December 27, 2007
I don't want to discuss politics. This lady belongs to my private set of female figures for whom I'm grateful for comforting me at that defining moment in your childhood when you realize your possibilities are substantially narrower because you were born into the wrong gender.
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October 12, 2007
lessing doesn't care less
Reporters opened the door and told her she had won the Nobel Prize for literature, to which she responded: "Oh Christ! ... I couldn't care less."
"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?" Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. "It's a royal flush."
"I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks," she added with a smile.
"I can't say I'm overwhelmed with surprise," Lessing said. "I'm 88 years old and they can't give the Nobel to someone who's dead, so I think they were probably thinking they'd probably better give it to me now before I've popped off."
She acknowledged the $1.5 million cash award was a lot of money, but still seemed less than thrilled.
"I'm already thinking about all the people who are going to send me begging letters. I can see them lining up now," she said. The phone in her house, audible from the street, rang continuously.
*****
I like her. I don't know if I like her books but now I'm definitely going to read them. Also, I'm hoping her acceptance speech will be a riot.
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A gerund goes into a bar, and the bartender says, “What are you, drinking?”
*******
The governor of the Federal District of Brazil, José Roberto Arruda, has ordered regional public employees to abolish the use of gerunds, a measure that he defines as a "nice" message against inefficiency.
Upon defending the decision, Arruda said that he has lost patience with some members of his own government who are always "doing", "getting", "studying", "sending" or "preparing" but never finish their work or establish ways to finish it.
Local government calls the use of gerunds "a plague", which only serves to make excuses for unsolved problems.
via vivirlatino
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August 19, 2007
Just wondering...
Why has Putin gone fishing (pictured below, Rambo style) with Prince Albert II of Monaco? This most unlikely pair's holidays sounds like the setup for a dry joke.
***
What to do with Poland in the EU, considering thy have a religious extremist, xenophobic, homophobic government?
The brothers appointed him last year as one of three deputy prime ministers, and as minister for education, a job he has exploited to transform Polish youth. Giertych started by laying down an “essential” reading list for schools that includes the popular Christian novel Quo Vadis? by Henryk Sienkiewicz, John Paul II’s autobiography, Memory & Identity, and a history of Catholic priests in Dachau. He wants to ban Joseph Conrad (a Pole, but too close to Nietzsche for comfort), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Russian, obviously), and the works of the Polish Jewish writer and homosexual Witold Gombrowicz. on the Sunday times
Not that there's a pulp fueled bonfire in Warsaw yet, but this reminds me of Heine: "Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too."
Prime Minister Kasimierz Marcinkiewicz, also of Law and Justice Party, has stated that if a homosexual “tries to 'infect' others with their homosexuality, then the state must intervene in this violation of freedom." -- Human Rights News.
A senior Polish official has ordered psychologists to investigate whether the popular BBC TV show Teletubbies promotes a homosexual lifestyle.
The spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, Ewa Sowinska, singled out Tinky Winky, the purple character with a triangular aerial on his head.
"I noticed he was carrying a woman's handbag," she told a magazine. "At first, I didn't realise he was a boy." on the BBC.
Censorship in Poland is a deadly serious subject. The censorship situation with David Cerny's Shark represents a radical change in the nature of what is censored in Poland. Artist Dorota Nieznalska has been punished by Polish courts, ordered to perform community service after a work of art was found offensive to the Christian religion, she is still in court appealing the decision. In Bytom, Poland, gallery manager Sebastian Cichocki is currently being investigated for allowing a work of art by the Prague-based Guma Guar to be displayed. There is a serious ambiguity with Polish laws governing free speech, but it is clear that laws concerning religion and free expression have yet to be tested in court. on Prague TV.
A group of Polish members of parliament have submitted a bill seeking to proclaim Jesus Christ king of their overwhelmingly Catholic country. on the BBC.
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August 08, 2007
I am not pleased
How can anyone with more than two brain cells put up with these stupid tabloids in this country!!?? I was coming back home and, on the tube, every single evening newspaper being read by the passengers featured stories like the one pictured above. I honestly almost felt like snatching the papers aways from my co-travelers hands and give them a lecture on the portuguese criminal and judicial system! (I'm developing a theory: the longest time away from the home land, the more patriotic one becomes).
Basically, these moronic people who call themselves journalists are using the claim of a Portuguese convicted murderess that the Portuguese police - the same inspector in charge of Madeleine McCann's case- framed her in the case of her missing daughter and might be doing the same to the missing brit kid's mother.
