Author Archives

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What’s the Point?

The Quotable, the Abbreviated & the
Exception All Vie for the Apostrophe

We should’ve seen this quote-unquote quagmire coming, one would’ve guessed. Some obscure government agency, with a surprisingly slasher’s appetite for apostrophes in geographic names, has banned its use for 113 years, with only five meager exceptions.
Such discriminative zeal has driven self-appointed ‘punctuationists’ to many exclamation marks, preceded by a ‘W,’ a ‘T,’ and a ‘F,’ no dots included. But it’s not even new: the Web already ignores it, and it’s more commonly misplaced than a comma or a semicolon.
But before we get to the latest fracas, let’s review these landposts that can guide or derail communication. In language, music or measure, either written, for breathing or clarifying pauses, they may as well be the edge we still have over the droning of robots and computer-generated speech. But we may have already lost that one.
We mentioned the comma, for instance, fully aware of how dear they’re to linguists and grammarians of almost all tongues. It’s actually amazing how such a small curvy mark can originate so many treatises of its use, praise from academics, and frustration by students, and we’re not even getting into the pompously named Oxford comma.
Then there are the marks that some languages like so much as to place them in the beginning and the end of a sentence, as the Spanish does with the exclamation and the interrogation points. With the added sophistication that they appear upside down, on their second time around. Such a twisted Latin passion, you may wonder.
Albeit often laid at the feet or side of letters, no punctuation above the mores of our times, helping contract full sentences and complex meanings into a few strategically arranged typos. Or go the other way, and get spelled out as a word, as in the case of the arguably most disconcerting of them all: the slash.
Thus, much more could be noted about these ‘accidents’ on the road to understand each other, or completely miss the point. We’d rather Continue reading →

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Not Food

Think Things Don’t Change?
Try a 14-Year Old McDonald’s

Not many corporations convey so well both the state of the economy and our social mores as McDonald’s, the world’s former biggest restaurant chain. And for its product’s poor nutritional value and the environmental impact of its business practices, it’s doing just fine.
Or so it seems. For news about a 1999 burger looking eerily ‘fresh,’ and of a CEO making $8.75 million, while the average patty-flipper earns $8.25 a hour, were both received with jaded nonchalance. No wonder an artist made a life size mummy out of McDonalds.
It’d be stupid to blame solely the economy on the company’s success. Granted, its origins are in fact linked to the Great Depression, and it’s no wonder that now, during such an extended reenactment of those empty pocket years, it remains the compulsory choice for those who can’t afford to embrace the organic, cage-free craze of the era.
It may also be the power of its muscular business model, the 1980s expansionary pull through emerging economies, what may have guaranteed its staying appeal. Such aggressive strategy made possible for McDonald’s to become more popular (read, cheaper) than Indian food in India, for instance.

But who can deny that other element that the most American of all corporations possesses, to which only a overused and detested word can be applied: iconic. The red and yellow colors, the rings, and that obnoxious clown are so infused in urban culture, that artists such as Andy Warhol had no choice but to incorporate it into their work.
As for those who see signs of hope, since McDonald’s no longer the world’s No. 1 food chain, let’s keep things in perspective. Researchers Continue reading →

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Safe Arbor Clauses

Three About Trees &
a 5,000 Year Old Truck

Buddha sat under one. Sumerians have crossed oceans on ships built with them. Many species disappeared, or exist only in old depictions, paintings predating the modern era. Yet defying all odds, trees still grace our world, and stun us with their girth, height, and vigor.
That’s why a man in India has planted whole forests of them, and the Brazilians plan to count those in the Amazon. Now, as the world’s biggest trees continue to grow, according to botanists, an editor at NOVA begs new architects: please, stop placing them in skyscrapers.
In New York City, where the latter thrive, though, trees are subjected to more mundane afflictions of street life, such as dog pee, rusted chains, and cigarette butts. That’s why the Treedom Project is halfway through a quest, which ends May 26, to ‘liberate them’ from such indignities.
But without being the cradle of ancient trees, or having a forest to call its own – never mind the woody wilderness of upstate New York – the city is still home of one of the gems of modern urban green architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Central Park.
Carved and carefully planted at the heart of the city, it’s a wonder that neither its 800 acres plus nor its incredible variety of species haven’t felt to the axes of powerful real estate moguls. If the park’s been the setting of a few bloody crimes, it’s also been the very reason many a resident haven’t yet lost his or her mind.
Still, for all their majestic and soothing presence in Manhattan, no Central Park tree comes close in age to Methuselah, a fittingly-named truck which, by some accounts, is the world’s oldest. The bristlecone is said to be 4,844 years old, a thousand years older than any other on Earth, and it’s been living all this time at a pine forest in California.
The good news, at least if you’re a tree, is that many of the big species are still growing, just like what you’d wish your mind were doing right now. A Humboldt State University research team found that 3,200-year old giant sequoias, for instance, actually grow faster later in life than in their ‘teenage’ years, when all they’ve got is a few hundred summers imprinted on their rings.
One of nature’s best recordkeepers, trees can report back to us our entire walk on this planet, better that we ever could. They may not Continue reading →

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Furry Tales

Rats vs. Nukes, Stray Cats vs.
Florida & a Dog Lovers’ Bacteria

For thousands of years, no other trio of animals have been so close to us. Whether you love or abhor their company, most of us have at least one funny story to share about a rat, a cat, or a dog we’ve met. But behold, for furs always fly when one fails to recognize their own stripes.
Some stories may start with a flamboyant set up: so a rodent, a feline, and a canine walk into this bar and… We’d rather tell you about the environmental bent of Japanese rats; the furious fight over southern feral cats; and a bacteria type that only people who love dogs carry.
To be sure, that’s not a threesome that you’re used to seeing mentioned in the same sentence either. Except, maybe, as the title of some obscure flick. And cats’ undisputed dominance of the Internet, viral video division, is inversely proportional to our own aversion, or general failure to fully understand, rats, mice, and the vermin attracted to our provisions since immemorial times.
With dogs, though, it’s another story, one that usually invokes feelings of companionship, loyalty, and not a small penchant for being subservient to our most spurious interests. It all points to our bottomless guiltless ability to subjugate animals in order to prevail in our daily grind against our own species.
If we could, for a moment, see the natural world through unbiased eyes, perhaps we’d have the clarity to recognize that having been bestowed with a sense of moral, we’re the first ones to betray it. And all other living beings are muted witnesses to our nefarious sense of supremacy and self entitlement.

RATS HATE NUKES
The final and sad toll of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which struck Japan’s Pacific coast in March of 2011, was close to 16,000 dead, with thousands more injured and officially missing. To that, one may add now a few rats, unsung heroes of an ongoing battle between environmentalists and government bureaucrats.
Along with death and destruction, another scary consequence of the catastrophe was the meltdown at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant complex provoked by the tsunami. It not just disabled the plants, but to this day it’s still generating radiation to Continue reading →

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Curtain Raiser

Of Arthur, Kenneth & Carmen, Colltalers

Proponents of austerity measures, the Draconian slashing of government spending and social programs as the only, unarguable, solution to all problems affecting the global economy, have suffered many setbacks lately, including from one of the bastions of global capitalism, the International Monetary Fund.
But beyond any heartwarming socialist speech about the fallacy and inherent cruelty of capitalism, there’s at least one study in contrasts that illustrate with great clarity the bizarro world behind our current woes: the case of the fraudster that was honestly right, and the cheating elite economists who got it all wrong.
More on that in a moment, but let’s drive the first point until the nail crushes the vampire’s heart. Or the zombie’s brain, for those who belieber it. Regardless.
One may be able, albeit ill-advised, to dismiss the hundreds of thousands of people, who on Labor Day this past week, took the streets around the world to protest austerity policies their governments have been shoving down their throats, with no visible benefits, but mounting nefarious consequences.
But even those controlling the strings can’t ignore that there’s no longer a consensus, if there was ever one, about the efficacy of spending an obscene amount of capital, political and otherwise, on a proposition that alienates the majority of the world population, whose sweat and labor supports the very wealth at the top.
Neither the Reagan-era ‘greed is good’ bumper-sticker capitalism of the 1980s, and its phony tales of Cadillac-driving welfare queens, could’ve envisioned economic growth led by a skyrocketing stock market, huge CEO compensations, and a global network of tax havens for billionaires, standing on the backs of starving laborers and millions of unemployed roaming the streets.
And yes, it has happened before, but there’s no need to go there. After all, despite all historic examples and the books to prove it, many in charge of making economic policy decisions show a disturbing obliviousness about the lessons they were supposed to have mastered with the expensive degrees they’ve earned.
Or as we see it, one must be at least suspicious about being among the few still paying attention to evidence and ‘reality-based’ cause-effect (even for using quotation marks, which would be absurd if we were in fact living in a rational world), while those holding the cards seem to overlook it all so easily.
That’s what made us think about Arthur Batista da Silva, who got it right about what was happening to Portugal, even though he was not who his countrymen thought he was, and Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, the Harvard economists who everyone thought should know better, but as it turned out, did not.
Last year, when Portugal was negotiating a $100 billion bailout with Continue reading →

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Spring Quickens

Colors Are Bright But
Critters Are Crawling

We’re deep in the age of freaking out about nothing, while getting numb about what screws us up. If that sounds hyperbolic, take Spring’s arrival in the Northern Hemisphere, and its annual rites of wonder and obsession with sights, smells, colors, and specially, crawlers.
Yes, along with flowers and the birds, the music in the air, and the light afternoon breeze, there’s no end to the sheer terror of being touched not by an angel but by a bug. And there are plenty of them. We give you three of the most distinctive: cicadas, snails and cockroaches.
It may be hard to grasp why city folk is so terrified about the prospect of being covered by these minute aliens, utterly different from us, and yet, way more necessary to the natural world than our stinking behinds, but what’s really over the top is the language with which they’ve been greeted in the media.
‘Billions of Cicades to Swarm the East Coast.’ ‘Giant African Snails Invade Miami.’ Or ‘Roach Infestation Disables Greyhound Bus.’ Note the use of superlatives, of ‘enhanced,’ albeit cliche-ridden, imagery, all documented with detailed pictures of the little monsters in all their otherness and difference.
It’s all true, of course, even though that we are the ones who’re invading them, or at least causing them to multiply and seek refuge in our dwellings. Pollution, climate change, pesticides, it’s all our own doing, really. And the inclusion of roaches here is because, let’s face it, there are simply very few places on earth they won’t show up.
As for those who blame the media for all the alarm, let’s keep in mind that both language and imagery come from or are based upon the greatest compendium of advertising horrors we’ve ever known: the bible. That’s where such fears can be tracked to, plus the gory flair that pious writers, such as Dante Alighieri, have added throughout the years.

