2006

You’ll have to excuse me but the meme just bit me. This blonde joke is wonderful.

Everything2 is a strange, addictive website that’s been around for almost 8 years now and still feels as disorientingly original as when I first found it. It describes itself as “an online community with a focus to write, publish and edit a quality database of information, insight and humor,” but I just chanced upon a better description: Everything2 is sort of a Wittypedia. No, really. You want something witty about Michael Spivak? About double penetration? About this quote, this poem, or this phrase? About lust? About Ghost in the Shell? About whores? About sex games? About beautiful, cry-worthy things? About language? About orgasms? About flaunting your sexuality? About menstruation? About growing old? You now know were to find it.

I’m proud to announce that, right now, this blog is the #2 result if you search for “very arousing” in MSN Search—beating such famed contenders as ”The most beautiful tits I’ve ever seen…”, ”Medical Fetish Pictures”, and ”Scent of an uncircumcised penis”. This only goes to show how far behind is Microsoft when it comes to search, but whatever, I’m proud.

Here’s a screenshot, for posterity.

...es el titulo de una cancion de Miguel Gallardo. La cancion es buena pero a mi lo que me encanta es el titulo. Es mi eleccion para ristra de 5 palabras mas romantica (y cachonda) de la lengua Española. En Frances, mi delfin es aquel inovidable (y fatalmente ironico) Je veux baiser votre âne! de Vince Cassel a Monica Bellucci en Irréversible (al que ella responde, sonriendo y tambien con 5 palabras, Tu es un tel romantique!)

Aunque ahora que lo pienso, siendo el campo de juego ristras (y no solo frases), preferiria: lima, axila, cadera, media-mañana y pupila.

En que cosas divago… supongo que yo tambien ando en busca de una amitié amoureuse.

Jorge Wagensberg tiene un libro delgado y delicioso (119 paginas) que me fascina. Se llama Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? y consiste de alrededor de quinientos aforismos sobre la incertidumbre (y su definición de incertidumbre es una de las muchas joyas de este libro). Para mi, que tanto me gustan las definiciones y La Forma, este libro es un manjar. Vaya, le sale tan bien eso de hilvanar aforismos que hasta pareciera que se ha inventado un nuevo género literario.

Pienso transcribir el libro entero e irlo subiendo, poco a poco, en este post. Iba a empezar hoy con 20 frases pero me avorace y ya casi me echo medio libro.

Actualización 27/Octubre/2006: ¡Termine por fin de transcribir el libro!

The other day I had a weird idea for a reputation market (that’s right, a reputation market!) and ever since, I’ve been exploring how value is created and expressed in a capitalist society. My investigations have led me, of course, to that quintessential example of wealth-creation, the scam. Nothing that I’ve read on the subject (not even the Million Dollar homepage :) has impressed me more than this long, old, but fascinating article: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?

Just ‘cause, how the fuck does one translate this (wonderful) sentence to Spanish?

(This is just me loud thinking, it has nothing to do with On the language of this blog.)

March 2, 2006 – Update:

Que tal?

Spielberg^{WP, IMDB}’s Munich^{AM, IMDB, WP} is a great film; there’s not a scene I would change in this 164-minute movie. On the other hand, the man’s starting to scare me, I mean, how can he be so talented? Every film of his I’ve seen is a masterpiece, to the point that it seems almost unfair that someone should hoard so much talent. He embodies that Gap Paul Graham talked about in much of Hackers and Painters:

More to the point, Eric Bana^{WP, IMDB} and Ayelet Zorer^IMDB (sometimes called Ayelet Zu’rer or Ayelet Zurer) were the two Munich actors that impressed me most, and my favorite scene from the movie was the sex scene between their characters, Avner and Daphna. It is remarkable both for the long-during, extreme closeup on Daphna, and for the fact that she’s visibly pregnant all along. Closeups are one of the wonders of film, something unthinkable in theater, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: for over 30 seconds there’s only Daphna—beautiful and breathy and rhythmic and smelly and sweaty and lusty and doe-eyed and blushing and nubile. As for the visible pregnancy… well, I’m somewhat disturbed to find that very arousing, but I guess it’s all part of being a male homo sapiens at a reproductive age.

I couldn’t find any screenshots of this particular scene on the web—I seem to have very refined tastes—so I had to download the movie and take screenshots myself. Here they are:

This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.

It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace, , you get:

Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace, , you get:

The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.

Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…

Sorry for the boosterism… blame that little techno-evangelist we all carry around inside.

Anyway, it’s interesting to put a face on those words I read so often. If you have a blog, leave a comment with a link to your pic and your blog’s address, and I’ll put it up here. Same for your favorite blog, leave a comment with a link to a pic of the author and the blog’s address, and I’ll put it up here.