“local”

Via Richard, un bizarrisimo video local: La Tapatia de El Personal. Producido por alumnos del CUAAD ^WP, el video es practicamente una guia sui generis del centro de Guadalajara.

Ah, no se, es tan malo que es bueno… Ademas de que siempre es raro ver cultura local capturada en medios como el video y la musica.

A recent, furious storm marked the likely end of a particularly relentless rain season. Two stories from the (d)rain.

The first one has all the marks of an urban legend but my father claims it was a very notorious case, appearing in all the major newspapers of the time. Some ten or so years ago, two daughters of a famous doctor returned from a party late at night. A storm having raged not long ago, traffic was a deadlock and the streets were quite literally rivers. To save their friends from a long, slow detour, they got off at the sidewalk opposite their home, not minding overmuch the drench.

They never crossed. They never came home. Their bodies were found in the sewer. An open, overflowed manhole having sucked them that night.

The second story is neither as gruesome nor, really, a story, it’s just a droll scrap from the past. It comes down from my mother who, back in Guzman, her hometown, attended a relatively posh, nun-ran school where the good girls were raised. On rainy days a man used to wait at the school’s exit with the simplest of carts—a wheeled platform with handrails front and back. Booted, he would push the cart himself, across the main avenue and back, charging his passengers some cents of a peso in exchange of a dry crossing. Prim catholic schoolgirls crowded.

It used to be the only option to streetmap Guadalajara^WP was to use local mapmaker Guia Roji’s crappy—and I mean crappy—interface. Google, Yahoo, and the like had the nice satellite imagery but that isn’t nearly as useful to give directions. Street names are a whole lot more useful than trees to find your way around.

Englishman Gwyn once stepped in to teach a local (or was a local teaching an English man?) about MapQuest, which has a better interface than Guia Roji but still isn’t draggable.

But that’s all in the past. An unknown while ago Google Maps updated its database and now includes pretty, draggable street maps of Guadalajara (and a lot of other Mexican cities). This is major people.

Unfortunately, while you can search for businesses (in a so-so fashion, there isn’t yet much online info for Google to mine) you can’t yet search for particular addresses. This shouldn’t be much of a problem, Google Maps is the poster child of the new web for a reason—ah, the beauty of true interactivity!

Another unfortunately: the street map is oddly not yet available trough a Blackberry.

It’s watermelon season here in town. Which means the cheapest, sweetest sandias of the year. The green bellies crack open at the slightest cut, roar, and out bulges sweet, sweet candy-cotton. I tell you friends, it’s a good time to be a frugivore^WP mammal.

Genial la mas reciente portada de Proceso. Todo un logro de diseño grafico en su simplicidad.

Speaking of locality, if you haven’t seen Google’s new Streetside View (like, say, in San Francisco) you’re missing a future shock gasp. (via O’Reilly Radar)

Breathtaking immersion. Eerily reminiscent of Rainbows End^{WP, AM}.

Also not to be missed are Immersive Media’s—one of the companies behind this new feature—richer demos: pannable videos!

PLBRS.com – Super Poderes Lexicos gdl.Uruban.com – web local

Hope you like these two and please do tell me your first impressions-what works, what doesn’t? are these things at all helpful to you?

Thanks.

22 and 23/jun/07

Bad time management. Sorry. :)

24/jun/07

Plbrs

1. Better Definition Structure. Definitions are now grouped visually under grammatical category (like, say, all the definitions of the word as a noun, and then all those of it as an adverb). They’re already grouped sequentially in the original dictionary but it’s all very redundant and clumsy (every definition has the grammatical category indicated at the beginning). This is a big improvement. Try it out by searching for “correr” in both plbrs and DRAE.
2. Expanded Abbreviations. Most abbreviations are now automatically expanded, which works wonderfully in most cases though there are still several fringe cases like “usado o usada o usadas o usados”, which will be corrected tomorrow.
3. Improved the simple design. Added a “definir” button, a neat magnifying glass icon, made topbar type smaller, and chose slightly better color combinations. Moved slogan below and added a small explanatory sentence. Added Improv’dDaily and NotReality icons.
4. Improved status reporting. Now besides the loading image a message appears saying that your query is being searched. If multiple queries are being currently searched all of them appear in the message.
5. Improved Not Found message. The query you were looking for now appears on the message (duh!)—thanks chemito! Message trimmed. Added fallback link to a Google search for your query.

Uruban

1. Much new content! 8 new places added, together with photos and descriptions. It’s all terribly paltry and sketchy but it’s a beginning.
2. Improved design. Gave the website a blue-green color scheme and generally beautified the whole thing. Added Improv’d Daily link.
3. New copy. “Enciclopedia Local” is the new main slogan, “Haciendo que la Web Local No Apeste” the subslogan.

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. ^_^

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.