterious, strange, or unexpected as to send a chill up the spine (a coyote's eerie howl) (the similarities were eerie) ; also : seemingly not of earthly origin
synonyms see weird
— ee·ri·ly \ˈir-ə-lē\ adverb
— ee·ri·ness \ˈir-ē-nəs\ noun
Sunday, April 26, 2009
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