On this blog it was better refuted than I would ever be able to, so I'm pasting most of the entry here:
1 – Joana Cipriano vanished from a small place 10 km in the outskirts of Portimão. Last time somebody saw her, she was on her way to a local groceries shop;
2 - Her mother, Leonor Cipriano, only reported to Police her daughter has disappeared two days after;
3 – After a long and difficult investigation, headed by Chief-Inspector Gonçalo Amaral, Leonor Cipriano and her brother were accused of murdering the eight years old child;
4 – The body of Joana Cipriano was never found, but samples of her blood were found in her mother refrigerator;
5 – Her mother justified those samples of blood admitting she had beaten Joana, for some reason, she was hurt and she bleeded from her nose;
6 – Leonor Cipriano and her brother, who had a incestuous relationship, were sentenced to 16 years in jail, for the murder of her daughter and niece;
7 – Before the trial, Leonor Cipriano accused five CID officers of beating her, trying to extract a confession. She named the five CID officers, and included Chief-Inspector Gonçalo ("Amaral Lector", according to British tabloids…);
8 – The Public Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation and ordered a police line-up, with the CID officers named and accused by Leonor Cipriano of beating her;
9 – The line-up took place with Leonor Cipriano behind a two-way mirror and she couldn’t recognize any of the aggressors;
10 – The Public Prosecutor’s Office magistrate that was in charge of the criminal investigation decided to accuse the five CID officers, but didn’t mentioned, in the accusation sent to the Court, that Leonor Cipriano couldn’t identify any of the aggressors, in the police line-up;
11 – Leonor Cipriano never confessed the murder of her own daughter. Her brother, in a letter written from jail, accused Leonor Cipriano of selling her daughter;
12 – Police is convinced (and the jurors at the trial found enough evidence to pass a verdict of guilty) that Leonor Cipriano and her brother were found, by Joana, having sexual relations, when she came home, back from the groceries shop. As Leonor Cipriano had a lover, at the time, they were afraid she would tell him what she saw;
13 – So, they beat her, in order to frighten her and keep her mouth shut up;
14 – Perhaps accidentally, they beat her so violently that they killed her. So, they decided to get rid of he body and cut it in pieces, keeping some of them in the freezer, while they gave the other pieces to be eaten by pigs (this is what police believes is the strongest possibility, because there was no other trace of Joana Cipriano, unless the blood samples in her mother freezer…)
15 – The body of Joana Cipriano was never found.
And so, here we have a terrible story of a dysfunctional family, a child murdered and a very difficult police investigation. The only thing – in my humble opinion - that has some similarity with Madeleine McCann disappearance is the fact that the person in charge of Madeleine’s case is the same that successfully headed Joana Cipriano investigation: CID Chief-Inspector Gonçalo Amaral. And success, in Joana’s case, is clear: the murderers were found, accused, went to court, they were sentenced, they appealed the sentence and the Portuguese Supreme Court reduced it to 16 years of jail to both of them – the mother, Leonor Cipriano and her brother, for the murder her daughter and nice, eight year old Joana Cipriano.
If many "consumers" of British Media have another idea, that’s because most British journalists covering Madeleine McCann abduction strongly believe that truth never should be allowed to "kill" a good story. Even if I means destroying the reputation of an experienced CID Chief-Inspector. "And what’s the problem?" – I imagine my British colleagues asking themselves this question, with a pint of Guinness in the hand, enjoying the sunshine at Praia da Luz. "The guy isn’t even British, he’s just a Portuguese…"
*****
PS: May I just add that if there are people in my country that work hard no matter how apalling the conditions they face those are the men and women in the Police forces with whom I had the privilege to work with. Smartest and most dedicated civil servants I have ever worked with on my consulting days.
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August 02, 2007
Meh
The New York Times Arts section. One step away from being removed from my RSS reader.
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August 01, 2007
The Daily Mail sucks
(the best caption they could come up with on the day of Bergman's death)
and so does most of the British press...and to think I saw an ad today in the tube that said something like "yadda yadda England brought culture and sophistication to the world...". Yeah, right. Before tabloid era, maybe.
*****
Still have some posts to write about Hay on Wye, the floods in Wales, Alan Bennett's diary, odd coincidences, Prague, Carlsbad, the Strahov Monastery, Central Asia, stereotyping (as usual), Harry Potter and all the stuff I've been up to lately.
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October 24, 2006
At the aftermath of the recent spanish changes, there's an ongoing debate about gay marriage here with the government dismissing it as not important at this time and as being a dividing issue.
I can't resist to summarize this three-fold comment by Miguel Vale de Almeida on the recent polls in which some newspapers/TV stations have asked random people if they agreed with same sex marriage - to which a vast majority of Portuguese people said no.
- the right to same sex marriage is a political one and not just a law issue or a moral issue: its denial goes to show how citizens are not treated equally before the law thus going against the Portuguese Constitution;
- on surveys about "values" they never ask if the respondent agrees with the situation of there being so few rich people and so many poor ones: it's a given fact, it's not questionable;
- why not come up with a survey to see if Portuguese people agree with letting women vote (they should be given alternatives such as "Yes, but their vote only should count as half" or "Yes, with the bulletin pre-filled by their husbands"); no one asks this because the right of women to vote is not a "values" related issue, it's the product of an unquestionable right to being treated equally.
++++
“I will never understand those who proclaim love as the foundation of life, while denying so radically protection, understanding and affection to our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, our colleagues. What kind of love is this that excludes those who experience their sexuality in a different way?”
— José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s Prime Minister, May 11, 2005
++++
“Prejudices are what fools use for reason.”
— Voltaire
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“Same-sex relationships have long been part of our African history and heritage. There is ample research illustrating that African people have loved and had sexual relationships with people of the same sex for hundreds of years. For example, in Namibia, Kenya, Nigeria and SA, bond friendships, ancestral wives, female husbands and male wives have existed for centuries as forms of same-sex relationships.
All these relationships were accepted and respected in Africa, long before Africa was colonised. In addition, these forms of partnerships and marriages were protected by common law. Same-sex practices have always been a part of our sexual desires, intimacy and practice. In SA, the practice has been traced among the Zulu, Lovedu, Sotho, Tswana and Venda tribes. It is important to understand the traditional and cultural institutions that form families, marriages, and clans before we pronounce on these matters.
There is no record of traditional African societies legislating against homosexuality. Such laws are a western import, manifested through colonial penal codes and the criminalisation of sodomy across the continent. So, one could argue with authority that it is homophobia, not homosexuality, that is un-African.”
— Fikile Vilakazi, editorial: “Protect South Africa from Sexual Apartheid”
in Business Day, September 7, 2006
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