So when locusts showed up in city-size dark clouds over the Middle East, last month, that creaky mother of all qualifying cliches of news coverage trudged right along with it: ‘biblical proportions.’ Followed, of course, by words such as ‘plague’ and ‘apocalyptic.’ Never mind that the phenomenon, however its disturbing look and destructive power, has been happening since, well, biblical times.
It doesn’t matter. We’ll freak out about it all the same. War, poverty, hunger, slavery, exploitation, disease, all of which also playing leading roles in the gospels, seem to have somehow lost Continue reading →

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Used Books

City Fined for Destroying
Occupy Wall Street Library

It was an act of truculence from the NYPD, just as the many arrests and illegal surveillance of members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which even at its peak, remained an example of restrain as far as protest rallies go. An act that, even after two years, has no defenders.
A mistake, it’s now agreed, that will cost New York City, or rather, its taxpayers, $230,000, which includes reparations for the destruction of the volunteer-maintained People’s Library, plus the small windfall that lawyers, hired by the movement to litigate the case, have earned.
OWS has gone through many phases since that spring, summer and fall, still the only consistent act of rebellion against the widespread multi-billion malfeasance, perpetrated by Wall Street bankers, that brought most of the world’s finances to an almost standstill. Not quite, though, as it turned out.
Neither the U.S. government has managed to punish a single character in that tragic operetta, which bankrupted entire nations across the world, along with millions of working families. On the contrary, as far as anyone know, those same bosses have since thrived and are, in fact, wealthier than ever nowadays.
That’s why the raid of Zuccotti Park, in Lower Manhattan, was so out of proportion then, and utterly absurd now even as it recedes in time. While the city was wasting its highly trained law enforcement agents, their very own pensions were too being raided by the same chiefs who’d called them to clear the park in the first place. Not even Machiavelli could’ve envisioned such a mascarade.
The movement has found other venues to remain relevant since that fateful year. Whether it’s found its true calling by purchasing and forgiving debt of common citizens, as in the Strike Debt initiative (see on your left), or just being instrumental whenever needed, as it did during the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, it’s a discussion for another post.
In this context, beating the city in a lawsuit is not even its greatest achievement. But it sure helps. Thinking about that, here’s what Colltales published about the raid, and the chilling message it sent to some of us, to whom any time libraries and books are destroyed, burned, or dumped, the hair in the back of our neck stands up. Enjoy it.
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Booking the Future

When Libraries Are Destroyed,
Bad Memories Drive the Protest

When the New York Police Department raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park, Lower Manhattan, last Tuesday, destroying its free makeshift library, it unwittingly joined a sad and brutal roll call of fanatics that stretches back many centuries.
The NYPD became just the newest member of an infamous club that includes the Taliban, German Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, Imperial Japanese forces, The British Empire, the Catholic Church, and an assortment of despots and bloody occupation armies across time, religions, cultures and ideologies.
All at one time or another, have been singled out by history for being responsible of the destruction of millions of books. The volumes will never be recovered or even identified, and those who did away with them exist now mainly under the general banner of scourge. But what has been lost to mankind certainly goes way beyond their horrific deeds.
Even before Gutenberg officially invented the modern print, books were perceived as a threat to power. Thus, the way the police confiscated the 5,000-odd volumes covering a wide array of subjects that had been donated to the OWS movement, was but a small, albeit not new, Continue reading →

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Quantum Leaks

The Deaths of Two Pablos &
the Latin American Sept. 11

Just as the exhumation of Pablo Neruda’s remains got under way in Chile, Wikileaks has released another trove of U.S. documents. This time, they relate to the same period of the poet’s death, days after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup that ousted democratic president Salvador Allende.
As for the other Pablo, April 8 was the 40-year anniversary of Picasso’s death, who was also targeted by a dictatorship, that of Francisco Franco, but managed to outlive its reign of terror. Thus what took place decades ago remains relevant even to these indifferent times.
The 1970s was a dark period for most of Latin and Central America, with widespread military coups and disregard for human rights. It was a time when blood-thirsty rulers, under the banner of fighting a mostly fabricated Communist threat, were let loose to persecute and assassinate political opponents.
What’s disturbing is the fact that they may have had help from Washington and the Vatican, as the Wikileaks papers attest. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Pope Paul VI, both central to events of the period, are shown to be aware of what was taking place down South. They just chose to do nothing to prevent it.
Kissinger’s role has long been discussed, as there’s an overall consensus that the generals who disrupted by force so many democracies in the region could not have remained in power for as long as they did without political support and funding from Western powers. Despite all claims to the contrary, he’s staunchly denied any role in the Chilean coup.
But the papers also show that the Vatican had downright dismissed mounting allegations and evidence of almost indiscriminate murders and serious violations Continue reading →

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Spinning World

Fear of Losing the Internet, Your
Religion & the Best Things in Life

There are times when we fancy ourselves as a sort of keepers of the world. We pretend that bad things skip a beat under our watch, or look the other way. It may be all silly, but lately we’re only able to function under the illusion that things won’t turn that mad when we’re around.
Take the past weeks when we were off, for instance. You may argue, things unravel, as they wont to do, regardless of who’s at the helm. But eyeballs in a trash bin? An anti-atheist postal bias? An entire continent severed from the Internet by a pair of scissors? There’s more.
Guess what item is the current hottest U.S. export? But we’ll let you crave about this one for a bit, while we litter your Friday with a bunch of weird news, and a few signposts along the way first. For it wouldn’t be fair, otherwise. After all, we’re not talking about nuke threats from a diminutive Asian dictator here.
In fact, we’re the ones craving about these odd splinters we eagerly collect from the daily grind. As we said before, our files are stuffed with them, begging to be let loose. The only ground rules we’d consider would be to group them with like-minded items, under the general rubric of a world that’s lost its lid.
Which brings us back to the undercurrent theme of this fair Spring day: who can keep up with so much musings and rantings about ‘what I think,’ or ‘what I’d do,’ or how many ways one could count to appreciate the wonder of being themselves. But we digress. The point is to offer you a ride, a spin if you would, and see what still stands, when all is said and done.

THE NET, ITS TUBES & THE DIVING CUTTERS
The biggest, albeit hardly noticed, Internet attack ever recorded happened just the other week, to dismay of those who, by now, take online access for granted. As it turns out, this megabillion bytes digital highway has so many vulnerabilities to make us all fear for its continuous operation, if such attacks intensify.
And they will, we’re told. But we won’t bore you with the nerd details you probably already know, other than saying that your computer was probably made part of it, as a zombie, along with its printer and, hey, even your toaster, for that matter. What we should be asking, though, is why bother?
That’s because three men caught off the coast of Alexandria proved that disrupting the Internet is way simpler than that, at least in theory (and if you happen to be a diver, of course). They were attempting to cut through the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable. Talking about the tubes of the Internet, well, this is it.
Disabling such a prosaic piece of hardware would be disastrous for millions of people in Asia and Europe. It’d immediately cut off the Internet in France, Italy, north Africa, the middle east and Malaysia. Cables like this run all over the world, making sure you get your porn at the click of a bottom.
The latest digital attack, by a shady organization called CyberBunker, has clogged up a staggering 300 gigabits per second of the Internet, so the threat of disruption by hacking is still pretty scary. If it were directed at a major utility, or a nuclear defense system, for example, it’d be downright nightmarish.
But many other nameless thugs may lack the technical expertise to bring the world online to its knees. So the next best thing may be Continue reading →

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Fools’ Errand

The Cruelest Month & the
Wasteful Land of Hoaxers

April is here again, and that may be one of the few things you may be sure about its first day. Yes, it’s high time for jokesters of all stripes, including the miserable kind old Eliot may have alluded to in his epic. So all we can say is, be mindful out there today.
For in college dorms and at offices across the land, misguided tricksters may be tempting serious injury, and who can trust the sense of humor of digital avatars, these days. Better tread with caution, weary traveler, for no amount of solemnity may mend a catastrophic mishap.
On the other (sleight of) hand, though, we just can’t wait to see what will be the dominant hoax of the day, and, slow as we are, how long we’ll take to realize, hopefully in time, our endless gullibility. Lacking any insights to add, we’re republishing our 2012 post on deceiving and fooling as we saw it then.
May the cleverest and the most benign prevail this Monday, even though we doubt it. As it usually goes, someone always gets hurt, and their fall is the undue wage paid to devilish intent. In other words, we wish it were all fun and games, but the flesh is weak and we may find ourselves laughing at somebody’s expense. Damn us.

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Sleight of Minds

In Leap Years, April Fool’s
Comes a Full Hoax Earlier

Who doesn’t know the expression, don’t fool yourself? And yet, we love to do just that. We go to great lengths pretending we don’t know what we should, and we don’t feel how it hurts. Aches, longings and desire, jealousy, hatred and grief, we’re all great at deceiving our own hearts into believing things can’t be that bad. Yet, they’re usually much worse.
We brag about how far we’ve got, how good we are, how much better is our god. Such gullibility makes the work of hoaxers not just easy, but necessary. So thank your phony stars for another April Fool’s Day, for it may provide respite and restore sanity.
You may fear if it ignites a conspiracy, a collective craze, the hysteric crowd. But those would have happened with or without pranksters. After all, paranoid buffs may believe they’ve uncovered the truth; everybody else is sure there’s no way of knowing it.
It may also look as if we’re a full day ahead of schedule, but in any but a Leap Year, today would be April 1. Which was once celebrated in January, and December, and March 32nd., which even in the 14th century was no longer possible.
So, either way, it’s a day of ambiguity and humor, even when at first you may feel like dismembering anyone who dares to punk you.

