Tag Archives: Simon Romero

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Nary a Christmas

The Worst (& Cutest) Little
Gift Some Forget Not to Give

For those still looking for that perfect gift, one that will save the holiday cheer, and prevent anyone from calling you a Grinch, we’re sorry but you won’t find your last-minute redemption in this post. For that, please scroll down, or, since we’re in a giving mode, go elsewhere.
Just hope you won’t settle for a particular kind people continue to give each other this time of the year: pets. It may as well be the topmost mistake, in the season’s long tradition of mistakes, right up with getting drunk in the office party, and wishing Merry Christmas to everyone.
One may feel tempted, though, and perhaps animal shelters share part of the responsibility for some of the disappointment such a gift usually ensues. During the holidays, those heartbreaking late night ads with sad-faced cats and dogs up for adoption are shown at an earlier hour, just in time to offer you a quick fix for guilty feelings.
Well, don’t fall into that trap. Even if you had to go to the kitchen to grab some tissue, missing the part where they say that these rescued animals need the safety of your home, not that of your siblings, you’re still not excused. After all, it’s not the poor things’ fault that you still don’t know your nephews’ names.

FOR THE LOVE OF OUR PETS
Thus, as they say somewhere, ‘nary a Christmas’ goes by without someone having the astonishingly misguided idea of bringing a pet to a family who hate cat fur, or what they do to the furniture, or simply can’t be broken into walking a dog three times a day. They’ll most certainly return the animal.
That’s often the beginning of their martyrdom and ultimate destruction. Like you, most people mean well when they think that giving a living, Continue reading →

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Below the Equator

Sexing for the Rainforest & Saharan
Sands Sweeping Over South America

There is no sin on the low side of the equator. The loosely translated sentence is from a 1970s Brazilian song that plays with preconceived notions about South America being a paradise of promiscuity, exoticism and wild animals. It should have said Norway instead.
That’s where a troupe devised a novel way to support the Rainforest: having sex for it. As this peculiar notion penetrates the deep cavity of your brain, let’s add another piece of the puzzle: every summer, a Sahara dust cloud comes to visit the continent’s shores.
There’s obviously no connection between the two facts, except that they both relate to that massive tropical land, where Americans speak Portuguese and Spanish, and little English, and that seems at times to offer an odd counterpart to its big brother in the North.
Again, let’s make yet another detour. One of the pleasures of writing a blog is to set oneself challenges in order to tell stories that one hopes, can’t be found anywhere else. How we’re going to find a common sense between these two strands of narrative is today’s quest. You’ll be the judge as to whether we’ll manage it.
We keep collecting stories in a dusty file, any of which could strike our fancy and serve us well as a springboard to talk about our favorite themes. You know, life, the universe, and all the fish, issues we hardly know anything about and shouldn’t even be allowed to tackle. But why make it easy to ourselves?
We could always offer our absolutely worthless take on the Brazilian government’s new homegrown email system, an attempt to ward off spying from the NSA, Canada, everyone and their mothers-in-law, which according to recent files leaked by Edward Snowden, has been rampant for years. The spying, not the mothers. Or have they too?
We could also add our two cents to the apparent Latin American trend of digging up dead people. Nothing to top a good Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story, for the record. But if it means to understand the 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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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 →

by

Nary a Christmas

The Worst (& Cutest) Little
Gift Some Forget Not to Give

For those still looking for that perfect gift, one that will save the holiday cheer, and prevent anyone from calling you a Grinch, we’re sorry but you won’t find your last-minute redemption in this post. For that, please scroll down, or, since we’re in a giving mode, go elsewhere.
Just hope you won’t settle for a particular kind people continue to give each other this time of the year: pets. It may as well be the topmost mistake, in the season’s long tradition of mistakes, right up with getting drunk in the office party, and wishing Merry Christmas to everyone.
One may feel tempted, though, and perhaps animal shelters share part of the responsibility for some of the disappointment such a gift usually ensues. During the holidays, those heartbreaking late night ads with sad-faced cats and dogs up for adoption are shown at an earlier hour, just in time to offer you a quick fix for guilty feelings.
Well, don’t fall into that trap. Even if you had to go to the kitchen to grab some tissue, missing the part where they say that these rescued animals need the safety of your home, not that of your siblings, you’re still not excused. After all, it’s not the poor things’ fault that you still don’t know your nephews’ names.

FOR THE LOVE OF OUR PETS
Thus, as they say in the south, ‘nary a Christmas’ goes by without someone having the astonishingly misguided idea of bringing a pet to a family who hate cat fur, or what they do to the furniture, or simply can’t be broken into walking a dog three times a day. They’ll most certainly return the animal.
That’s often the beginning of their martyrdom and ultimate destruction. Like you, most people mean well when they think that giving a living, Continue reading →