“elzr.com”

41 days delta! That’s more than 10% of a year of silence and more than ever before. Frankly, I’ve been too busy living, trying everything I’ve been able to and coming to grips with my new life and how I want to live it. Now that I’m a bit more settled I want to again take the time to write here—I’ve wonderful stories, thoughts, and discoveries to share. So see you soon! (In the meanwhiles I’m frequently updating both my my twitter and my flickr)

There are now almost a quarter of a thousand tags densely covering every single post I’ve written since February 8, 2006. Hopefully, these will mean a better related posts, better serendipity. The categories themselves should also be a nice way to navigate around the archives. Among the many new categories, there were many surprises, like questions, arguments, rain, touching, or three, and there were many, many long overdue ones, like interesting people, inspiration, introductions, sex, symbols, ethics, venting, transhumanism, or experiments.

After commenting, you can now choose to be notified by email of new comments to the post. This is long overdue and the hope is it will keep conversations alive. You don’t need to comment to subscribe by email to a post’s comments, you can subscribe right through the new form at the beginning of the comment section. Finally, you can now subscribe by email to the posts themselves, to all of them or only the favorites, and even just to a weekly digest (sent on Sundays). The subscription form is right below the ELZR logo. These should be an easier way to keep track of this blog than RSS (which a surprising amount of people still don’t have the foggiest idea about).

Our trusted old friend very, I just found out, comes straight from the Latin VERus, truth! It’s the same root that gives us VERitable, VERacity, VERism, VERdict, (“truth-speaking”), or the Spanish VERdad. Every single very you’ve gushed has been a truly in disguise. When you say, say, “Damn Ivonne, you’re very hot!”, what you’re really saying across millennia to Yvonne is that she’s truly hot. Which she is. Now aren’t you glad you read this blog religiously?

The 2month silence was worth it. Brace yourself.

I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:

1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty. 2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a design^ELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy Bliss^WP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century. 3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.

Thought I had already written about this obsession of mine but since I can’t find the post I’ll assume a better part of me reigned in and I had spared you. Most friends, however, haven’t been so lucky and usually win me to point it out in the hope that I shut up quickly: the oh-so-unnecesary “www.” bit one sees in most URLs. There was a time when it may have been needed—like, 1995—but why now? Now, some URLs actually won’t work without it, but that’s usually because of net administrator negligence; in most cases doing away with the appendix is a very minor setting. Once you know this, you die a little (literally!) every time you’re forced to stand it—and you’ll start to notice how often you are.

Today I just found there are in this topic—as in, we are remembered everyday, everything else—fellow anal freaks (tongue-in-cheek-ly, this ones). They even set up a website to spread the meme: . Of course I had to oblige. Even learned that there were futher Super Saiyan^WP levels to attain. So as of now, this is is a ”class B” website, which is the “classification [that] helps remind users that, while the www subdomain is accepted, it is not necessary. In Class B, www.example.net is a valid address, but it redirects all traffic to example.net.”

It may only be that my grandfather’s agony has me seeing everything with long-now eyes but these days I’m increasingly aware that I should take precautions in case I die.

I don’t want to die. I don’t shake my head and look away at death, I stand up in defiance. But the fact is our lives are still too fragile and faced with the possibility I would rather think things through.

Which is why I’ve written this short will. I shall edit and refine it as long as I’m living (with the latest version the official one, of course) and so I thought I should start now.

That weird phone call I got weeks ago was from the prim (but ambitious) lil’ supermarket near my house (they got my number from my blog, go figure). Out of the blue they demanded, not rudely but not friendly either, my “cooperation” in taking down pictures of them I had uploaded to Flickr (for I wanted to write a review of how innovative and important the store really is—“The income level of a country is determined, above all, by the productivity of its largest industries. High productivity in the unglamorous “old-economy” sectors—retailing, wholesaling, construction—is most important, since more people work in them.”). Anyway, it sure looked like a big boatload of crap to me then. They weren’t giving me even hints of good reasons and still they threatened me—me, their most ardent former enthusiast—that they didn’t want to pursue the matter in a different way (wtf?). I instinctively groped for the freedom-speech martyr role, willing to fight the crusade against dimwitted, Pleistocene shopkeepers to its bitter end.

And so it would have likely been. But then father and Dragonball intervened^ELZR. “If you do something that you later find upsets a friend, what you do is stop,” was father’s simple but crushing argument. Dragonball’s was more subtle in its nonverbalness but you could word it into this feel-good motto: “enemies are future friends waiting to be made.” I’ve never kept enemies and so it simply kills me to have one. I can’t. Because even if they never actively hurt me, I’ve always been aware that there will come a time when their help would come in handy—and I need all the help I can muster. In the case of this shoppe, I saw them immediately as customers. If this harebrained scheme I hatch of creating an ad-based online interface to Guadalajara is ever going to take off, I will need the help and patronage of every local business I can find.

It took me weeks to visit them (see previous fear post) but when I did, yesterday, it couldn’t have gone better. I went there and defused the whole thing by admitting error from the very beginning and promising to take down the pictures as soon as I came back home (which I’ve done). What followed was two persons trying to outapologize each other. My caller revealed himself a friendly, good-natured man. Most importantly, I finally got to understand what got them so upset. To begin with, being somewhat new to the retail business they’re paranoid about security after lots of bad experiences and it totally unnerved them when this random guy was able to sneak behind guards (some of them undercover) and take pictures nonchalantly. The crux of the matter, though, was that it turns out my Flickr page was the first Google hit for the store (that happens a lot whenever I talk about something from Mexico, Google gives me a totally disproportionate pride of place—Imagery’s aftermath, I suppose) and that, combined with the anxiety of having problems with their webdevelopers (who haven’t been able to upload anything—not even a lousy banner—in six months), got them all worked up—how can it be that some random stranger is the one that tells the world what we are?

Now I offered myself up for the job and I may be the one building their web presence, which I’m sure would be a fascinating job. Amazing isn’t it?

Fuck, I keep thinking and thinking and thinking. And instead of stopping for a moment and writing some of it in this rather forlorn weblog, I keep reading and reading and reading—keep stoking the pyre.

This is getting scary. One of these days either I burn or I firework.

The problem with abandoning a blog is not the lost posts but the lost sequence. I’ve learned so much these last weeks and yet written so little that what I’ll now post may or may not make sense but will undoubtedly feel broken and out of place. Alas, I have lost the path that took me here and while I’ll try to mention it tangentially it will only be a pale sketch of what it really was. The emotions have cooled and forgotten are most of the shameful and silly detours, dead-ends, and retracings that led me to today. Which is a shame, because they were so much anguished fun.

So I apologize. But this blog is back on track. On steroids and with several weeks of bulging backlog. Après cet post-ci, le deluge.