THE SHIP OF FOOLS SAILS ON
For some reason, the 20th century was plagued by all sorts of political conspiracy theories that arose from one too many behind-close-doors machinations. Many believe they’re are surely behind (excuse us if we Continue reading →

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Curtain Raiser

Laughs Are in Short Supply, Colltalers

Romans may have got it right, after all. No society can subsist only on bread, and they had a way of keeping entertainment at arms’ length. It was a way of ruling not unlike that of populist regimes, to be sure, but still quite effective.
For societies that abhor comedy tend to be of the authoritarian kind, whose leaders enjoy a particularly cruel form of justice: to persecute those who dare to turn their divine edits into jokes.
Problem is, whenever we get too enraptured with the circus, we may not notice how stalled is the bread we’ve been served. Too often, what’s considered ‘funny’ is just a way to veer your attention toward shopping and away from what ails your life.
It’s fair to celebrate jesters, as they provide crucial relief from too many a bleak moment crammed into every single day. But there must be a healthy measure of engagement in the issues concerning our times, even if it’s hard to come up with a good bit about them.
We thought about that when it was revealed last week, by no small measure of news coverage, that the Tonight show may undergo yet another of its periodic changes at the helm. From one jokester Jay to another Jimmy, we’re told.
Immediately we got blanketed by a massive media coverage, which seems to appeal to way more than the average talk show audiences. Or so it appears, even though we still consider a miracle that so many stay up so late and still manage to keep their jobs in the morning.
Meanwhile, gun legislation may be all but dead in congress, questions about the U.S.’s drone use, both abroad as a deadly rainmaker, and domestically as a privacy-buster, are waning, and immigration reform has stalled yet again.
In other words, the gun, military, and private prison industry lobbies continue to influence and dictate policy in this country, through their loyal army of elected politicians, who once have sworn by their constituencies’ interests.
Thus when something so irredeemably serious as the citizen’s right to influence policy is so blatantly mocked by the system, what’s left to laugh about? Plenty, as it turns out, even though much of it may and Continue reading →

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Would You?

They Asked Us, Please, Please Me
& We Were All So Pleased to Oblige

It was half a century ago – Sgt. Pepper still a cultural revolution away – when The Beatles released their first album. Despite how fast it was recorded, and the band almost total anonymity outside the U.K., it became a landmark of pop and rock music like no other.
Please Please Me, an almost live recording of their Cavern Club act in Liverpool, had already the combination of originals, classic American rock, and songs by composers outside their immediate realm of influence, that marked their early output. And, of course, those vocals.
By then, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison had already honed their performing skills, and the late addition of Ringo Starr seemed to have only helped usher their meteoric rise. The album shot up to #1 in both sides of the Atlantic, and within three years, they were indeed more popular than you-know-who.
At this stage, they were still better as a cover band than at writing their own material, as most of the songwriters they’ve used, including Carole King and Burt Bacharach, were already established household names in the U.S. That was not to last, as we all know how it turned out.
However, Lennon and McCartney’s I Saw Her Standing There, the title song (released earlier as a single), and Love Me Do owed nothing to the Continue reading →

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Rain & Tears

Mudslides in Brazil or the
Predictability of Tragedy

It’s happening again. Almost every year, incontinent summer rains flood and cause tragic mudslides in and around Rio de Janeiro. Accordingly, headlines could be merely copied over and republished, with changes just in the number of victims and their names.
That’s because, as local and federal governments get elected, fulfill their terms in office, and leave, little is ever accomplished to prevent this sad cycle of despair and grief happening all over again in Brazil. As usual, the epicenter of this still unfolding tragedy is Petrópolis.
Despite the use of terms such as ‘unusual heavy rains,’ and ‘unexpected mudslides,’ the script is all too familiar. Rains come and the mountainous region around Brazil’s ‘marvelous city’ start to turn into a deadly, several feet-deep wave of mud and detritus, rushing down and burying everything on its path.
So far, the death toll (335, so far) hasn’t been as severe as it was in 2011, and we do hope it keeps that way. Still we thought it’d be appropriate to republish an exclusive and dramatic eyewitness report on the floods that affected the same area two years ago. As we said, there’s very little difference between then and now.
You may gather your own conclusions, of course, but since it’s still happening as we speak, we’ll abstain from making judgements or calling for accountability for now. At least until the weather gives a break to those poor Brazilians, and everyone is safe. Then, we most definitely should. In the meantime, here’s the story.

Exclusive

Left With Only Despair & the
Clothes They Were Wearing

Over 500 people got killed in the past few days, as intense rains caused floods and mudslides in five towns around Rio de Janeiro. The death toll is expected to rise as more rain is forecast and an unknown number of victims remains buried under land and debris from collapsed buildings. Here’s a report from a resident of Nova Friburgo, one of the most affected cities.

“Hi Chico,

Things here are really horrible. The rain inundated my mom’s house, she lost almost everything, many barriers broke down, there are many deaths, relatives of Fabio (my husband) lost everything and were left only with the clothes they’re wearing.
We had to leave home because things were getting pretty bad, without running water, power and risking getting sick, for the mud was already at the fourth step Continue reading →

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Evolving Mores

Undies, Mother Teresa & Brazilian
Prostitutes: They All Got Upgrades

We all have expiration dates. In fact, pretty much everything about us, life and everything has a rotting point, beyond which it must evolve or it’ll dissipate. The same with clothing, reputations, and things people do for a living: it’s either reboot, or become as good as an old BlackBerry.
Take underwear, for instance. There’s no telling what they mean to so many, even those who don’t consider them a priority. Or Princess Di’s favorite poor of West Bengal, whose notoriety is under heavy artillery right now. As for the Brazilians, it’s all about professional improvement.
More often than not, change is good. One needs to keep on tiptoes if something will ever get done, and many a fine and exquisite way of doing things, in a certain, exquisite way, well, went the way of the Dodo. It simply couldn’t withstand these times of instant reward and viral videos.
Then again, some industries take advantage of this natural cycle to push their wares, as anyone who’s ever wondered why they wound up being stuck with this year’s model, when the one parked nearby is still running, would rush to tell you. We’d tell you more, but your smartphone probably would need an upgrade to put up with so much data.
In any event, we can’t help it. We crave the new, as long as it’s shiny, and smells fresh, and has a big logo, or set of functions, we’ve convinced ourselves we absolutely can’t live without. Even if last year’s is still perfectly fine, and running, and takes all calls, thank you very much. We just never care to pick it up.
So in anticipation of the new season, and whatever new crap they have in store for us, at a premium price, we’re got this first-world problems thing really down. After all, there’s something else common about these three themes that follow: they’re all much older than your mother.

CAGE-FREE-RANGE PANTIES
It seems that everywhere you look, everything is getting an organic version of it. This wave of labels may have started with food, but now it’s spreading like a malware throughout the fabric of our society, to use a pompous old-fashioned dictum. To the point that such labels may as Continue reading →

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Curtain Raiser

Forgetting All About the Elephants, Colltalers

We interrupt our regular weekly homily, er, ranting about the things that make us slightly insane, to add yet another one: there’s a systematic massacre of elephants going on around the world, right now.
It’s so serious that it threatens to drive the species to extinction much before anyone would’ve predicted just a few decades ago.
What’s tragic and ironic is that such a potentially incalculable loss may happen just as we’re becoming more cognizant to how intelligent these creatures really are. Remember, not too long ago, when their numbers were in the millions, we still thought they were mute and relatively unscathed by widespread poaching.
It’s believed that there are now some 600,000 elephants in Africa, plus less than 50,000 in Asia, but these figures are far from precise. The dramatic slaughtering caused by a recent resurgence of poaching for their tusks, as widely reported that it’s been, is yet to make it to any official statistics.
With prices for ivory reaching staggering levels, more elephants were killed in the past five years than in the whole previous decade, according to wildlife organizations. Only in Tanzania, over 10,000 have been killed in average since 2008, with Kenya and other African nations following closely.
At this rate, they could disappear from the continent as soon as 2020, with the same happening in Asia just a few years later, an alarm that conservationists and organizations dedicated to wildlife have been sounding for a while now. Unfortunately, few have been heeding to it.
(Before we proceed, unlike our regular posts on Colltales, we’re not Continue reading →

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Papal Imbroglio

Argentina Beats Brazil in
the Vatican World Cup Final

In the end, it was as predictable as always: Jorge Mario Bergoglio beat Brazilian Odilo Scherer, who shares the same background of Latin America’s bloody military dictatorships of the 1960s and 70s, and became the first non-European pope. No African came close.
The church quickly picked the cardinal with the slightly better conservative credentials, as it was well aware that it could not afford any uncertainty about its choice to fester. Thus Francis I will rule at least until the next scandal calls for another early retirement.
Immediately, along with all the sponsored joy in Roma and throughout the world, those who survived Argentina’s cruel Dirty War, waged by the successive military juntas against their political opponents, have protested the choice, mentioning Bergoglio’s possible role during those dark times.
And at least one well-documented instance has been invoked: the kidnapping of Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, two Jesuit priests, in May of 1976, by paramilitary forces of the regime. They reappeared five months later, drugged and seminude, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
According to Horacio Verbitsky, a journalist who published an account of the episode in his ‘The Silence,’ Yorio accused Bergoglio, then a Society of Jesus official, in Argentina, of having refused to properly protect the priests, who were persecuted by the Junta for their work among the poor living in slum communities.
The generals, who ruled Argentina with an iron fist during the period, neither acknowledged their imprisonment, nor the reasons for it, naturally. Yorio passed away in 2000, and the case would be destined to become a footnote, if Bergoglio hadn’t now risen to the top position of the Catholic church. Then again, as pope, it’s even more unlikely that he’d have to defend his actions.
A SCHOOL OF INTOLERANCE
He offered his version of the events to his biographer, Sergio Rubin, portraying himself not as the facilitator, but as the liberator of the two priests from their harrowing experience. He told Rubin that he personally interceded on their behalf with the dictator of du jour, the infamous Jorge Villela, who then, completely out of character, granted the priests mercy.
But Bergoglio, as Francis I, may not need to deny the other, perhaps more relevant, charge against him: that of being a homophobic, who’s Continue reading →

