“en espanhol”

Las caricaturas de atras del Ocio, Pupa y Lavinia, de un humor neurotico y feminista (muy a la Maitena^{WP, IY}) que me fascina, son de ella y su trabajo de diseño tambien es muy chido.

No se por que me dio un gusto raro saber que es tapatía, ojala algun dia pueda conocerla (creo que anda por Canada). Bueno, el punto es que es mucho muy buena. Leanla. ^_^

I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after he^WP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5^{WP, AM} has got to be among the best books I’ve read. Anyway, I’m still fascinated by the phrase and particularly by the interpretation offered there (which seems obvious and inevitable now, but you never know so maybe you—virgin you—may want to make your own unadulterated meaning before reading the following):

So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlight^ELZR. Hope it’s useful to you too.

Oh, and here’s an interesting elaboration on it, from, of all places, a Grey’s Anatomy writer (yup, I’ve become such a rabid fan I gobble up the writers’ blog…shut up already):

May 10 yesterday was Mother’s day^WP here in Mexico and it was a messy affair, what with my now heart-wrenchingly weak grandfather back in our house and all the sad, crowded tension. Me, I put particular attention to the music. The undisputed classic poem for the day and inevitable tearbomb at elementary schools across the country is El brindis del bohemio (lyrics: “Sólo faltaba un brindis, el de Arturo, el del bohemio puro, de noble corazón y gran cabeza; aquel que sin ambages declaraba que sólo ambicionaba robarle inspiración a la tristeza.”), most famously declaimed by Juan Manuel Bernal. It is terribly cursi, pure schwarmerei and maudlin gesticulation, but at least it’s unabashedly so and good at it. That said, I’m glad we managed the day without it.

What surprised me yesterday was our reaction, my family’s and my cousins’, late at night and with some alcohol involved, to Denisse De Kalafe’s Señora, señora (lyrics). The song’s of course more than schmaltzy enough for the occasion but it is actually not that bad. And all of a sudden we all started singing it. We had all heard the song countless times and had been forced to learn the lyrics more than once for school recitals. It wasn’t this big emotional singing, at least not at first nor all along. It all started as some sort of joke but the song has a definite mood. And it was good to sing it.

Much less known (at least here in Mexico) is Los Churumbeles’ Cariño Verdad (lyrics), which, again, and this is perhaps inevitable, is guilty of sentimentalism, but it is all drown in some fantastic music. I didn’t even know what the song was about for a long time, always mesmerized by the tune alone.

Oh and one more song: Gloria Trevi’s^WP thankfully-breaking-the-maudlin-mood A la madre, which was actually quite an innovative, playful song back in the time.

btw, I came from the party with a cool CD Faby lent me: Rhythms del Mundo | Cuba. I had heard one of their songs thanks to Chef and it was very intriguing. The project describes itself as a “collaboration of Western artists and the Buena Vista Sound” (as if Latin America wasn’t Western) and the results are oddly arresting (Latin America appropriating the outside world!). It’s pop made salsa. It doesn’t always work wonders but it is always worth hearing. The two best tracks in my opinion are Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She’ll be loved. Check them out.

The always-up-to-something Gwyn is organizing the 2nd Fototour tapatio and place and time have been settled. Here’s the official invite.

You should come—it’ll be fun (it was last time). If you do, drop a note at this Flickr thread.

I knew Luis González de Alba for his controversial, non-PC^WP opinions and that’s why I bought a popular science book of his in the last Spanish bookfair here in Guadalajara. The essays I have read have so far been overly digressive and frankly tedious overall, but there have been several fascinating insights here and there. My favorite of all:

I remember Andrea cringing when I read this to her, denying any link with the brutish Spaniards—Andrea, my beautiful, western-named, Spanish-surnamed, milk-white, hazel-eyed Mexican friend.

After an afternoon of sumptuous, unrestrained culinary indulgence, bursting at the seams, a friend of Ureña, one of dad’s best friends, liked to say, in fantastically black humor: ”Ojala hubiera muerto de niño—para no sufrir tanto.” (“I wish I’d died a child—to save myself from so much suffering.”)

”Trabajo que no da para levantarse a las 11[AM], no es trabajo.” (“A job that doesn’t pay enough for sleeping after noon is no job.”) Used to say another, rather too fond of the good life, friend of Dad’s.

People usually said goodbye to my grandgrandmother Aurora—who is now just over a hundred—with a formulaic, yet earnest, “Take care!” To which she promptly responded, ”You take care! I’m over ninety years old, what I want to do now is die!”

”Que puedes esperar Parra,” (“What can you expect Parra”) used to say Ureña jokingly to my father, ”yo me crie con tortillas de sal y chile. Yo no comi pescado, ni leche, ni jamon.” (“I was raised on tortillas with salt and chile. I didn’t get to eat fish, nor milk, nor ham.”)