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Helping Themselves

Brazilian Preachers Amass Their
Wealth & Followers by the Millions

They hold court to thousands every week, performing original songs in elaborated sets, just like any pop star. They routinely land on Forbes’s wealthiest lists, while their core audience is part of Brazil’s lowest income bracket. They were never known for civil liberties, though.
But despite protests, an evangelical preacher became the head of a rights commission at Brazil’s lower house. Since the 1970s, so-called messianic cults have thrived in the country. But no one expected these new multimillionaires to get so much political power so fast.
The issue has a particular tenor to it, since the rise of charismatic religions coincided with a decline of Catholicism in Brazil, and even a modest increase in the number of those who do not identify with any denomination. Specially now that a Brazilian bishop is considered a pope contender.
He’s a long shot, of course, even if Brazil has the biggest number of Catholics in the world. The problem is, Dom Odilio Scherer may be in tune with the Vatican, but is out of step with the majority, the only segment of the church capable of competing with the rise of the evangelicals.
Rome apparently turns its nose at Padre Marcelo Rossi, for example, a former personal trainer who became one of the wealthiest and most popular Catholic priests in Brazil, and who regularly sings and performs dance routines in front of 25,000 worshipers at his megachurch in São Paulo.
Like him, there are few others who also belt out songs, while ‘donning cowboy hats and crooning country tunes at Mass,’ and even publish Continue reading →

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Curtain Raiser

Climate Change Is Packing Heat, Colltalers

Let’s leave the matter of whether we’ve been changing as a society for those who enjoy discussing that sort of thing.
There’s something in it, though, that may warrant a thought or two: how to report the news in an age when increasingly what’s considered news often isn’t.
Take the use of boldface names as an anchor to grab readers by their throat, for instance. It’s what most print manual style books prescribe as a fast, most effective way to deliver the news: get its agents to show it, rather than attempting to describe, or ‘telling’ what’s happening.
But what if a particular set of news, as serious and powerful and far reaching as they come, lacks that individual personality to gather and attract the short-span attention of the masses? Will it still be reported?
But first, fine, fair enough: the past week was dominated by a few boldface names, whose role as newsmakers brought up some crucial issues concerning our life and times.
Will the appointment of John Brennan for the CIA usher a new era of increased government’s secret assassinations, since he’s the well known architect of the U.S.’s repulsive drone policy and alleged ‘killing lists’?
Does Hugo Chavez’s death mark the end of a particular brand of populism in Latin America, socialist rhetoric et al, even if lacking much substance, or is his legacy destined to be countered by the new conservative political wave already taking hold on the continent?
Finally, will the process to replace the troubled leader of a billion Catholics only help to further erode the church’s credibility, as a growing rosary of sex and financial scandals continues to be shoved aside, along with Joseph Ratzinger, from its visible agenda?
What all these three news have in common is the fact that each has a center of gravity in the figure, or absence, of a polarizing name. As Continue reading →

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Women’s Day

Some Progress on Paper, But Old
Battles Still Need to Be Won Again

Past the first century by four years, the International Women’s Day continues to serve as lamppost to reassess and reaffirm its principles of equality, freedom, and all that. But unless we’re mistaken, we seem to be fighting one too many battles we thought had already be fought.
While the U.S. has renewed the long overdue Violence Against Women Act, both inside it and abroad there’s been no shortage of examples of ingrained prejudice and despicable acts against mothers, wives and daughters. But rejoice: there’s also Malala Yousufzai’s life to celebrate.
It’s been that kind of year. For a few achievements and heroic acts of note, it also brought back a whole struggle,needed to prevent a turning back the clock on women, their reproductive rights, access to education, safety to raise their families, and dignity as human beings. And somehow we wish such reality was not only conditioned to the U.S.
For perhaps not surprisingly, the past 12 months marked a reinforced charge by the Catholic church, through its minions in congress and elsewhere, to restrict even more the inalienable right of a woman to make choices concerning her own body, through a well-heeled campaign of terror and intimidation.
One’d think the church would have been busy coming clean out of the horrific accounts of child abuse in its midst, while restating its self-appointed spiritual mandate, opening its doors to the sex minorities it’s been rejecting for centuries, to the poor, and to those still seeking some kind of emotional rescue. But it’s been far from it.
Through much of the year, religion-affiliated colleges, and health institutions have formed an united front against women, in an attempt to undermine a few decades of improvement in public health that the women’s movement managed to bring to the whole of society. It’s been Continue reading →

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Curb Your God

As Religion Tightens Grip on the
Military, Americans Grow Agnostic

Religious fundamentalism is on the rise within the U.S. armed forces, a recent paper argues, with support of high-ranked officers. The issue has concerned defenders of the constitutional separation of church and state, given the military’s sway over the government.
It also goes against the trend observed in the American society at large, which indicates that a greater than ever percentage of the population now considers themselves non-religiously affiliated. At least, 46 million Americans told that much to a Pew research study.
The discrepancy can be added to the overall disconnect between the military community, which in over a decade has been thrown into two unpopular, and vicious, conflicts, and the rest of the American society, which seems oblivious to it. It’s unclear, though, whether this tug of war benefits either side.
The truth is, as the Pentagon reinforces its grab of a huge percentage of the U.S. budget, and resists attempts at accountability and change, it also grows apart from the mainstream of U.S. society, more concerned about income disparity, unemployment, hunger, and social inequality.
On the other hand, the rise of religious fanaticism and so-called messianic faiths has been linked around the world to deterioration of social conditions, impoverishment and its consequent gearing off education-based knowledge to ‘magical’ thinking, and the literal teachings of the bible.
No wonder during the campaign to the U.S. Presidency, Republican candidates have tried to outdo each other in blaming higher education for the lack of ‘fundamental values,’ which may be roughly translated into repeating dogmas about the natural world first formulated over 2,000 years ago.
That an institution that has been waging an expensive set of wars with such a low approval and understanding from the general public has also been accused of discriminating against sex minorities, and turning a blind eye to its widespread culture of rape and violence against women, is only another expected component of such a toxic mix.
But the fact that that same public, not quite cognitive to the interplay between military spending and depletion of social programs, has been increasingly turned off by the church’s policies towards those so-called sex minorities, should be actually considered a sign of evolution. And Continue reading →

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Nocturne

The Night, Number
Eight, & the Infinite

A completely unscientific survey shows that, in some languages, the word night is made up by the letter ‘N’ and the number eight. Thus, eight night, in English, ocho noche, in Spanish, huit nuit, French, acht nacht, German, otto notte, Italian, oito noite, Portuguese.
Given that N is the mathematical symbol of infinite, and eight also means the same, those who pay attention to that sort of thing (conspiracists?) conclude that night must have something to do with the void, the end, the dark. Which seems obvious. Or not. Whatever.
It’s all coincidence, say those who need a bit more of scientific basis before jumping into assumptions about philology. That list of languages, they say, which also should include Hindi (aat raath), are all derived from the Indo-European branch, so they are all related. Bummer.
And then, of course, they proceed to demolish the argument by mentioning all the hundreds of other languages in which the words night and eight have no way of knowing anything about each other, so to speak. Linguists of all accents were ecstatic, and so were everyone who simply can’t stand another pseudo Synchronicity.
No wonder so many tongues are disappearing. By the way, the fact that many false theories percolating the Internet these days would be easily dismissed if more of us would’ve paid a bit more attention in school is just a small consolation. In this case, however, is also a bit sad.
That’s because the theory was so elegant, we’d have loved if it’d made any sense. But even as it doesn’t, the implicit imagery of the flawed connection between the word, which rules when the sun is away, and the number that’s essentially two stacked up zeroes, soothes our jaded minds.
THE NIGHT HAS EYES
Is it the fact that, squeezed in there somewhere, there’s also the concept of slumber, dreaming, and even the Big Sleep itself, with its closing of the eyes and cessation of all possible senses? Or is just our own grey matter, again playing the tricks it learned once it no longer relied on its Reptilian past?
We’d add two other, completely unrelated and also as unscientific as they come, arguments to justify if not the illusory link, then our own volition to go along with it: one, we’re lazy. Secondly, we’ve been searching for a (noble?) excuse to publish these two amazing pictures. Yes, there you have it.
The Earth at Night (above), a cloud-free composite picture that NASA has put together out of over 400 satellite images of nighttime lights, has become one of the space agency’s most downloaded images, and that’s saying a lot. It was originally compiled to ‘study weather around urban areas.’

Exploring the Night, which depicts the Milky Way rising above Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, with a hiker (and the photographer) as sole witnesses, was taken by Jason Hatfield in May, 2012. It’s the 11th of the 50 finalists of the Smithsonian magazine’s 10th annual photo contest.
We could’ve called this post Below the Horizon, or Why Not Talk About Nine, or even Why Six Is So Afraid of Seven. But they all would skin over what the night does to every living being, and the tides, and nature itself. Also, they all ignore the Moon, which is something else entirely.
But as for the infinite, we really know nothing about it.

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Skating to Kabul

For Many Afghan Boys, the Future
Lies Between War & Being a Sex Toy

Last week’s tragic killing of two boys in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, underlined once again our worst fears about the future of generations of Afghan youth, squeezed between the brutal choices of either being killed by the war, or sexually abused by their country’s older men.
As the U.S. prepares to withdraw from Afghanistan, many fear it will leave it in a much worst shape than it found 12 years ago, choked in the toxic mix of poverty, obscurantism, and the quirks of ancient law. Still, some see skateboarding as a way out for some children.
The shooting of the young cattle herders by a NATO-led strike was obviously a catastrophic mistake, just the latest in a long list. That however doesn’t lessen the blunt of their loss to their families, who like many others rely on all labor their youngest can put up to, amid the war-ravaged countryside.
Mistaken strikes, often by drone missiles, have been the most deadly cause for civilian casualties in the Afghan war, and the death of the two boys, age seven and eight, follows another attack in early February, that left 10 unarmed people dead, five of which children. There’s no sight this can possibly be stopped.

It’s a fitting, albeit calamitous, coda for a war that started with one purpose, to find the responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. It got deflated before such mission had been accomplished, interrupted by the long, and completely baseless, Iraq invasion, and finally restarted with no visible objective.
The result: over 2,000 American troops killed, an estimated 140,000 civilian ‘casualties’ in the combined Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the biggest U.S. defense budget ever, far more than all the other NATO nations combined, and an domestic economy in tatters due to this overzealous war effort.
A recent U.N. report also pointed at one of the most lasting damages this war will imprint on Afghan’s society, and the Iraqi’s too for that matter, for years to come: the staggering number of children killed, enough to leave a generational gap in the future of those countries.
As for the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the main reason to justify both military adventures, and the most expensive war effort ever undertaken by the U.S., it ended as everybody knows, with his killing in May, 2, Continue reading →

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The Hunted

The Haunted Beauty of Albinos
& the Bigots Who Can’t Bear it

After months of relative peace, the brutal chase seems to be on again. Last week, a seven-year old Tanzania boy had his hand hacked off by a mob of tugs disguised as spiritual leaders. That false beliefs and carnage never cease to fester in such impoverished land is no surprise.
As it’s nothing new that a supernatural being is ‘ordering’ the murder and dismemberment of innocent humans, exacted in the hands of their ignorant priests. But it’s still staggering that what’s essentially a medical condition would incite such unconscionable acts for so long.
We could spend the day here discussing this and many other cases, with their particularly gruesome patterns and all the gory details. Instead, we choose to celebrate what’s considered the ‘otherness’ of Albinos who, after all, have to put up with all the limitations of their own condition.

The work and lives of South African models Thando Hopa, and Refilwe Modiselle, Tanzania Albino Society’s Ernest Kimaya, Afro-Brazilian Rosemere de Andrade, the India’s Pullan family, documentarian Harry Freeland, Brazilian photographer Gustavo Lacerda, plus a cadre of highly successful artists and thousands others, only assert the power of their dignity as human beings.
We offer today’s post as a solidarity gesture to Albinos everywhere and their plight, not a repulsive patronizing pat on their scared backs, because it’s clear that neither such condition is an impediment to greatness, nor that to stand with Albinos requires preaching and outraged diatribes.
He hope the boy, Mwigulu Magessa, recovers, of course, he being only the latest in what appears to be an increasing series of savage attacks for their supposedly ‘magical‘ flesh. Let’s hope too that TAS gets the resources it needs to go after the culprits and those who cover up for them. In the real world, ignorance should never be a bliss.

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Made Up

Never Mind Gadgets; These
Inventions Can Save Lives

Truth to be told, the kind of invention that gets all the press is the one people carry in their pockets, the smart gadgets that some awkward college grad developed as his pet project. They’ve got us all by the tip of our fingers, and we can’t even lift our heads to avoid traffic.
To be honest, we’re not impressed. What gets us going is something invented to get people to share. Like a billboard that turns air into water. Or an ocean salt-remover machine. A circulating shower, or a food production unit. For these, we gladly bow our heads in awe.
We love our precious little things, make no mistake about. They supply and compensate for our companionship and reassurance needs, even though in reality they give us neither. But, to paraphrase the old saying, what we create out of necessity has a much better shot at bring us together around the fire.
Even the concept of inventing something depends on a number of qualifiers. The U.S. Patent and Trademark office is one of the busiest of the world, but the majority of contraptions and devices that surround us are arguably products of a long development process, not of a single, ‘Eureka’ moment.
With due respect to the amazing inventors who simply can’t help it but to constantly create all sorts of ingenious setups to make our lives easier, they rarely match the romantic idea of the solitary genius who changed the world out of his garage. Mostly, they create a better toothbrush.
That also can be said about the computer, the electric car, and the smartphone. As great as they may be, they’re far from cutting edge Continue reading →

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Sleeping With the Fishes

Salmon, the Frankenfish & the
Truth About the Tuna You Eat

Contrary to the old saying, and paraphrasing it too, the life aquatic is no longer plenty. It’s hard to tell what’s depleting it faster, whether overpopulation or ocean pollution. Short of an unlike miracle, we may be heading to a time when eating fish will no longer be an option.
Which is too bad, of course, but we’re not getting into that now. Because be it as it may, many think there must be another way. Fair enough, but what? Either call tilapia, red snapper, and tuna, escolar. Or please get that salmon loaded with some extra genes.
We’ll skim over these slightly deranged options, and those unstoppable depleting factors in a minute, but let’s agree first that we’re facing a quagmire, here. Our seven billion-strong mouths won’t stop devouring, anytime soon, whatever is closer in order to keep their hosts from collapsing, that’s for sure,
On the other hand, since even before we’ve reached the top of the food chain, we’ve been serving ourselves with everything this planet has bred and nourished way before our great entrance in the concert of species. Thus we turned every other animal into just another dish, and never looked back.
As we colonized flora and fauna to our own sustenance, we grew stronger and multiplied faster. As we’ve occupied every corner of the globe, we’ve also incorporated ever more species into our diet. Until the number of human digestive systems started to shadow the overall number of living organisms used to sustained it.
That delicate balance between what we demand to survive and what’s available to the taking seems about to be tipped. That and, of course, the widening disproportion in the distribution of natural resources, and what’s with the outrage about horse meat, anyway? After all, isn’t that leaner? But that too, is a fish for another water.
So to show how this long and winding intro can manage to land right on top of your dinner plate, let’s see what’s cooking, so to speak, about the seafood we think we’re eating, but that we’re not, and the fish that we thought that we knew, but soon enough we may not recognize.
Japan UN Saving Species
THE TRUTHNESS OF TUNA
It may have all started with the study conducted by Oceana, an advocate group for the preservation of the world’s oceans. Between Continue reading →

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EcoViews

Brazil’s Tombini Sees Central Bank
Ready For Exchange Rates Volatility

‘Inflation has been more resilient than we’d have liked it,’ Brazilian Central Bank President Alexandre Tombini said Monday in New York, adding that the goal of foreign exchange policy is to ‘mitigate excess volatility’ and act when there are market disruptions.
In a presentation to the Brazilian American Chamber of Commerce and the Council of the Americas, he underlined the view that a flexible exchange rate is the ‘first line of defense’ against market shocks, but the bank will provide liquidity ‘in case of market disruption.’
Tombini also said the inflation target policy has served the country well, while acknowledging that ‘inflation has been more resilient than we’d like it to be.’
At the two-year mark of his tenure at Brazil’s central bank, Tombini is faced with a spike in the 12-month inflation rate, which has increased Continue reading →

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Awaiting On You All

George,
Who’d Be
70 Today

The Beatle who, up to his last years, didn’t know he was older than he’d thought, is being celebrated today in a quiet way as he would’ve liked it.

The last of his closest mates to reach his seventh decade, the fact that George Harrison‘s passed away years ago, in 2001, is irrelevant to his continued presence and influence, just like it is with John Lennon.
As their physical presence in this world recedes, their legacies stand up and complement each other, in ways that were not quite so evident during their lifetime.
We bet that something similar is already happening with the still very much alive Paul McCartney, just like the three of them are bound to be remembered outside the powerful myth of the Beatles as a group.
But what’s the most enduring about George Harrison now, as ever, is still his music, as he’s changed the cultural landscape of his time by sheer intuition and the dept of his artistic talent.
Even without resorting to the easy labels attached to his personality and accomplishments, something will always remain mysterious and baffling about George Harrison.
Perhaps, that has to do with his experimental approach to life, just like he happened upon his own birth certificate, and realized that he’d been born in Feb. 24, not on the 25th, as most bios of his still show.
So what? You wouldn’t have heard it as such a big deal if it’d come from the man himself, who’s spent great part of his life learning the healthy art of being ready when the journey ends, and it’s time to accept the inevitability.
That was the task he took at heart, and we’re glad he’d a chance to fully prepare himself for it, unlike the coward twist of fate that befell Lennon. And that’s why today feels as if he’s still around.
He’d probably spend it tending to his garden, and possibly enjoying his dear ones, just like many of us would’ve consider spending our own precious moments. Happy Birthday, old friend, we’d tell him; my, your Gardenias are looking particularly sharp this afternoon.

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Good Morning to All

Happy Birthday to Ya. Would
That Be Cash or Credit Card?

Minds of the practical kind know it all too well; birthdays can be expensive. And tricky too, specially if it’s your own mate’s, who happens to be picky about that sort of thing. There’s something else increasing the overall price of celebrating you being around: the song everyone sings.
Good Morning to All, the tune American sisters Patty and Mildred Hill wrote in 1893 for school children to sing, somehow became Happy Birthday to You in the early 1900s, through a very serendipitous journey. Along the way, it changed copyright owners, and became very expensive indeed.
Technically, every time someone sings it, which probably happens worldwide thousands of times a day, someone, or rather, some institution collects some dough. It used to be the estate of Preston Ware Orem and Mrs. R.R. Forman, who were given credit for the new lyrics in 1935. Now, rather than pay up, some want this tradition changed.
Which means, there’s a new Happy Birthday song around the block, after a radio station in New Jersey set up a contest and chose a winner to replace the old tune. But it’s unlike that you’ll be hearing it sang by a group of underpaid waiters at your local diner anytime soon. These things take time.
Which is just as well. Nothing to remind you of its passage than that over familiar melody, and those repetitive chorus, which by the way, get different lyrics in different countries, not necessarily only its translation. But in English, it may only underline how old you really are. And that’s almost unbearable.
That could be also what’s behind WFMU’s idea, when it teamed with the Free Music Archive to replace the copyrighted song. But the main point was to send the new one straight to public domain, so no one would Continue reading →

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Look Up the Number

When Your Bank ‘Likes’
You as Much as a ‘Friend’

‘Tell me with whom you associate, and I will tell you who you are.’ From a superficial standpoint, Goethe had no way of knowing that, over two centuries later, his words would still be current, invoked in a story about social networking. After all, a lot has changed since, or has it?
Despite its technological patina, the Internet only enhanced what essentially was already there since our times as chief foragers of the land: our limited ability to extend the web of our meaningful relationships. That even if we consider that our own brain has grown to catch up with our social adaptability needs.
Thus, when the British psychologist Robin Dunbar came up with a number to serve as a parameter of how many people can actually be a factor on our lives, and us on theirs,  he mostly confirmed what many kinds of social interactions were already suggesting, even before his time.
The Dunbar Number, which is 150, by the way, is the average, some would say, limit, number of people we not just know by name, but also share a deeper story or connection with. They do not include your boss, or your bank, the Korean deli worker you chat everyday, or even your drug dealer, if you happen to have one (we won’t tell).
At the same time, among those 150, are the closest members of your family, your truly dearest friends, your childhood partner with whom you set up shop, and maybe the proverbial former lover or two. You may not see or talk with them that often, but if you run into them on the street, chances are, you’ll stop and spend some quality time together.