I’ve been drooling as much as anyone for one ever since Jobs announced it last January 9 in a brilliant demo (just for some historical fun, compare it with the 1968 “Mother of all demos”), and an interesting, in-depth review of it by Bruce Tognazzi got me thinking more deeply about it and all the possibilities it foretells. But just as I was guzzling the last Kool-aid dregs I started choking: I found out, to my unending disbelief, that it’s going to be a closed platform—meaning one won’t be able to independently develop software for it. This matters. It’s not a chink in the diamond, it’s a rupture—tantamount to forcing you to surf only within apple.com. The web could of course be an innovation lifeline but I’m skeptical of Safari—it’s not a good web 2.0 base at the desktop, I doubt it’ll be one for the palmtop. And my experience with the Blackberry is that mobile-device webapps demand more speed and immediacy (and ubiquity!) than the current web can provide. So no, it will at best be only a partial solution. (The reason given for the apartheid, security, has—to use a commenter’s phrase—the faint whiff of horse manure.)

So that’s that. I now want to remark a little on that iPhone review I just mentioned. Bruce Tognazzi is no Joe Blogger, he was Apple employee #66 and is a famous interaction designer. His website, AskTog, is a classic resource on interface design. But it’s not his interaction insights I want to point out now—though there are plenty of good ones. What impressed me most was his language. Three quotes in particular strike me as true language-forging moments.

The young and the geeky. Witness the birth of a new wordchain. It won’t be the last time you’ll hear it.

High-tech jewelry. That’s a beautiful, zeit-geist defining phrase—electronics “becoming… works of art to be fondled in stores before a purchase.”^E

There’s an image! It reminds me a lot, both alluding to pseudo-scientific science^{WP, WP}, of that classic Spanish insult, ”No tener ni dos dedos de frente!” (“Not have even two fingers of forehead!”)—trying to find an appropriate translation, btw, I stumbled upon an instant new classic, ”Tiraron al niño y se quedaron con la placenta^F” (“They threw the child and kept the placenta!”).

My winners, so far this year, of the Keep the Web Weird prize.

• Susan Stepney’s Homepage. Swim around her factoids or her myriad book reviews—sci-fi and non-fiction being the two categories. And boy does she read good nonfiction. Check her rated non-fiction index for a good glimpse of it and notice how her book reviews tend to grow organically into full-fledged bibliographies [example].

• Luis Pabon’s Entropía blog (in Spanish). If you can only read one thing from him, let it be El hombre que hablaba al reves (The man who spoke the wrong way round)—it’s positively brilliant. Positively.

  There’s also a letter to his future self; oblique strategies; an elegant fable: El pez que se bebió el océano (The fish who drank the ocean); obscure calendar erudition: La abreviatura de los miércoles (Wednesday’s abbreviation); original music; a scanning of a (terrifying) dictation from a Spain under Franco: Libertad Dictada (Dictated Freedom); a reflection sparked by GTD^WP: Conocerse a sí mismo (Knowing Oneself); an absolutely amateur, yet interesting, physics experiment: Acústica de fluidos; and a beautiful, infinite poem. Even his profile is writing of the highest order.

  He has infodesign talent to spare, as he showed with his proposal in my calendar challenge, and he can sometimes use it for most amusing purposes. Like these two graphs here, perfectly illustrating why sometimes to go forward it’s better to get some distance first:

  
  

  Most intriguing is when he combines this graphic inclination with his (prodigious) verbosity to create amazing, longwinded plays with the ridiculous (think of that famous bathroom-tissue-distribution-units passage from Snow Crash^WP). There’s for instance the Messiah Project, his compendium of priorization strategies, and his “simple graphical and mathematical model for the analysis and assessment of situations according to a person’s capacity, responsibility, and will.”

  “Luis… estás como un cencerro!!!” says a legendary comment. Correctly.

Vaya que es sorprendente. Curiosamente, me entere de esto en The Economist, no se que tanta difusion se le haya dado en periodicos nacionales pero mi familia no estaba enterada.

El IFE (“the independent electoral authority”) publica aquella encuesta como la Evaluación de la gestión institucional a la luz del Proceso Federal Electoral 2005-2006 (Parametría).

” Hay varias otras gemas en esta encuesta a 2,000 personas del 8 al 12 de Septiembre del 2006, como el que 38.6% de los encuestados afirme que no participaria en futuras elecciones (aunque 76.6% esta muy o algo de acuerdo en que “La democracia puede tener problemas, pero es el mejor sistema de gobierno”) o el que la mitad (!) de los encuestados afirmo haber votado por Felipe Calderon, que los partidos politicos son considerados tanto la institucion politica mas corrupta del pais como la menos importante para el desarrollo del pais, que la principal razon (15.9%) por la que se cree que hubo fraude es la tardanza de los resultados, que 47.1% esta muy o algo de acuerdo con la frase “No me importa un gobierno NO democrático en el poder si logra mejorar mi nivel de vida”, que 43.6% cree que es mejor vivir en una “sociedad que respete derechos/libertades aunque haya desorden”, que un 40.8% esta muy en desacuerdo con las acciones de resistencia civil que promueve AMLO mientras que solo un 13% esta muy de acuerdo con ellas…

Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.

In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.