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO CALL?
Goethe, of course, had something else in mind when he formulated what became one of his most well-known quotes. He was referring to what can be revealed about you just by the company you keep, and boy, isn’t that still so true. Again, we’re not talking about your buddies at the local waterhole, or your lover’s annoying mates.
But if you’d happen to brag about your 500 friends on Facebook, that could give everyone an important hint about the kind of person you really are: first, that you’re a liar calling them friends. Secondly, at least Continue reading →

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In Hot Water

Gassy Arctic, Melting Andes
& the Ongoing Sinking of Oahu

We’d hate to throw yet another bucket of stale water over the diminishing crowd of climate change skeptics. But even though humankind is already soaked with evidence (and bad water-based puns) of rising temperature and sea levels all over the world, there’s been almost no action about it.
In the meantime, change is beginning to impact some of Earth’s well-known landmarks, such as the age-old glaciers of the Arctic, in the North Pole, and South America’s Andes mountain chain, while in south Pacific, erosion and increasing flooding threaten the survival of Hawaii.
Just this past week, we had yet another sample of the destructive power of the natural world, specially if we sit on our behinds and choose not to act. But whereas an errant space rock hitting us is a random event, extreme weather is almost entirely our responsibility, and it’s imperative to minimize its effects.
As it is, though, tons of pollutants are thrown daily into the atmosphere, while we struggle to reign in on a powerful carbon-dependent energy industry, and on a wasteful society, that privileges comfort over ecologic awareness. Not even the agents of such a toxic mix can deny our role and obligation to reverse this process.
We remain as ineffective and paralyzed about the environmental decay that surrounds us, as we are about preventing one of those speeding heavenly bodies from sending us to oblivion. Yet the key to an Continue reading →

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The Unconfessional

Hold the I or Indulge on Us;
Agonizing Over Who’s Speaking

Now let’s talk about at least one thing we really dislike about us. That’s exactly it, this idea that using ‘us’ makes our writing more compelling, or less self-indulgent, or a bit more inclusive. It doesn’t, we knew that from the beginning, and now we’re having a hard time going back on it.
It was a conscious decision, mind you. The rationale behind it was that, since the fiction you find elsewhere on this blog is written in the first person, news stories shouldn’t have so much of a personal focus, a narrator if you’d prefer, lest not the content be taken over by the voice.
There’s no way around it, it was pitiful mistake, just like any other on this site: full of lofty ideas of making it all about the reader and not the writer, and winding up being all about the modifiers and not the subjects. Guilty as charged, there isn’t any formula to make this less than another exercise of vain righteousness.
The idea would be then to walk back into that original, and faulty, premise, if not for anything else, then for the fact that everybody hates those insufferable pretentious dopes, who like to refer to themselves in the third person. How come this became a pertinent issue is a matter of contention.
It’s also well understood how flawed such an undertaking can be, that of deconstruct a device used for over two years to basically, let’s face it, mask the real problem: we simply don’t have much stomach to keep using the I did this and I did that. Mainly because we usually don’t do either.
So, here we are, and we mean everyone who’s still with us at this point, knee-deep into a muck of pretense about form, and probably already wise to the fact that, lacking a certain knack for a good news story, there’s not much there, now is there? You, of course, will be the judge.
It was also, let’s be fair, an idea that not just seemed good at the time, but also served well the purpose of, well, repurposing the news of the day with a humorous tinge and a slight slant towards the potentially overlooked detail. After all, there wouldn’t be any point in rewriting someone’s else report.
Somewhere between that noble, albeit arguable idea, and the end result, which was the excessive use of the plural voice, a lot of common sense got lost and wasted. There isn’t any packed newsroom behind ‘us,’ Continue reading →

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A Place to Coll

10 (GM 10). Clabhach, with ruined dwelling in middle foreground, 2009.

The Tiny Island in the
Middle of Our Last Name

We’d already been around the block a few times when we learned about the Isle of Coll, off the coast of Scotland. We’re yet to set foot on this tiny speck of land half a world away from our place of birth, that may share a lost link with our ancestors.
The Celt, the Norse and the Vikings once battled and took upon temporary residence there, but apart from its 200 year-round inhabitants, their descendents spread out throughout the world, and a legion of summer tourists, Coll has only a few followers to note. Which, of course, includes us.
Despite telling ourselves that we plan on getting there for a visit, we’ve hardly made any plans, so don’t take this humble elegy to a place we know little about as a crass infomercial; we could bet our IDs that no current resident will ever read this post, or care about our personal inkling in writing about it.
Still, everyone needs a dream or two, to invoke when all else around seems so bleak and hopeless, and ours may as well be the Isle of Coll. You’re probably on to our bias towards the place, by now, though. It may be the somewhat bucolic vibe that surrounds it what propels us to even talk about it.

Which is surprising since we’d be always inclined to favor a much warmer climate to embrace us, rather than the ‘brisk walks’ recommended on every brochure and Website about the island. It may also be a certain melancholy about its isolation and insularity what appeals to us.
There’s no need to bore you into oblivion about our pseudo-ancestry and possible connection to that foreign geography. There’s very little of that emotional universe that we personally own or even begin to understand. Thus we may be sharing with you only a sliver of meaning, one borrowed from the outskirts of our being.
As we said, someday we may take that three-hour ferry ride from Oban, and brave that constant breeze, just so to strike a closer acquaintance with the land of our name. We may go for much more than just stamping our passport, and casually exchanging some rapport with the locals.
If we ever get there, then, we’ll be thinking about a time, deep in the past, when we shared with readers a private, and probably senseless, aspiration. Short of sending postcards, looking back at this moment will be just like writing a quick note to each one of those we’ve left behind.

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Curtain Raiser

A Warning Shot From Above, Colltalers

The world was stunned last week by the kind of rare global event capable of bringing its frenzy and carnage to an eerie and sobering halt. We’re talking, of course, about the realization that Michael Jordan is, sad reminder of our own finality, 50 years of age.
In fact, the pictures that flooded every news coverage of his stunning leaps and dunks and magical performances, when he seemed to stand still on the air, are truly capable to fool anyone into thinking they’re watching a CGI-enhanced Hollywood production. Amazing.
But enough of that. By now, you’ve probably realized that we’ve used a gimmick only to draw you in, so together we can take a look at the truly shock of the past week: the meteor explosion above the skies of Russia.
That it caught us all by surprise, distracted by another planetary event that, let’s face it, was lacking the two most thrilling elements that made the event in Chelyabinsk so frightening: the surprise factor and its destructive power, it’s only part of the deal.
For it was also a picture-perfect reminder of what may have happened 65 million years ago, or even much more recently and not too far from there: the likely meteor explosion in 1908, over the margins of the Continue reading →

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It’s Fly By Us

Spectacular Meteor Blast Over
Russia Steals the Asteroid Show

Something stunning happened while half of the world was sleeping, and a lot of people were waiting today see an asteroid’s close encounter with Earth: another spaceball showed up unexpectedly and exploded over Russia, showering thousands of flaming debris over the frigid land.
So much for the D414 and its rare extreme proximity; it got completely upstaged by a yet to be named heavenly body, smaller but with much better performing skills. Which also managed to injure some one thousand people, cause considerable material damage, all captured on several video recording devices.
As its pictures go viral, fingers will probably be pointed to those who got us all worked out for another underwhelming event, which almost no one watched. Considering the lethal potential that a crash like the one in Russia could’ve had to life on Earth, what was once again displayed was our utter lack of preparation.
But there may be a (burning) silver lining about this blast, as its forensics gets in gear in the months ahead. Besides of including a massive collection of debris over a large swath of inhospitable land, it may likely serve as a testing ground and offer precious clues about its nature, hopefully to the point of helping us get ready for the next.
The fantastic images of the event may also serve as stand in for another event that also happened in Russia, a century and five years ago: the explosion of an object over the gelid forests in the banks of the Tunguska river, which flatten an estimated 80 million trees over an 830 square miles area, according to Wikipedia. Now back to our regular programming.

Burning Rocks
Checking Us Out

Imagine that at some point today, you’d be walking outside and look up, and out of the thin, blue, chilly and beautiful blue sky, an office building would zip fast by you. Picture that it’d be high up but close enough that you could see its windows, and even a set of desks or two.
Now, never mind that it’d be bigger than a plane. You probably wouldn’t be too worry as to whether it’d crash on Earth, because, well, it simply didn’t belong up there, in the first place. But if it were an asteroid instead, that would certainly be your first thought.
We say that because, as it goes, there’s a piece of rock the size of a small building crossing the skies somewhere above the planet, and if conditions were just slightly different, you’d be able not just to spot it but to watch it crash and, yes, it’d probably be the last thing you’d see on this life.
The asteroid, 2012 DA14 will be zooming by us at about five miles per second, which is really fast, and closer to the ground than the satellites that told you about the weather this morning. It won’t hit us, though, NASA says. In fact, you most likely won’t even see it go by.
Still, it’s a considerable piece of rock, 150 feet across, with power to destroy a whole city, if it were to crash over our heads. The impact would create a charred wasteland in every direction to hundreds of miles away from it. Ah, and again yes, it’d probably kill everyone and everything on sight.
Even with NASA’s diminished budget, and an almost universal neglect about the threat these lethal travelers can represent to life on Earth, we’re finding out that Earth’s traveling through a shooting gallery of Continue reading →

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Valentine Way

When the Affair Is Over &
the Blues Hurt Your Heart

It’d seem virtually impossible to add yet another cliche to a day so full of them as Valentine’s. But we think we can still squeeze an extra one in. For a selected group of researchers seems to agree that heartbreak causes physical symptoms in those going through it.
We hate to say it, but we told you so, haven’t we? Doctors in New York, Michigan, and Beverly Hill believe that the body responds to the emotional pain of a breakup just like it would to any other kind of stress, and it may even enlarge your heart.
For Montefiore’s Director of Psychology Simon Rego, the reaction is a built-in defense mechanism that ‘keeps us alive.’ It’s ‘more than just a metaphorical feeling of pain,’ says University of Michigan Professor Ethan Kross, in what psychiatrist and author Carole Lieberman characterizes it as a particularly vulnerable time to physical illness.

Even the prestigious Mayo Clinic got into what’s known as ‘broken-heart syndrome,’ a condition in which the person experiences chest pains and firmly believes it’s a heart attack. That’s because research showed that the heart temporarily enlarges in response to the surge of stress hormones caused by the end of the affair.
By now, many of you may be experiencing some kind of heart-racing urge, alright, but just out of the desire to kill us. After all, why would we choose today to (chocolate) rain on everyone’s parade, right? We understand. But think of it as a public service and please don’t think ill of our feeble attempt at bringing you something fresh to such a by-the-numbers day.
Perhaps Dr. Rego can elaborate a bit, specially for those who may feel left out of all the fireworks of roses and rings that makes this a make or break kind of a day. ‘It’s important to remember that life is never constant,’ he says (please don’t cringe just yet). ‘It’s the blessing and the curse of it all,” he told the LATimes.

His pearls of wisdom should appear in small print on the back of all Valentine’s Day cards that millions are exchanging today. ‘We all will experience loss in our lives. It’s what it means to be human. But as low as we feel, it’s important to remember that things get better,’ and we think we may be having some kind of palpitation now.
Maybe that’s because we know we couldn’t possibly put it any better, without starting melting as piles of white sugar under a heavy downpour of high fructose corn syrup.
We mean no disrespect to the good old doc, of course, or to any research on the emotional response to such an often devastating event in our lives as a breakup, for that matter. As Dr. Kross, who studied the effects of physical and emotional pain, says, ‘social rejection may actually have a bodily component to it.’
Let’s not go any further with the derogatory tinge for now. As many in history, we’ve tried and tried our hands at the stuff, and may have only managed to cross the part that ‘hurts and causes physical pain.’ So what’s no experts at love are left to do? try it over, of course. We’re foolish that way. The Valentine way.
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Read Also:
* Buzz Off
* Embraceable Hearts
* Broken Hearts
* Before & After

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Slumbers & Yardsticks

The Cost of Staying Awake
& the Fattening of the Kilo

This just in: American workers are having a hard time catching sleep, a Harvard research found. In 2011, they burned through a staggering $32 billion in sleeping pills, and insomnia cost the economy almost twice as much. Worse yet: word is that the kilo is getting fatter too.
Bills and jobs seem to be keeping people awake at night, according to a sleep medicine industry group. Apparently, no one has spent a second of that time or money partying either, which is sad. As for the kilo, it’s been said that it’s gained 80 micrograms in the 20th century alone.
Yes, scientists do study that sort of thing, bless their souls, and somehow that’s good for the general morale. For despite the daily beatings and the gruesome rat race, many will find comfort in the fact that they’re not alone. But how could the kilo let it go like that, that’s what we want to know.
Before we get to that, though, let’s add that other things that we waste our time with also have a dollar figure attached to it, and some are not nearly as ‘fun’ as worrying about that extra bottle of wine we brought that blew the credit card limit. Take standing idling in traffic, for instance. A whole $90 billion down the drain, or rather, out of the exhausting pipes.
Had a sick pet? Again, you were not alone: almost $38 billion were spent taking time off, getting medicines not covered by your plan, spending some quality time with them at home, we’ve all been there. And remember that umbrella you’ve misplaced and now wish you hadn’t? it adds up to $34 billion, only on the account that now you can’t stop sneezing.
We can always add the caveat that what research of this kind misses Continue reading →

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Evolution, Liberation, Deception

The Doc, the President
& the Quitting Pontiff

Readers of this blog know that we like to pick threes, to group things, to dig for meaning often to unexpected results. Numbers do get our attention, and so due dates, and the time of the day. We also love cats, ice cream, blues, and cryptic clues. Double talk, though, not so much.
Today is the 204th anniversaries of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, which makes Feb. 12 a fortunate day for all of us indeed. We were running with that until out of the dark blue came the startling news that Joseph Ratzinger, a.k.a. Pope Benedict XVI, called it quits.
While we were glad to mark the birth of two exceptional minds who inspired billions of lives, the pope’s resignation seems unsettling, since the last time it happened, America wasn’t even around. It couldn’t be a spare of the moment decision, either, but it’s bound to dominate the news.
Darwin, the deeply religious Englishman whose research challenged the very core of Church’s doctrine, has also managed a stunt of his own, recently: he scored 4,000 votes in the last U.S. presidential elections. Despite a still fierce antagonism to his findings, he remains vital by mostly what hasn’t been possible so far: to prove him wrong.
On the other hand, a movie in theaters, and no lack of opportunities for the current White House occupier to emulate his bold decisions, have revitalized Lincoln, the brilliant but doomed American president. In some ways, he’s become a yardstick by which we measure progress in at least matters of race and personal freedom.
The present ruler of a billion-plus Catholics, though, is not only not in the same league, but may be destined to be known as one of the most disappointing popes to have ever worn the white skullcap, the choir dress and, of course, the red shoes. Which makes one wonder about Continue reading →

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Tracking Momoland

The Forgotten Fun
of Brazil’s Old Revelry

Carnival, the world’s biggest party is on, even though it’s hardly the pagan, all-inclusive fun it once was. Whether in its biggest setting in Rio, or in New Orleans, across the Caribbean nations or even in Venice, it grew in form as its substance’s dwindled.
Costumes are flashier, the music got louder, party-goers are bolder (as costs skyrocketed) but somehow there’s also more longing for the lost innocence of yesteryear. We don’t meant to be nostalgic, though; just the typical Ash Wednesday-born party poopers.

But never mind the bullocks. If you’re ready for some fun, by all means, this is the time. Join the samba in Brazil, follow a jazz parade in Louisiana, or waltz to the Italian Bal Masqué; they’re all worthy soundtracks to your sense of abandonment and debauchery.
And check these pics out, from when Brazil’s carnival was measured by how much enjoyment you could pack without spending a penny. See the homemade cross-dressing, the cheap face mascaras, the pedestrian expressions of pure delight. Grandpa knew best.
It’s our humble homage to those lives that went before, and how we can still relate to them partying or having a ball. Bring the kids, call your neighbors, and fall in love. As some used to say in, have the most now, and forget all about the morning after Fat Tuesday.

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Nuking the Future

Mutant Butterflies May Fail
To Prevent a New Fukushima

There are just a few kinds of people who’d feign surprise about this news: those who have been living under a rock for the past four years; those paid for by Japan’s nuclear industry; and Lady Barbara Judge, who’s nothing of the former, and more than a bit of the latter.
With the fast approaching third anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which prompted the world’s worst nuclear meltdown, at the complex of plants at Fukushima, what was once logical is, startling, no longer a certainty: that Japan would phase out its nukes for good.
Apparently, not even high radioactive readings surrounding the complex, or the fact that a beautiful creature such as a butterfly has become the canary of the mile, showing disturbing signs of mutations, seem to be enough to deter a renewed push to forget what could’ve been a horrifying tragedy.
Perhaps, the fact that it wasn’t, either by luck, or because genetic mutations and cancers in humans will take years to reveal their patterns, is the one to point as culprit for such short-memory mentality, driving Japan’s government and its aging generation of energy executives.
Who, by the way, should know better: after all, most of them were eyewitnesses of the devastation of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some 60 something years ago, and how the staggering health toll it took continues to claim lives and hopes for a future.
We’re not about to bash the brave Japanese people here, who has paid such a heavy price for the sins of its rulers during the war and before it. In reality, Japan has one of the most progressive environmental Continue reading →

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Police Blotter

Trafficking Tides, 18 Human
Heads & the Criminal Lennons

It’s Thursday, so this must be file-clearance day. And we get a big kick out of it. There’s always a taste of the unexpected, the gory, and the slightly jocose in those files, and we’re glad to share them with you. As for whatever happened to our sense of decorum, the hell with it.
Who knew, for instance, that there’s a black market for Tide, the laundry detergent? Or that heads are routinely shipped around the country, heaven forbid if they’d lack proper documentation. Plus: guess how many John Lennons have been busted by the Brazilian police?
There’s a reason why we insist in collecting and highlighting these news of the weird, these reports from the bowels of weary precincts, these tales of fellow comrades, caught red-handed doing what any of us could, or have in the past, or, brace yourself, may still have in store ahead of us.
Our method for this madness is simple: whenever the world threatens to drown us all yet again in heartbreak and grief, look desperately for a Continue reading →

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The Red Chronicles

Mars, As Red As They Come (NASA) Click for Video

Think You Could Move
to Mars? Pack Lightly

A curious thing happened while we were mourning the Space Shuttles’ demise, and lack of a recognizable project to follow it up: NASA got busy with Mars. Thus, even if such news are breaking at least 54.6 million kilometers away, and often farther than that, we take it.
Last time we checked it, there were two rovers on the surface, and a satellite orbiting the planet named after the Roman god of war. And as we’re already researching ways of sending humans for a permanent visit up there, no one has mentioned anything about armies to follow.
It belongs to Mars, for example, the most spectacular event connected to space exploration in recent memory: last August’s landing on the planet of one of those rovers, Curiosity, through an ingenious and complex succession of stages. Or so we were told, since there’s no real-time footage of it.
But even the animation NASA prepared detailing the landing beat by a large margin the next-best thing, the docking of privately-built Dragon capsule on the International Space Station last October. While that was the promising opening salvo of a new era of commercial cargo trips, Curiosity’s pictures are way hotter.
This week, it’s supposed to crack its first Martian rock open, and astrophysicists and scientists of all stripes are beside themselves about it. In the meantime, elsewhere in the traffic-free red surface, the other Continue reading →

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Bones of a King

Royal Skeleton Under Parking Lot
May Force England to Revise its Past

The remains of one of England’s most vilified sovereigns have been positively ID’d as belonging to Richard III, who ruled from 1483 until he was bludgeoned to death in the 1485 Battle of Bosworth. But his particularly gruesome demise wasn’t the last indignity he suffered.
His almost complete skeleton caused an international stir when it was uncovered, buried under a prosaic parking lot in Leicester, and DNA tests only confirmed what many already suspected. Now starts an even more daunting quest: to restore his battered reputation.
It won’t be easy. After all, when he lost his life and crown as the last Plantagenet king, bringing the famed Wars of the Roses to a conclusion, he and his kin were replaced by the Tudors, who dominated and literally rewrote the U.K.’s history to suit their political interests.
Besides history, Richard III had also a circumstantial but powerful foe, to conspire against his legacy: William Shakespeare, who wrote a play with his name that rivals the historical record, and who, according to many, was himself not unfamiliar with the convenience of creating new identities.
Shakespeare helped to consolidate Richard’s image as a cruel and blood-thirsty despot, with a physical deformity to match his sadistic reputation. Left unsaid is the fact that such a well constructed composite would suit well the ruling Tudors’ aim at winning hearts and minds during the bard’s time.
There’s now a big discussion in England on how to go about restoring King Richard’s true place in history, more in synch with our own times Continue reading →

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On Track

Grand Central Terminal
Takes Off For New Century

One of the most pleasant, vital, and photogenic buildings in New York City reaches today its 100th year anniversary. In the past century, through many incarnations, it went from a prime train hub, to a movie star, to a dilapidated relic, scheduled to be razed just 30 years ago.
It survived, in no small measure thanks to efforts by a famous presidential widow, and it’s ready to welcome travelers for another full century. It offers them a reprieve from their commute, and shelter from the bustling metropolis it symbolizes as few other landmarks of its age.
Built over an old decrepit depot, and largely credited, in functionality and Beaux-Arts style design, to architects Charles Reed and Alfred T. Fellheimer, the popularly known as Grand Central Station of our time has gone through several profound changes, to keep pace with the changing city.

It served well its purpose, splitting transportation duties, and star wattage, with its sister from across town, Pennsylvania Station. It was after WWII, though, that its own existence (and secrets) came into question, since cars and buses seemed destined to take over railways as a preferable commuting means.
In the process, it got in the hit list of controversial urban planner Robert Moses, a man who single-handedly redefined much of what grand public works were supposed to be. Despite many misses, he got a lot Continue reading →

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The Last Detour

When Columbia & Her Crew
Did Not Come Back to Earth

They died doing what they loved. And before going, they’d done all they’d set themselves to do. Ten years ago today, Rick D. Husband, William C. McCool, David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon, got ready to return home.
It wasn’t to be. The Columbia, a 28-mission veteran shuttle that had been their shelter in the sky for 16 days, disintegrated on re-entry, in the final tragedy of the 30-year space program. We lost their lives, NASA lost its craft, but no dream has been sacrificed in the crash.
While it lasted and until its end, in July of 2011, the Shuttle Program did manage to keep the human aspiration of traveling in space very much alive. That despite its limited range and its specific overall mission, which was to build the International Space Station.
Curiously, the Columbia never visited that orbiting outpost where today, as we speak, six astronauts are still keeping vigil. Neither the program itself has been replaced by anything near its long-term original purpose. We’re definitely living an era of diminished expectations.
In a way, the upside of that is that it assigns epic dimensions to the space shuttles, and truly heroic colors to the 350 people who flew on their missions. Given the risks, it’s also amazing that their safety record Continue reading →

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Blowing in the Wind

Selling Air Bottles, Flying With
Bacteria & Hiring Fake Protesters

As the climate changes and pollution rises, people and corporations scurry to seize positions on all sides of the wind energy debate. While it’s getting harder for humans to grasp a breath of fresh air, it’s just fine for bugs and bacteria, flying in upper layers of the atmosphere.
But even the threat of chocking to death might mean opportunity. Thus an entrepreneur in smog-filled China is selling bottles of air, while a mysterious company would give $20 to anyone who’d show up in Midtown Manhattan, to rally against wind turbines.
Just when you thought that there’s not much going on around you, right? At least not with the air, this constant soothing ghost of a breeze that envelops and kisses our skin ever so gently, but that it’s also the fastest element to mercilessly kill us, whenever it’s short or absent.
Then again, we’ve been stuffing it with some much dirt and soot, chemicals and heavy metal particles, heat and all sorts of flotsam, since at least the Industrial Revolution, no wonder we seem to be reaching critical mass. For millions, the act of breathing in itself is an all-consuming activity.
Billions are routinely spent to support industries and human activities that have a brutal effect on the environment. It’s now a cliche to call it our ‘addiction to carbon fuels,’ but the fact remains that man-made pollution it’s the single greatest factor wreaking havoc with earth’s climate.
THE BUG & BACTERIA EXPRESSWAY
But not all is garbage circling the planet, of course. A couple of years ago, a study found out that millions of moths and other bugs travel regularly overnight at some 60 miles an hour, which is faster than many birds migrate. Just like windsurfers, they seem to follow an internal Continue reading →

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Seeing Double

New Class of Glasses Brings
A Clearer Sight For Sore Eyes

Here’s something that Google can’t control: ‘reality augmented’ glasses. Even before its wearable contraption is out, there’s already been challengers to it. And not just to simply enhance what we see, but also to reveal, educate, even warn us about what we may be missing.
Then again, glasses have been around pretty since humans have ears and noses to hang them, so it’d really be rich for the giant search engine to claim that too. But try they do. Thing is, for all the hoopla, the very concept of glasses as a vision enhancer may be on its way out.
There are now glasses that act as computers, smartphones, designing tools, interactive gadgets, revealing devices, and if you’re concerned about all that privacy-busting array of needed connections for these things to work properly, even an infrared visor that blocks facial recognition software.
The possibilities are not just endless, but actually encouraged. In a clever way to market its interactive-able set of lenses, one company is explicitly asking for input from anyone who may have an idea they don’t already own, on how to outfit your shades with that special juice. Quite challenging, really.
But there’s a reason why we don’t sound too jaw-dropping enthusiastic about these next wave of ever shrinking props, which seem ready to become as common as iris biometric identification systems and thought-activated computers. Or rather, a few reasons: the first one is Continue reading →

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The Untamed

Remiss Author Does It Again:
Curious Blog to Lack New Post

We must apologize, there won’t be any post today. Our writer refuses to turn his daily article, unless we raise his stipend, and as a matter of principle, we don’t negotiate under threat. We’d made that quite clear the last time he attempted to intimidate us with his self-indulgence.
We have an agreement for these past two years: in exchange for board and a glass of cherry every Saturday night, he produces a daily report, that we tweak a bit and add our name to it, and that’s that. We think it’s fair, and any changes need to be pre-approved by us first.
Before you think we’re being excessively strict with this up-to-no-good individual, who without us, wouldn’t possibly manage to find a decent means of employment, we assure you: this is more than he deserves. You should see what we go through in order to have something fresh on this pages every single day.
We humiliate ourselves, we do things we’re not proud of, and we submit to each of his detestable idiosyncrasies, just so to have a few hundred to a couple of thousand words which, if we may say ourselves, could hardly be considered for publication by any editor worth his or her reams.
In fact, we know of no other charitable publisher who’d put up with this infernal cycle of having to come down to this cramped, dirty, fetid cubicle our writer, whose name shall remain unmentioned, calls his lair. All just to extract yet another disturbing rag of ill-engendered sentences who knows about what.
Just to give you an idea, it’s never ready when we come. Sometimes, it’s already 10pm and we’re still viciously arguing and threatening physical harm so he can drop any damned excuse he comes up with in order not to just sit down and write it already. There’s always something, we tell you.
Now, who knows, perhaps because we caught him reading an old, filthy edition of The Capital, he’s been going on and on about labor and other Continue reading →

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Curtain Raiser

The President Must Heed His Own Words, Colltalers

At the halfway point of his presidency, President Obama’s naturally concerned about a number of issues that will mark his legacy. As a clearly student of U.S. history, many of his decisions have in fact been taken with an eye in the future.
Unfortunately, not the ones concerning the acts of individuals who, despite great personal risk, took the step of denouncing wrong doing, often at the core of the institutions they care the most about.
Whistleblowers have had a particular miserable time at the hands of the administration, a fact that radically contradicts what one would expect from a former professor of law and who, as a presidential candidate, praised their courage.
But even as his rousing second inauguration speech was full of inspiring mentions to once taboo themes, such as ‘our gay brothers and sisters,’ it also omitted this particular issue.
On the contrary, during the first four years of his administration, the Dept. of Justice has sought the indictment and conviction of six Americans, who acted on their own ethical standards, despite risking losing everything.
As if on cue, this past week one of them, former CIA agent John Kiriakou, was sent to prison, accused of revealing the name of an active agent. For those who have been following his case, however, what was not mentioned may have had more relevance to his conviction than his eventual indiscretion.
Kiriakou, who has had a distinguished career with the agency, personally credited for the capture of an Al-Qaeda’s key operative, got into a collision course with his bosses when he expressed his opinion against torture and renditions, two of the most common tactics used by Continue reading →